The Angst Of Angels

M SEEKS F- to rub an ice cube on chest in three-storey walk-up in Red Hook.
No experience required; Just a sensitive touch and hypnotic hush. All attitudes must
be left by the door. And we’ll stand like shadows worshipping the watertower in the mist
then confess and reveal our deepest secrets in one of those brilliant midnight Summer baths.

Totally relieved, free and euphoric, we’ll start our relationship from the middle.
Maybe even with a squabble, then listen to down home Blues from Chicago.

Dim room, flush of a fan
Swaying pear blossom
Clang of cathedrals

First breath in Brooklyn at dusk
Disturbed tenants fall asleep
in darkened apartments

I couldn’t help thinking of my barber in The Lower East Side
with her infectious laugh and convict brother in the picture
frame, exclaiming–”What’s up B?!” “Just chilling G!”
then lets out a hearty and healthy, ghostly guffaw

We had met under the bridge. She’d been nursing a bottle of Old Grand Dad. It was
pouring. And when it finally cleared and cleaned the streets we made love on the rooftop
as I stripped off her nurse’s dress revealing supple olive breasts. She had a past and only
fooled around on the floor, as though she compulsively felt the need to punish herself

She used to be in a convent and had a blind father who owned a string of bodegas in Yonkers.
She was an alcoholic and carried around a bag with a diary where she was interpreting the bible
in calligraphy. She said if she ever got famous not to tell anybody about these things. I promised
her. And wondered why she felt the need to remind me. Yet upon further reflection, I realized,
similarly, and not too coincidentally, I was the exact same way

I lost touch with her just like everything else that Summer, transient and fleeting (pals gunned
down execution-style and shotgun weddings, as though these celebrations and tragedies were
all a part of the same scenery, remembering the mad banners swinging from scorching tenements,
which welcomed home older siblings from correctional facilities, like some strange slapstick comedy) historic and holy, hypnotized by the heat, while evaporating in an erotic pool, celebrating my anonymity,
yet interestingly and ironically, increasingly feeling very much for the first time a part of things (not
a part from things). But I stray, I stray, I finally stray…And somehow, and some way, do believe

There was no sound more splendid, pleasing
that the birds warbling outside my window
when fog and mist spilled over the cathedral

“Don’t know why
there’s no stars up
in the sky, Sloppy!”

I pull a stocking over my head and drink chocolate milk in wind

I turn away from anchorman because I don’t trust them

The super is beaten with an inch of his life

Bob the Slob has a fish thrown at him by neighborhood kids

And this is how it goes and this is how it is…
__________________________________________________________

A Week After Winter

wild turkey
on the side
of the road

*

rambling
with loved one
to shakespeare festival

*

still so long
till you reach
the red lion inn

*

ghosts wrapped
in country
curtains

*

lagoons finally thawed
and ice fishermen
all gone

*

still snow
shows up in
the mountains

*

piping paper factory
like a kiln glazing pottery
& you anxiously awaiting

*

you’re home!
you’re home!
you’re home!

*

the boxcars
& covered
bridges

*

(clockmaker contented
tinkering with tchtckas & contraptions
in the basement of his bed & breakfast

minding his own business
for if life truly is a play
a game of illusions

all he’s simply doing
is getting to the bottom
to the heart of the problem

a sort of man-made
mechanical deconstruction
without the conflict or drama)

*

lo & behold…
latches & keyholes
of old eyebrow colonials

*

an in-depth spiritual
view of the historical
transcendent soul

*
to the black-
berries & crab-
apples on the lake.