I am moved by all kinds Of music made by a sympathetic And yearning heart.

I am unschooled in the reading Of notes, of bars and of harmonies. For me the language of music Is breath.

I sway to music and am swayed By it. The hungers that support it Are stoked within me everyday, Every moment, when I lend my ears To listen and when I open my mouth To sing, to proclaim.

The blues of the farmhand, The unshaved working rough nursing His solitude like a beer, the high howls Of leaving trains mix with chants, With melismas of hymns, Gloria Gloriaaaaa, Songs in tongues only my spirit can Understand and speak, Become the Song of Songs within me.

A man not behest by an obsession Of simple things, without form, Like sea foam, evening light falling On the ribbed waters of a lake, The white grinning teeth of cascades. The deep sighs of a woman, the rustle Of skin touching skin, all that implacable Longing for God, doesn’t know music And never becomes music.

I want to take such a man by hand, By heart and bring out the drums of earth, The lutes with moonholes, the guitars Of starlight, the suns hidden in the body Of violins and set him aflame.

I and he, who is also me, Will then listen anew to the first cry Of an infant as it breaks from the womb Of the mother, the last drum beat of the heart Which is taken up by other hearts, the tap dance Of rain on muscle and skull, the rise of water Through the roots and trucks of friendly trees Infecting the silence of what was With music And become a peacable silence.

A man, with his head thrown back, falls like an angel, heavy with blues, with the slumped weight of earth, pulling him into an embrace of worms.

I have been, often unexpectedly, been A witness to this fall. Last night a wino On Ponce, falling into a cardboard box Under a bridge's overhang, into sleep.

A few hours before that, a man and a woman Seated in a bar saturated with broken glances looked at each other significantly but left home alone, to fall into a lonely slumber

Of what ifs. What if instead of wax, the ties That tie invisible wings to our bodies were made of something stronger - steel? What if every human desire can take off flawlessly into the blue?

Icarus was & is a necessary myth, with both Of his melting wings, with all of his terrible desire To fervidly embrace the stars. And his falling, As the wino fell, as the man & the woman fell,

His head thrown back, his blue body falling Through a cloud of shell burst, a bullet hole In his chest marking his heart's fire, a red Pulsing coin, is necessary to remind all of us,

The earthbound, of the unreachable stars and the trajectory of falls that take us to them.

How should I not be glad to contemplate the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window and a high tide reflected on the ceiling? There will be dying, there will be dying, but there is no need to go into that. The poems flow from the hand unbidden and the hidden source is the watchful heart. The sun rises in spite of everything and the far cities are beautiful and bright. I lie here in a riot of sunlight watching the day break and the clouds flying. Everything is going to be all right.