A Spring Song Not Here
It has been many springs now, Adrienne,
and here I find myself in a rain swept
city, staring at a shock of forsythia
out of a window - how we travel with our
bottle glass hearts from room to room,
holding them out to lovers who we know -
somewhere - like thunder - will leave -
the why, and how might differ but the end remains the same - a trace of remembered fires among cold sheets, and the echo - no, less than an echo - perhaps just a memory of someone - you - humming a jazz tune - something about flowers in spring showers - many rooms down in mind's bleak corridors.
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Breaking From Spring
In parks overseen by stern men
of bird-shit brass, the blue of hyacinth
and the red daub of tulips breaking
the deep yellows - Vincent never painted
- in Dutchland perhaps has none of? - these daffodils bent down in the rain - a gray from which mousy forms peel off to scurry underground. In this city of millions when spring actually comes who will sing Walt's song? Walt is dead - the apartment upstairs is dark - and I must migrate to the city that inhabits the shadow of Radhika's breast. But where is Radhika, under which shroud? Birdsong and the streak of mating cardinals among the dogwoods -- earth fills my mouth, air breathes my bones, I am but a minstrel of the unthawed cold, half held but also half cast out of her heaven, which pulses red like a hummingbird's throat.
04/04/2008, New York City
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What A Friend Said To Her
That he is a fool, he himself readily
(too readily perhaps?) admits, and this,
he says, is why he entangles himself
over and over in the barbed wire
of desire like a mangy rabid dog,
and waters the prickly cacti of
silences, with the ensuing muck.
This, if his word is to be believed, has been going on for years, this wandering between various Romes and Jerusalems, with the foolish hope that he will be blinded by light, that he will be the author of (and not just stage fodder in), a divine comedy.
But we know, realistically speaking, Beatrices are far few in between. So his claims that you came close, you know you should heavily discount. What were you then but a young girl singing songs by the fishing nets, and he but a delirious beach bum?
You have a life now, hard as the diamond nose ring you were given for your wedding. And this should prove for you once & all the kind of foolishness this man is made of, when he tells me, "Tell Kannamma, I still have her song even if I have forgotten my way to that house, in that world."
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