In horse news, men want in on the action. Geldings graze
a paddock, a mare I know comes down with equine influenza
and there’s hope for genetically modified yellow oats.
Can horses fly? Ask Arion or Bucephalus.
Our aging Percherons chew clover while roans race
across the Badlands nightly, a headless horseman
gazing at the moon.
Buttermilk played her part in Hollywood, and zebras
wander into Clinton Corners near our home. Bolivar rode
his horse up Machu Picchu while Rosinante
sparred with windmills.
A Stygian horse takes antitoxins for diphtheria.
In the suburbs where we live, ponies wildly canter.
Across the world, horses dream of sweet alfalfa.
Drumbeats draw us to the center of a group
of chanting celebrants
at a powwow in Pawtucket.
Crows skitter down from oaks to drink:
a bonfire, Datsun pickups, amber beads.
Basket-makers share their wares
and there are no soapstone bowls in sight.
Wolf clan members dance in circles,
feathers flying, an eagle poised
to fly in the top of a tulip tree.
Our English roots entwine with others,
as descendants of a man who came
to Massachusetts, 1637, indentured
servant, farmer, his cooper son and family
narrowly escaping with their lives
in King Philip’s War, whatever
generosity to others came with greed
or violence, out of silence, shame,
acknowledging the land
and giving back, seeing family
not as wanderers, but as
equal partners in trade or treaty.
We meet an Abenaki man who plays
barred owl songs on a flute.
Friends have come from the city
to visit Metacomet’s forest throne
on the anniversary of his death.
Instead, we join the circle where elders
leap with garland staffs in hand
until the yawning sun goes down.
for Norman MacAfee (1943-2024)
The semi-tractor trailer trucks are lining up
at Elmhurst Hospital, just a block from us
to carry out the dead. We curl into balls in
a dim, one-bedroom and wait to hear from
doctors who are muffled voices in the dark.
I meet our daughter at the Newtown Creek
on a cold day in the sun, both on bikes, not
ready to touch or probe too deeply what
the past two weeks have been, her mom
too ill to go out-- but still we try to focus.
We can’t smell or taste-- and the buses, now
not charging fees, gather germs from every
corner of the globe. Masked, terrified, we
try to find an open market near our home.
We rent a car and pile some things inside,
drive from Queens to Brooklyn to pick up
paper towels, fly through the Battery tunnel,
racing away from what’s invisible. Clouds,
fire trucks along an interstate to Westerly
and beyond-- where the military stops us
in our tracks to double check that we are
passing through. At a Cape Cod bridge,
a hundred Trumpers are rallying against
the empty wind. We travel on to camp
in a cottage by the sea. We find some
solace, despite the news of my cousin’s
heart attack and others we don’t know
in ICUs. We unfurl a bit in April ‘s cold
as we watch the body count keep rising,
as Covid grips a nation and the world.
My mom is over ninety now, celebrates
her birthday from the hospice window,
a bunch of us below by blooming pear
trees with a poster saying we love you!
Gulls careen above in a sky that’s blue.
We wear masks, get vaccinations, begin
to heal from being split in pieces. Our
daughter walks each sunset to the bay
to name the ospreys and the clams. We
sleep well, share a hope for a better day.
I’m biking the last mile to Coney Island,
with Agee’s Brooklyn Is folded in my vest.
After eating momos, I try to find peace
from a city’s endless engine plying stress.
Uzbeks are playing chess on a boulevard
of elms set out by Olmsted, as I happen
on a poet friend who’s moving cars from
one side of the parkway to the other, as a
black pawn takes a queen. We can’t sleep,
we live above a kiosk, B23 buses grinding
to a halt and ambulances wailing off to
hospitals. We buy a sound machine with
television static, thunder, ocean breakers,
as teens play noisy video games till 4 a.m.
The horse parade grounds are a greenway
for parrots making nests on phone poles.
Boys visit us from Ruidoso, where there
are no aquariums or eels. All night long
along allées, ailanthus trees are burning,
a cement plant at an F train is churning
out concrete by a nightmare postal stop.
Israelis, Palestinians, share homework,
a fish plaque at Cortelyou pictures cod.
We spell out a Langston Hughes poem
‘of frozen snow’ on a supermarket wall.
A stone’s throw to Sheepshead Bay, a cab
ride to Canarsie, Ocean Parkway sparkles.
On moving-in day, we were very pleased,
a landlady there with freshly painted nails
was shouting, Take the keys! Take the keys!
Morton thinks it means a plastic garbage patch, fields
of fossil footprints, black holes, beaches,
a grease pool under Greenpoint or alligators
in the Everglades. A biosphere, the giant network
of a quaking aspen tree, a particulate of carbon
discovered in an ant, or polar satellites that are orbiting
the Earth. Every last Paris shoestring, viscous,
molten, phased or quasi-motive, it’s a poem that starts
with lullabies, spinning out in traffic on the widest
boulevard in Queens. They were here before
we conquered flames, multiplied across the globe
by hungry tribes until today when every other word
is about the body or the self. For me, hyper-objects
are as simple as tar that bubbles in the street.
First we drink a Turkish coffee
and discuss the end of physics,
the art crowd we’d invited to our storefront.
The punks out front break panes of glass
because they can, a homeless man from Tompkins Square
has squared away his bill for us for sweeping up.
Our kids swim in the public pool,
one kindergarten friend is floating on his face
mid-water, with no impulse to live on.
We shake him, take him to Habib’s-- who’s always smiling
like a gentleman-- as we slowly bring the boy back to us.
Couscous, shawarma, a cup of tea.
Louis Armstrong or miles of Miles,
it’s the jazz there that keeps us easy-going.
Poetry Brigade
We came to celebrate a land where poetry is as commonplace
as washcloths, toothpaste, paint cans, banana milk or coffee.
We came to curse our nation’s funding of a government
of thugs, autocrats and hit squads as it unraveled.
We came for tales from the not so faint of heart,
those with hands pressed firmly in the soil, who,
against all odds, stood up for human rights.
Pier and Ocean
Another time I read a poem about a pier and ocean,
fresh mackerel, crates of oranges, an elegy to the sun,
smells of seaweed, salt, out beyond the ruins of a jetty.
When I read it, the room was full of lookers-on, keen
to take in what I could not say, as I droned on about
a trampled mole, found in a garden, a ghostly double
of a friend whose spirit came to me the night he died.
New Year’s Day Reading
I joined a hundred other poets for a marathon. I had
to go up and read right after Bernadette, cats climbing
up the walls, a stranger peering off a widow’s walk,
with sounds of grunge that swelled across a park,
a theology of liberation and a parcel full of socks
from you in Germany that went onstage with me
as I crowed about my longing for our special place.
The man on the corner was Ukrainian,
he wore a crimped and oily paper bag as a hat
and sat out there through winter fires,
pisco parties, riots in the park.
Though he often lost sight
of trees behind the fountain,
his fingers always fiddled, twisting, rolling,
bending, reinventing scrimshaw, toothpicks,
cigarettes, anything that could be scrawled
upon or twiddled. His hands were always
empty and only once, over the years, did
I ever see him eat, chicken fried rice from
a battered tinfoil pan. He never spoke
or looked at us but his lips were always moving,
muttering, spinning his soft, finicky laces
in the air, done in a strange tongue to say
to us that he was happy there.
We drive to Montauk Blue, a motel that stands
at the edge of the paradise of late October
when I’ve been let go from another job.
Things are bleak for any prospects, but you stay
with me as a giant moon pales and rises over breakers
that crash on shoals near a continental shelf, where
jellyfish float above the briny deep.
We try to sleep, but the crash of surf
is overwhelming every pulse of fear,
of joy, togetherness. We hear Bob Marley
on a pocket radio, as if we’d slipped back fifty years
in time. But here we are now, listening for the end.
Exactly noon. I’m atop a double-decker bus in Berlin,
gazing at a television tower beyond the wall.
We pass a ruined church, a stand of evergreens,
a bottle dump. Suddenly, as if out of nowhere,
as if she were Brunhild, a woman strides out
from a park, perfectly naked, amidst
the Turkish and Croatian businessmen
with smoked eel sandwiches, her arms raised up
above her head as if to usher in the light
that Brandenburg can offer us today.
And she knows something that none
of us who halt or gawk at her
can begin to fathom of the dance of life.
I heard you read out loud, perhaps in Alexandria
or somewhere near the Nile. I recall you asking
a grandfather in Gaza, one you never knew,
to build a home, a space-- like a poem--
a place that would have no boundaries.
I’d love to share a meal with you, but here
where I live, where sheep graze and ravens
peer at corn, where there’s room for those
who have suffered through this war of terror.
In Bethlehem, we visit the Church of the Nativity
after walking the Way of Sorrows, imagine a Christ child
lying in a manger, surrounded by shepherds and three wise men.
We go for coffee with a hint of cardamom, where you teach
me some Arabic words you’ve learned while working here.
Some things in Palestine just can’t be said in English,
like how much water can be scooped up in a hand,
a certainty from doubt, clear water, unwanted family obligations,
the struggle to persist, the sound of brand-new clothes.
You say that alcohol, algebra, candy, cotton, and elixir
come from Arabic, as well as hazard, shrub and tell.
You note there is no word in English for maktub,
as in ‘everything is pre-ordained,’ as in the daily intifada,
‘the shaking off’ that’s all around us-- or the thought
that it was fate we’d be here together on this day.
Clouds unfurl over flooded tulip fields
in Europe and New York, where forests are flush
with spongy moths and walking catfish..
The die is cast, we count our blessings,
sitting in cafes on boulevards of broken dreams
and think up puzzles for a pack of kids
who want us to mind their tongues.
What’s left of language beyond a lexicon
of pedantry or poise? The noise of geese that honk
their way towards Baffin Bay.
In a hedgerow, I’ve cornered wood mice
that cower in fear of the circling sparrow hawk
above, and I choose my words from a thicket
full of nesting mourning doves.