Born January 22, 1946

Born January 22, 1946

 

Ashes of Auschwitz attended my bris

they stayed quiet and did not speak their names

a scent that I did not yet recognize

dark gray sky cantilevered from the past

 

I shone the splendor of coming to be

undergirded by the terror of it

conjoint unravelling of joy and doom

never ever to be broken apart

 

to love is to love, the question that is

its own answer, to live is to live

this fleeting instant, eternity’s crown,

this spark that vanishes free from a name

 

the wound of hope bleeds and can not be stanched

beyond faulting I mourn and I bless

 

Fit And Counterfeit

I am my own true fit and counterfeit,

true gold and fool’s gold, their opposition

not surviving this life’s intricacy,

neither driving out each other’s other

 

What am I to make of myself but ceaseless

forming of unresolvable formlessness,

sometimes shameless in its heated heaving

sometimes weighted with patient blind waiting?

 

In possessing myself, I dispossess

myself of myself, pass into passing,

leaving behind trinkets that mark a path

beyond my own way of remembrances

 

“Am I or am I not?” becomes the sea

of “was” or “was not,”,  time’s own shoreless “be”

 

 

Slant

Slant is how best it goes when it knows not

wither or why it goes, truth or not ruth,

entertainment or catastrophe, yet

slant’s elusive as firmament’s first fire

 

was there a first photon or were all and awe

then self-entangled, then, as now , caught in

the net of nothing stretched impossibly

to bear being beyond themselves, ah, light

 

yes light, this light, slant, makes sight and shadow

the worrisome wisdom of our delight,

the fierce fervor of our burgeoning fright

as climate changes, so our climax, too

 

my self, illusion, to itself is slight

and slant as well, star, lost in its own night

In Brazilian Portuguese

In Brazilian Portuguese the samba

is the sonnet, lovely lazy lively

lilt slipping through shoulders, hips, lips, toes, hands

to be breath and so smooth how time flowers

 

Before there were any words, Jobim made

sun, sand, sea, saudade, me, and the girl

who was completely sound without need of  flesh,

she of the slightest  stirrings  of our air

 

No knowing now, ever,  how samba means

outside itself, except it lilts us  let

go grip of grasping selves, dance with shadows

sculpted from blocking light of this, this… life

 

ah, sway, syncopated, counting deeper

sweeter than any beat,  more…less regular

Baby

Baby

 

A baby rabbit

flushed from the liriope,

still, stares, slips back in

 

The baby rabbit

was the Buddha whom I flushed

from liriope

 

All encompassing

baby Buddha rabbit gaze

summoned me awake

 

This is everything

and nothing, baby rabbit

as still as a stone

 

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