At the Mystic Aquarium

Still sun blind, I wheel your chair
through the darkened room
to the largest tank, where hammerheads swim
in the aquamarine glow, the torpedo of their bodies
sleeking past you beyond the glass.
Wanting respite from the heavy pushing,
wanting unburdened time to take in
the small brilliant lives of darting reef fish,
for once, I leave you, brake on and safe.
But when I turn away into the milling crowd,
it is I who fall—only a few feet from you, tripping
over a small girl, my body old, heavy,
coming down on her, her arms flailing,
trying to fight it back.
She lets out a cry that rips straight through
and her mother snatches her up, snaps at me in anger.
Sorry. Sorry. I say again and again
as I try with no luck to struggle to my feet,
straining against the dark and the gravity,
thinking how hard it is to rise
from the downthrust of weight and age,
aware of shame's bloodrush, tears beginning
as if I were the hurt child, the one who needed saving.
Suddenly I hate your wheelchair,
the knees that will not hold you, your blocked heart.
I want you here at my elbow, your hand pulling me up,
your arm gripping my shoulder, comforts in my ear.
But you've never even noticed, hooked as you are
to the aqua light, flashing points of the teeth,
the flat implacable eyes.


by Patricia Fargnoli

Poem by the Bridge at Ten-shin

This jungle poem is going to be my last.

This space walk is.

Racing in a cab through springtime Central Park,

I kept my nose outside the window like a dog.

The stars above my bed at night are vast.

I think it is uncool to call young women Ms.

My darling is a platform I see stars from in the dark,

And all the dogs begin to bark.

My grunting gun brings down her charging warthog,

And she is frying on white water, clinging to a log,

And all the foam and fevers shiver.

And drink has made chopped liver of my liver!

Between my legs it's Baudelaire.

He wrote about her Central Park of hair.



I look for the minuterie as if I were in France,

In darkness, in the downstairs entrance, looking for the light.

I'm on a timer that will give me time

To see the way and up the stairs before the lights go out.

The so delicious Busby Berkeley dancers dance

A movie musical extravaganza on the staircase with me every night.

Such fun! We dance. We climb. We slip in slime.

We're squirting squeezes like a wedge of lime!

It's like a shout.

It's what minuterie is all about.

Just getting to the landing through the dark

That has been interrupted for a minute is a lark.

And she's so happy. It is grand!

I put my mobile in her ampersand.

The fireworks are a fleeting puff of sadness.

The flowers when they reach the stars are tears.

I don’t remember poems I write.

I turn around and they are gone.

I do remember poor King Richard Nixon’s madness.

Pierre Leval, we loved those years!

We knocked back shots of single malt all night.

Beer chasers gave dos caballeros double vision, second sight—

Twin putti pissing out the hotel window on the Scottish dawn.

A crocodile has fallen for a fawn.

I live flap copy for a children’s book.

He wants to lick. He wants to look.

A tiny goldfinch is his Cupid.

Love of cuntry makes men stupid.

It makes men miss Saddam Hussein!

Democracy in Baghdad makes men think

Monstrosity was not so bad.

I followed Gandhi barefoot to

Remind me there is something else till it began to rain.

The hurricane undressing of democracy in Baghdad starts to sink

The shrunken page size of the New York Times, and yet we had

A newspaper that mattered once, and that is sad,

But that was when it mattered. Do

I matter? That is true.

I don’t matter but I do. I lust for fame,

And after never finding it I never was the same.

I roared into the heavens and I soared,

And landed where I started on a flexing diving board.

I knew a beauty named Dawn Green.

I used to wake at the crack of Dawn.

I wish I were about to land on Plymouth Rock,

And had a chance to do it all again but do it right.

It was green dawn in pre-America. I mean

Great scented forests all along the shore, which now are gone.

I’ve had advantages in life and I pronounce Iraq “Irrock.”

The right schools taught me how to tock.

I’m tocking Turkey to the Kurds but with no end in sight.

These peace tocks are my last. Goodbye, Iran. Iran, good night.

They burned the undergrowth so they could see the game they hunt.

That made the forest a cathedral clear as crystal like a cunt.

Their arrows entered red meat in the glory

Streaming down from the clerestory.

Carine Rueff, I was obsessed—I was possessed! I liked your name.

I liked the fact Marie Christine Carine Rue F was Jewish.

It emphasized your elegance in Paris and in Florence.

You were so blond in Rue de l’Université!

The dazzling daughter of de Gaulle’s adviser Jacques Rueff was game

For anything. I’m lolling here in Mayfair under bluish

Clouds above a bench in Mount Street Gardens, thinking torrents.

Purdey used to make a gun for shooting elephants.

One cannot be the way one was back then today.

It went away.

I go from Claridge’s to Brands Hatch racing circuit and come back

To Claridge’s, and out and eat and drink and bed, and fade to black.

The elephants were old enough to die but were aghast.

The stars above this jungle poem are vast.

To Ninety-second Street and Broadway I have come.

Outside the windows is New York.

I came here from St. Louis in a covered wagon overland

Behind the matchless prancing pair of Eliot and Ezra Pound.

And countless moist oases took me in along the way, and some

I still remember when I lift my knife and fork.

The Earth keeps turning, night and day, spit-roasting all the tanned

Tired icebergs and the polar bears, which makes white almost contraband.

The biosphere on a rotisserie emits a certain sound

That tells the stars that Earth was moaning pleasure while it drowned.

The amorous white icebergs flash their brown teeth, hissing.

They’re watching old porn videos of melting icebergs pissing.

The icebergs still in panty hose are lesbians and kissing.

The rotting ocean swallows the bombed airliner that’s missing.

by Frederick Seidel

Number 8

It was a face which darkness could kill
--------in an instant
a face as easily hurt
----by laughter or light
'We think differently at night.'
--------she told me once
lying back languidly
--------And she would quote Cocteau
'I feel there is an angel in me' she'd say
----'whom I am constantly shocking'
Then she would smile and look away
----light a cigarette for me
--------sigh and rise
and stretch
----her sweet anatomy
--------let fall a stocking


by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Never give all the heart

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

by William Butler Yeats

The Riddle of the World

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan
The proper study of Mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A Being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his mind and body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Whether he thinks too little, or too much;
Chaos of Thought and Passion, all confused;
Still by himself, abused or disabused;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great Lord of all things, yet a prey to all,
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled;
The glory, jest and riddle of the world.

by Alexander Pope

Of Love

I have been in love more times than one,
thank the Lord. Sometimes it was lasting
whether active or not. Sometimes
it was all but ephemeral, maybe only
an afternoon, but not less real for that.
They stay in my mind, these beautiful people,
or anyway people beautiful people to me, of which
there are so many. You, and you, and you,
whom I had the fortune to meet, or maybe
missed, Love, love, love it was the
core of my life, from which, of course, comes
the word for the heart. And, oh, have I mentioned
that some of them were men and some were women
and some--now carry my revelation with you--
were trees. Or places. Or music flying above
the names of their makers. Or clouds, or the sun
which was the first, and the best, the most
loyal for certain, who looked so faithfully into
my eyes, every morning. So I imagine
such love of the world-- its fervency, its shining, its
innocence and hunger to give of itself--I imagine
this is how it began.


by Mary Oliver

Happiness

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though
I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along
the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with
their women and children and a keg of beer and an
accordion.

by Carl Sandburg