THE DEAD MAKE LIGHT

I have seen this graveyard from the highway
on a hundred family trips to the city. Grey legions of marble flashing by
in sunlight, and always impossibly seated at their center, the massive black squalid factory
spuming smoke.

From our station wagon's back seat, my brother whispered to me, "Of course, stupid-- Where do you think we get electricity from?
They burn the dead to make light."

And another time,
"That's where you lived before you were born."

I saw myself sleeping small beneath the cool green shade, hands folded,
my face blank white marble.
Until somehow from a bedroom in Long Island
mom and dad together crackled the current
that set me breathing.

DEAD WAKE

Nothing much has changed since I left here.
There is a pigeon resting, spattering
the face of another blunted saint.
There is a numbers board clicking
at the Irish bar across the street,
the neon weakly blinking
through wrought-iron gates.
There is the ungiving sluice of traffic
from the highway, not stopping,
constant as tides.

And there is smoke
from some early Autumn stove.
Smoke which rises, urgent and groping, forgetting the fire from which it's made.

ANTI-MATTER OF FACT

I guess our lives are just a metaphor,
like “Towering Inferno,” starring the folks next door.
Give us our daily bread. It’s wafer-thin, and we’re left wanting more, smoke-choked and chained inside this corridor.

EMBLEM

The shriveled-leaf oak enshrined in gold
at the end of my block by the last slanting
rays of sun between the roof tops—
I am drawn to you, like a message
flaming out. You can’t tell me
all that I’ve missed today, as I stumble into the dusk’s first radiance, here
at the end of the weekend, shaking hands with everyone I’ve already forgotten.
But I stand by you for a moment, and pretend so.

SUB ROSA

I whispered that last part: I didn’t expect you
to hear it. It was like the handmaiden’s breadcrumb—
I just wanted to keep you coming. Down the crimped tunnel,
toward the sound that echoed like every mother’s lungs,
toward the rewrite of the first word you ever heard.
We start you there. Class has just begun.

LOT’S SALT-LICK

You said you were armed beneath that lovely kilt.
But when I reached for a bomb, all I came up with
was silk. Well, the truce was breached
by my empty-handed reach, and I’m left standing still. I am Sodom, Gomorrah’s on the pill.

MARCH JAUNT

The seasons collide, each trying to outrace
the undertaker’s advance of the next.
A June sun burns in March, making us sweat
beneath wool, making the rain gutters salivate their icicled jaws.

“The snow turns black in Queens,” he said,
christened with soot before it meets the ground.
“Not like here,” he said.

Here, where the finely muscled hill-top
is splendid and glaring in white.
Our hungry tires want to devour it,
ride a surgical incision up its’ side.
Oh, let crystals salt shaker my eyelids,
let the blue turn so hard I can mail it to Miami!
And who ever said the sun’s not a woman to sleep with? Wake up to find yourself
thawed all over the bed sheets, a spring
chicken cooked without remorse.