In deep blue long gone huge afternoon by
blue blue Indian sea under blue blue
African sky a yellow mongrel dog
sleeping off the heat went in my blue eyes

And never came out again - there he lies
on the dark sand in a palm tree’s slim shade
bowed like a pipe cleaner and sleeps and sleeps
and mixes forgetting and remembering

Just so wild pigments of my dreams
can steal from him true hues of love and loss,
the times it went for me and against me,
while waves rocked and stars climbed hidden ladders

A yellow mongrel’s work who once was flesh
And now is dogged in another mesh

In a mud walled room with no furniture
I am still sleeping in a blue hammock
the color of earth.. a two year old comes
to wake me, shakes me, saying, “Quero pao”

I grunt, rise, walk up red laterite hill
with his tiny hand in mine, buy four loaves
of bread still warm from the oven, for him,
his seven brothers, sisters, his mother

I’m twenty and it’s a summer’s escape
from the colder north where I belong and
not for thirty years do I recognize
Luciano’s my father who first knew

Himself starving in wartime - the rapture
Of his hand in mine I still have, sleeping

One lilac fragrant twilight of late spring
a pack of dogs surrounded me just where
University’s flank joined the ghetto -
slowly they began to circle watching

My feet to see how I’d move - dogs yellow
and brown and black and tan, their ribs sticking
out from their chests, hunting me as if
they knew their hunger’s business, how to kill

Sweet the evening was, soft the fading light
as I wondered what it would be to feel
the fangs of these dogs, to fall and fade, die -
then came explosion of sweet savagery

As I roared, rushed, struck, stunned the largest dog
So they broke and left me in lilac fog

We’ve got our hands on the plans - DNA
and RNA, histones and all the rest,
but we don’t see where our folly nestles,
how it is built so deeply in that what

We do with what we think we know in this
golden age of exploration is bound
to be clumsy, insensitive and blind,
so that when we wake from this spell our shame

Won’t be enough to guide us in how to
regret, repent, seek to atone, restore
what we have disturbed, rescue what we’ve bent:
future presence of mind is hard to find

Our hands on the plans repeat old troubles,
We become our own serpentine doubles

O time, most dread of disciplines, who mends
not what mars us, but to woe bears increase,
as dull growth likeness unto likeness lends,
marking limiting's limit in surcease,

upon your bank we draw ourselves in coin
so airily minted that pain's dark thrust
mocks fitfully our minds, as to purloin
of self the better stuff of truthful trust.

Time, time, of tutors are you the supreme,
for gripped in toil of your usury,
we, paupered all, learn the seeds of doubting's dream.
Of nought stamps this banker men to harry.

Yet faith, if it would be more than time's fool,
no coin may show, lest mere coin, estranged, rul

The world is beautiful with breezes, snakes
of grace, serpents of softness, which avid
steal from tree to tree. So green slumber wakes,
animated to indulgence, shy kid

of goatish luxury, by the quick bite
of teeth envenomed with air's elixirs,
first, last and best poison, in malice slight,
yet most rich in invention's rare mixtures.

Sin original is mind's first motion,
art's intent, which like some fallen rainbow
stirs the waters of harmony's ocean
in search of the sign which has drowned below.

Eve's green garden was Adam's best delight.
Eden's trance is everyman's prime birthright

M was never an easy one to know,
for he thought of himself as just the first
or last hesitant outline of shadow,
a beginning or an ending, subtle,

Neither unambiguously the one
or the other, too vague for expression,
someone who was a half way hint, more than
he had ideas or aesthetic, plan

Or purpose, someone who passed life’s short term
beguiled by intimacies and fictions
arising only in him without clues
as to how they might be made more robust

A trace of M is not the taste of M,
who wished to be flower without a stem

Cancer killed a man who led the Vilna
Ghetto uprising, fought in the forest
and knew evil when it was live and fierce
all around him and he wrote poems still

Even after the cancer took his voice
so what was left was written character,
the smell of the hospital, memory
compressed in disinfectant, pain ruling

An empire growing minute by minute,
the glow of lights off the slick floors as night
moved along towards another cold dawn
by a river on a far strange continent

Abba Kovner, we let you go and stay
with us as steel spark of the darkest day

Each second I’m launching that second’s guess,
second guessing all seconds that have gone
before, adding one more awkward mirror
to a hall of mirrors that’s never done.

Now each second’s guess prepares a surprise
for all the seconds that are yet to come,
for the invasion of minutes and hours
that can’t stop itself and does not conquer

Any objective, but is caught in risks
that bloom from mornings and bright afternoons
to become catastrophes, opposites
of what was intended or expected.

Don’t forget worry is an art form, too,
That we can’t bear to live only what’s true

So many times now have I asked myself
the same old questions that I’ve gotten used
to them as parts of me: it’s no longer
a question of answering them, but just

Of knowing where my edges used to be,
how I’ve gotten smoothed down over the years,
so it’s hard to recollect my roughness,
my inarticulate passions, their ghosts

If I start to think I know what my life
has been and is, I’ve passed into stupor,
those old questions, hypnotic, until I
finally join them in the river’s trance

What’s more precious than a question’s curved mark
To keeps us company in our own dark?

How many minnows, unnumbered as stars,
hang silver still in these warm tidal pools,
a vast progeny cradled by sand bars
while the sun unwinds as from golden spools

I am huge among them, these tiny fish
that hang just below the air's interface.
I think of Faberge, that school's relish
in the miniature, in pride of place.

The minnows surround me. I am the hole
in the doughnut about which they revolve,
each a limpid instance, fish without bowl,
each a riddle no art can solve

Singing so, I paint fleeting immersion
Of breath, each has only his own version.

Mollusks are their own mathematicians.
Blind in the deep they discover whorled forms,
yet they've no use for metaphysicians.
Men die for purposes and drown in norms.

The lowly mollusk echoes galaxies
and cares not a wit. His shell bounds his world.
He lacks light for larger intricacies,
bothers not how stars through heavens are hurled.

I culled today a shell from dreamy sea.
It made a point and seemed to wear a map.
With lines of green latitude, precisely,
it was ruled. I disturbed it from its nap.

Now for the deed there is no remedy.
We both lie lost in stranger's melody.

It is as in the deep a silken tent,
yet vagabond, without a central stay.
Adrift in its capricious element,
where currents play it finds its silent way.

It floats all dreamless through the star struck night.
If something like a dance it does, it knows
no step and nothing of enchantment's might
though phosphorescent from within it glows.

Between wet and wet it's sheer filament.
It seems a ghostly rag, stolen from fog,
this pale aimless form, home to no intent,
white jellyfish, inexplicable cog.

The close stitched seams, the catenaries sweet:
What knows no enclosing meets no defeat.

1977

They flee from me, the lithe and lightning fish,
whom I would catch and dally with and keep,
admiring their embroidery, a dish
of light to make the queen of art's heart leap.

What tailor's hand their small scales stitched all tricks
of counterpoint and fugue, as Bach, did know;
with nimble wit fantastic threads he picks
and sets them all in unison aglow.

Not by seasons does the sea change fashions.
Fish clothes are classic, some pre-Jurassic.
On their skins sleek creatures sport their passions.
Some are fierce, some soft, some mock and mimic

This sea, where arts converge, makes light music
and music light, shows lust an ancient kick.

The ones we know best are so hard to know,
slip through our fingers as we ourselves do
as water does, as worth does, as wish does,
as love does when we try to bestow names.

The ones we know best are so hard to know
for they become for us habits only -
we look and look away and think we still look
when we have moved on to distract ourselves

The ones we know best are so hard to know,
because knowing is always risk and we
abhor risk because it’s our undoing,
the silver snake slithering through green grass

This is no latitude for empty gaze,
Labyrinth where we ourselves amaze

Brains in a bucket on a cloudy day
black lab tops under fluorescent light
“This once was a particular person!”
I don’t shout, but pry gently, with fingers

Pink, blunt, huge, sausages that dwarf thinking,
a process once extant but now extinct
in the pale tissues being dissected
in the search for structures, tracts, commissures

This was all matter of fact long ago,
staying with me as matter of wonder,
sequestered somewhere in my gray matter,
just like what lay in those buckets that day

Rain fell and spring thunder came and sweet scent
Smoothed away what brains in a bucket meant

Each day your being in this broken world
you repented and invented in the same breath,
struggle proceeding without theory,
only in practice, with awkward actions

I watched, not knowing what I watched or why,
you confused me, because you repented
your invention of me, too, as if I’d
be better not to be, better with you

At a safe cold distance so that your plight
couldn’t contaminate me, except that
you had an instinct, too, for warmth, so I
was drawn closer and closer to you

So close that sometimes in dreams I was you
Unaware of myself as someone new

In Memory Of David Victor Lewin, 1912-2002

Everything’s pretext for mourning, so when
that old space bird fell in fiery pieces
across west Texas, burning up the son
of Holocaust survivors, I thought of you

How the worst had come as a surprise so
many times at last it could not surprise
because you kept it always with you, near,
the hurt intimate with your heart, too close

For anything like comfort - when I saw
the face of the Israeli astronaut’s
old father, I recognized the look, like you,
unsure that survival is a blessing,

Steadfast, even when he’s most despairing,
For we and our world are past repairing

February 2, 2003

So quietly did fox cross yesterday
our path in wet woods, the white dog never
lifted her nose and I thought it was brown
silent apparition from a lost dream

But it so beguiled me, this noiseless fox,
it appeared over and over again,
just one fox become many mind foxes,
soft shades of brown, aristocratic tails.

Unforeseen encounter, intense pleasure,
antidote to the surprise of terror,
fox up on his paws, off on an errand
through fragrant pines in the mid-winter rain.

We’re just as likely to be lost as found
When dream of fox turns up on waking ground

I’m already older than I can grasp
and getting older still, breath by breath and
beat by beat, nothing to be done, but go
on going on, try to find melody

In the succession of my own moments,
how they slip away and take me with them,
even as they leave me at once behind
and ahead, dazed and dazzled, old and new

Yes, there’s the riddle, that though I’m older,
I come in each instant alive anew,
fresh and free in my own slight company,
perhaps more frail but unbroken yet

I know my destiny, that not to be
is being’s end, soon, too soon - old story

Like wingless feathers of a million swans
the snow comes floating down, lands and nestles,
silence in silence, extending whiteness
far and wide: that I’ve seen this before, seen

It more than once, seen it as a child, seen
it as a young man, an older one, too,
only serves to make it mysterious
in marvelous ways, a stranger sameness

Of white on white and silence in silence,
one I watch transfixed as the gray cat does,
witness a process I have watched before
at other revolutions of our globe

The quiet of snow falling, sentiment
Of beauty’s enduring nearness, swan sent

Let me explain what evolution shows:
lack of curiosity killed the cat -
the hunter must always keep on hunting,
pry under each rock, never trust, disdain

the obvious, overcome all smugness
with sheer restless energy that’s mental
and physical both; the cat that survives
must endure appearing foolish not just

to others but to himself – let them laugh
all they want, living’s no laughing matter
and when this cat sleeps his dreams do not rest
but sort follies in other dimensions

cat that’s not curious is goner cat
this is exactly the place that we’re at

I’m having trouble losing myself in
anything at all – books, music, sex, crime,
drugs and dreams are of no use, I remain
some thing slung about my neck, a presence

like an albatross, more faithful even
than my shadow for I stay with me when
there is no light, I hug through all the days
and all the nights, I have nothing to say

There’s nothing rare in this extremity,
I can’t help imagining it’s common
even if most don’t choose to notice it,
how we keep ourselves clinging company

It’s New Year’s Eve and the old show rolls on
I’m found, this that collars me is no con