Hot Sake Breath
You stick your chopsticks up your nose,
make like a panda making like a walrus
and I make dubious haikus
from our sweet slips of fortunes
for we are a duo of stows
on a slow rocking ferry in a strait.
Sea slaps the starboard behind our backs
like weak applause
or two Canada geese taking off for where else
but.
Passengers figure on the quay. They mimic
sugar maples in Manasquan
or a beech forest in Cape Henlopen. Wisps
are fingering their scarves. They are waving
over here, over here, more to the,
over here. But we drift,
lull like two swallows in a styrofoam cup
on the Harlem or two duck breasts
in a styrofoam take-home carton on the Hudson.
We,
in last tangles of cold sesame noodles
getting noodlier with the motion.
Win Win
Last time I felt for keys in a stranger’s pocket,
I won a new car. It was a DeSoto. Big as a house.
I let the stranger live in it until I got the title.
By then the new DeSotos had come out.
With two now to my name, I let the stranger keep
the one I’d won since he’d already tuned the engine
and the radio to All Sinatra All the Time.
My prize DeSoto was now a year older, but then
so were we. Don’t you love when things work out?
Don’t you love the feel of genuine red leather?
Suburban Pastoral
It’s the perfect time of the year for evenings.
You, home from your desk in the big building.
Me, from the bench by the pond in the park.
Table’s on all fours in the kitchen. Wine
breathes through its mouth.
Music like no music sweeps in off the porch swing.
A loaf cools. Butter puddles.
We are finally beside us.
What’s left and right in the world.
Four
Practicing Medicine
My doctor asks me why I’m here today.
He always starts our visits playing dumb.
Word is he asked me that when I was born!
My answer hasn’t changed. Perhaps he hopes
by now I’m feeling better. Perhaps this is a trick.
I want to be adult about it. I tell him I am feeling
a little funny all over. He gives me little pills
that look like buttons. Last time he gave me pills
that looked like Tiddlywinks. They made me jumpy.
I stick these new ones on my shirt. My chest feels
less congested! Those who know me say my pallor
has improved. I guess it’s all in how you take things.
The Resonance in Magnetic
How still she holds through all
the bangs and knocks, supinely
on the sled-like slab inside the giant
O. I watch as the technician images
more than I could ever have
imagined of my mother’s cerebellum,
cortex, lobes. I see the what
in what makes talking on the phone
and baking cookies simultaneously
successful. The where in why she had
my father take his hat and shoes off
on the porch. The when in how
she knew her life was good despite
the suffering. The who in who
her soul was, is and is to be. I see
an earth, black dots and white infinities.
Within a convolution of the occipital,
her very first thought of me.
Remedial
I am sitting in my ENT’s waiting room.
Three kids are playing on the floor.
The boy with a book
has been staring at a page for a while now.
He moves his finger over something.
I look at a book the same way sometimes.
I ask if it’s a good book. He hands it up to me.
I get down on the floor beside him
and begin reading aloud. The other two children
stop what they’re doing and join us.
Staff comes out from behind closed doors
and clamors for an empty chair.
Everyone gets one. The chairs are not musical.
When I’ve finished, the staff goes back to their stations.
The kids go back to their playing.
My sinus pressure has diminished significantly.
The ringing in my ears is down to a tinkle.
My throat is clear enough to take to the streets,
to read abroad even.
Birder
My ophthalmologist points to where
I put my chin and once it’s there,
he swivels in with his View-Master apparatus.
See any geese, Doc?
Was that a starling smashed into my lens?
I think a swallow mudded up my lower lid.
No way a nuthatch
upside down there on my retina!
Doc, your light’s so bright.
Just like the sun I told you I stared into
when I went looking for the cedar waxwing
that ate out of my palm,
pooped in my hair until I donned a hat.
Cat got your tongue, Doc? Doc,
have you heard a peep?
How ’bout I call my otolaryngologist
to check for wax?
Look up your nose for down?
Down your throat for beaks, scaly feet?
Here, take this just in case, the number
of my primary ornithologist.
Bruised Patella
I wear my beanie into X-ray
and the techie asks where’s the propeller!
The boner poking out of my gingham
does not deter him as he boosts me up
onto the table and bends my knee
for the lens. Then leaves,
seems gone extra long as if he might be
doing something he shouldn’t behind
the little window. Or maybe he’s making
an independent short film. Who’s to say
as I lie dreaming of my femurs
long and strong, each pivoting in
its smooth acetabulum, my whole skeleton
poised atop a snow-white bike, breeze
drafting its sharps and flats
through the natural keys of my ribs. Done,
now standing in my denims, tight T,
I tell the techie and his juniors there to gawk:
my beanie’s for protection. I tip it
for a peek at no textbook skull!
Dementia
Doc says she has the onset
and I ask him how he knows and he says
how she talks and carries herself.
After hearing specifics, I say
she’s been like that as long as I remember.
It’s nothing new.
When I tell him she’s a fairy godmother,
he says, ah, that
explains it and I ask what?
Her cooking for ten when only the two of us
sit down? Her passion for weed blossoms
over exotics? Her concluding that jets
unzip sky and dump rain?
Tell me, Doc, where did you get your
degree? And what funneled you
into this windowless exam room?
When you look in a face, Doc,
you don’t see wonder?
Hers is a world where wishes are gospel.
Hers is a world where fingers are wands
and eyes, big picture windows.
Building a Better Mouse
Freda lays frays of red blouse thread
on her forearm. They look like scratches raised up
off her skin. She either breathes on them furtively or
waves her hand over them dismissingly and they skitter,
get lost on the red rug. Freda feels for them,
circles her lined palm on the pile and returns with
a loose ball, ganglion she calls it when held up
to the patient white of incandescence:
this is the start of a heart. For a body Freda recovers
a pink jellybean clothed in the fate of a dust bunny
under her recliner. Pinches, twists make limbs, features.
Slight bulge in her apron pocket begets a soul.
Somewhere in Freda’s needle is a hole.
Unsung
When she lets go a song,
the words and each of their musics
seed in her waydown,
bud,
bond with CO2 from her lung pairs,
heart’s blush,
you get the drift,
and carry in any direction there’s an ear.
An ear like lips with a flexi-straw between them,
sucking up granules of malt
like they’re gold dust at the bottom
of a shake’s paper cup.
Her song does not sing
of how she gets the song
to repeat two sets
every night of the week except Monday,
fifteen minutes, two menthol lites, one double scotch splashed with water
between.
Her song does not sing
of her getting out of her get-up,
leaving the building,
crossing the tarmac at four in the morning,
getting husband and kids up and out
at six and seven.
Her song does not sing
in broad daylight
at all.
Says Words
John brought home the stone
that gets passed around at each
friendly meeting. The smooth flat stone
everyone gets a chance to say a few words over
while holding it tightly between both hands,
then letting it go and passing it on.
John thought it might look good
in his fish tank,
better yet in the turtle bowl
for the turtle to crawl
out of the water and rest on
in light streaming in from the window.
John brings it back to the meeting
where it gets set aside, where
everyone including himself
passes around the new rubber snake,
says words like words
have never been words before.
On Bending Knee
Repairing
in a bed. Hooked
to what nurses call
appliances,
orders to get well.
Skin’s still gray from gases
that granted surgeons
passage inside.
Plastic tubes
pump clarity
into her shrubbery
of lung. Very blood
she let abundantly in trauma
drips back
into her spring.
Dreaming
popcorns on the ceiling.
She reaches for her husband’s hand,
lifts it
to her head for brushing.
Together,
build loose hairs into a nest.
He daubs her face with swabs of cotton;
she cups his chin.
Mid-bed her mummied knee
bends
on a knee-bending machine.
Against a cloak of gauze
the foot-long slice
is gathered like a boot.
Beneath its swell,
whatever lasts goes far beyond
titanium.
To bearing.
Presence
You thought you saw me on the street.
You were right.
You’d think I’d have some sense and stay inside.
Let me remind you, exercise
is part of the instructions I came with.
The Constitution even says
I have the right to be all I can be;
no, wait, that’s the Army.
It’s true,
I am fewer molecules,
need, say a third fewer calories, thread count.
Contained in me is much
negative space.
Before long I’ll walk through walls
without a trace of DNA,
leaving you the door,
this key.
Down Main
Immediately after the accident
half the high school marching band
rounds the corner. It just happened to be
in the vicinity. Then Hose Company
No. 6 with its groomed Dalmatian.
Are those equestrians I see?
I smell sweat. It’s intoxicating.
Meanwhile victims bleed.
They ask for air while motioning
the parade to go around them.
It had practiced for just such an occasion.
Candy and ribbons tossed in the air
stay suspended
for the ambulance corps to arrive.
Meteorology of Me
Driving home I see my head, face
in one big cumulonimbus above Route 4.
It is traveling about fifty. Faster clouds
are backing up behind it. Traditional thunder,
and the cloud shuts its eyes. Cloudiness
puffs from its nose and ears. Its mouth opens
like it’s going to trumpet. Fortunately
I’m wearing shades because a blinding light
comes down and no, I am not beamed up. Instead,
I rain. When I arrive, snow
all over the porch. What can my family do
but shovel me off for the night. Morning breeze,
and I drift above the hedges where I evenly coat
the boxwood, make a scene from a picture postcard.
Noon approaches. I melt. Much of me
sinks in sod. The lesser of me lifts, mere mist
that reaches into cracks and crevices,
soothes the hands and knees of greater bodies.
Five
Flying Objects
The air is filled with them.
It’s like the sun is a giant hive.
Someone up there doesn’t like empty.
Birds and planes aren’t enough.
Clouds never did matter.
If they did, it would rain down honey. Look,
a man is leaving his lawn.
He is well over the hibiscus.
It’s the most daring thing he’s ever done.
His wife is blowing him kisses.
They have wings. He walks out on one.
Stands on his head on one.
For Ages
Secretly at night
when moms and dads sleep
in their beds, storks fly
through
the nursery windows,
gather tears in tiny vials
from the crybabies.
Storks for ages
have been taking tears back
to the closest ocean.
Now and then a stork’s shot down
where the tiny vials are
labeled contraband.
The tears get dumped
into a pristine lake or stream;
its pollywogs and minnows
perish from the salt.
When the crybabies
come of age, some
pluck their eyes out. Some
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