Landscape, Three Cows

Horse News

 

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.


Pokanoket Powwow

 

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)

 

Coronavirus Poem

 

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.

 

 

Ocean Parkway

 

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!

 


 

Hyper-objects

 

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.

 

 


 

Habib’s Place


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.

 

 

St. Mark’s Poetry Project

 

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.

 

Corner Seventh and Avenue A

 

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.

 


Montauk Blue

 

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.

 

 

Hasenheide

 

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.

 

 

To Mosab Abu Toha

 

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.

 


 

Maktub

 

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.


 

After Ashbery

 

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.