A Crossing
Passport. Visa. Questions. Answers.
Fingerprints - right hand, left hand.
Photograph of my sleepless face minus glasses.
Two stamps of arrival in red.
Outside a taxi. One tunnel. Two bridges.
This is how I cross into one of your cities, even though you will always remain walled off to me, Adrienne, a refugee and a fugitive from love.
Note: Written while waiting in an hour long line for "Visitors" at the border, at NYC's JFK Airport.
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An Indian Aubade
Last morning in India finds me in bed,
well after the racket in the streets began
warbling its dissonant raga,
thinking about those large bats I saw swooping wide circles in the sky in the translucent hour before nightfall,
blind but feeding on perfected echo. This was yesterday as I walked towards the abandoned shell of a school where
I once learned geography and equations, the practical kind that took me to college and beyond, into a world where I learned
to earn above and beyond my daily bread. Yet see how this morning comes again with its sharp hunger for a warm presence
under the famished hand. And hear, with eyes forcibly closed, how pale music once found via echolocation dissolves into nothingness again.
Note: These lines are in some fashion related to this sequence, also featuring bats. Also a previous aubade.
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Association - 2
Walking towards a freshly painted house,
its color a certain shade of blue,
with patches of white still showing through,
my nostrils flare and fill with turpentine
fumes, whose scent soon grows indistinct
as I drift away into evening light,
thinking this is how I approach you too, first thing after waking, you breath low and crackling with sleep, your body the hue of sky as it is breaks open with light, your scent of fruit, flaming in the half dark, a dawn firefly visible even before I touch you under the blanket -
O, why do I keep forgetting not to touch your dream wet body yet? Why do I keep wanting more than a certain sufficiency of sound, vision, and smell?
My Poems
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