The Landline

How do you hold a happy day,
when as it goes it goes away?
The wind carries it, you can see
the wind in the grass, the grass
blows over as evening comes
and yes your day is gone, unheld,
your hands empty like eggs
whose yolks and white have been
dumped out – you get to eat
but the containers are now useless,
their lives spent.  What in you
would hold the day if not the hands,
the eyes, the mind?
Is that what a memory is, when you
hold it successfully?  Happy days
go quicker than the sad, eager to return
to their sources like droplets to the sun,
evaporation, the lake from which the droplets come.
The wide world, happy and sad, held and dropped,
experienced and dreamed; drugs taken, sober
days spent happy too, in a house beside
a bar, beaming, waiting for friends, for
the telephone to ring, and when it does
the wind picks up and blows the grass
and there it goes, the wind, the happy day,
silence on the other end, receiver in the cradle.

A Krimko Man They Call St

I looked at Boston in the distanc
e and belived that it would be the on
e.  It had pearls on, a presence lik
e a nightmare you neck wit
h.  On Wednesday (that’s
tomorrow) a tune will rise from th
e high rises and run the ris
k of killing the softest ears.

Babies’ softest ears, silk-padded
and too young to be personalize
d.

This deep ward of annoying
            presence, this cunning
world of happiness I loathe.

A legend, that’s what I want to b
e.
A broken man if I have t
o.
A tunesmith reversed, a sheep to go b
a,
a bridesmaid to all Hawai
i.
A Krimko man they call St
u.

            And still that’s not enough!
My complacency I rebuff.
Boston in the distance dances
with my weary eyes––that’s what
you get when you’re high all day,
all night (the night before)
and the morning before,
when you’re too busy making
your own music and others’ food,
a face of determination skiing
across your skull.
                                    Are you
scared to admit your faith?
I don’t know,
                        are you?

William Blake Wasn’t Born Yesterday

I work in an art gallery and in the gallery we sell
paintings and sculptures and videos you name it
to people and institutions with money for culture
I imagine they celebrate when they get their paintings
home on the wall they pour themselves glasses
of champagne and admire their purchases dots
of purple applied just so the way the edges
are handled the way they change under the changing light
when they drain their glasses they retire to their bedrooms
where they keep plasma TVs where they sleep and dream
and wake and love and toss in their sheets
while downstairs their paintings hang sleeping too
their purple splotches like dried blood at night
and at dawn like Genesis like ‘Morning Has Broken’ like
rainbow rainbow rainbow in  the boat Elizabeth Bishop
fishes from and then she lets the fish go
motoring on I guess what more can she do
sit there and wait for a bigger fish? no
she goes back to Key West she fills a tumbler with gin
with three ice cubes she sits at her private table
she puts a few words down on paper the beginning
of a letter fragments from a dream