Drinking the Wine

New lovers lie on a blanket
Inifinity lays six
feet of dirt against the fresh
pine lid beneath

I wonder what they see
when they look in each other's eyes

unperturbed earth
accustomed to a long diet
of deaths most
of its graves unmarked
forgotten

The grass is given
a close shave and a fresh drink

Four corks run
through with the sharp end of a pigtail screw
lightly stained in dark wine
the dark wine pouring
from fingertips into
little covered cask

Greenwood Cemetery

Love

Love is the only way
we have to fight against death
and death is not winning.

We are alive.
We make love.
We make each other.
For every one who dies
two more are born.

Yes, you will die.
Yes, I will die.
Yes, the beautiful flower will wither.
Life goes on.

Even if we all go
we will return.
There are seasons
to the universe.

Ophelia

Ever since you were
in that play with flowers
growing from your hair
and one of them,
the white one, fell
from your coffin
to the blacktop
and the rain came over it like boots
and the boots came over it like rain...

What a death
they wrote for you! The human flower
crying yourself down the stream
You couldn't sing but boy could you cry!
I’ve never seen anybody
cry so much, not even
in real life
It cracked our hearts
for a while but got annoying
and soon we disowned our feelings
like old bread.

I loved the way your dresses fell
I still hear your song
and every flower you cast down
(
they’re just props but they mean to me
what he said they mean)
You untangled death and blew new breath
in her lungs,
joining the others
who've put bodies over that soul,
new flowers on the Bard’s old tree

By the end the stage was a churchyard
and we yawned and clapped
walking with the dead
as a tree is itself
upside down
roots in the air     
                          branches in the ground

I left the night into the opposite stars
thinking what a life death may be!

Spalding Gray

Spalding Gray
Where is the Staten Island Ferry taking you today?
You’re inspecting the Hudson, gauging it’s suitability.
The MTA is watching you.
They’d escorted you off earlier that week.
Its’ a foregone conclusion,
You’ve made us laugh with it for years.
Step away from the railing, Sir.

Did you jump or did you slip and fall
trying to talk yourself into jumping?
All it takes is one flake
Of courage, one lapse in neurosis and
You’re in flight, Spald.
You’ve disembarked
From the body that abandoned you,
The defunct mind,
down the hole after your mother.

A glorious hiatus in thought occurs in that splice
after you’ve left the earth, before you’re buried in water.
It's as if you'll never come down.
Then you slap the skin of the river and something is jolted
Out of you, like a body hitting the end of a noose
rudely yanked back when it would prefer to keep falling.
It’s very cold, much colder than you imagined
But after the initial trauma
The river welcomes you.
You’ve slipped back into your berth.
There’s the familiar tranquility of swimming
with the new gravity of the ultimate.
If only you could live through it
It would be your best monologue yet.

And you could. There is a choice
In the white of the searchlight
Peering down at you,
But you can almost see her
Down in the dark,
So you gulp and dive to get there faster.
A thousand silver bubbles
Bloom from your nostrils, your ears,
Your legs and arms and teeth
like stardust.

Now that you’ve vanished
People see you all over town:
In the glass of a bus stop,
At Sardi's, skiing down Park Ave,
flying through the light
on to a movie screen in the Village.

Yesterday I went out on the Ferry
to look for you in the water
And though you washed up
On the shore in Brooklyn
I find you everywhere
sleeping in the East River.

The Black and White Ball

The guests have all almost arrived.
The men in black ties
cross names off the list.
Soon it can begin
to end.
A Man
is shaking hands.
We file
down the line.
His smile is so big
I can see the silver in his teeth.
His hand is warm and strong.
We have cocktails with the men
who will kill us.
They are not doing it for them
they tell us.
I believe them. I thank them.
Men have been trying for centuries
and they're going to do it.

We'll rise to the sky
without having to climb.
We'll appear there,
lifted like rain.
The last guest arrives.
He’s already dead.

4th of July

I live near the underpass
Where I crashed
my car. The hill
hurled me down through the rain
into the concrete wall.
It didn’t cause me any pain.
I walked away.
I didn’t change.
I slept that night.
I lived.
I still live.
I drive.
I live
nearby
Where I nearly
Died,
the hill
that tried to kill
Me. Isn’t it wonderful
To feel nothing at all?
The sky is blue everywhere,
empty
Ready to be filled
with fire. Tonight
explosions will hatch
over the underpass
in the sky,
And here below too.

Over the Mountain

Lying in his armchair with a
joint in his mouth, my dad
decries and prophecies
and coughs at the television
sunk in the floor like a tomb
heavy with all the world’s ghosts.
He putts a ball into a machine
that shoots it back at him.

His uncle once told him “Someday
I’ll be going over the mountain and
I won’t be coming back.”

Mornings he and the dogs walk through the field
behind the church. He hits at the sticks he’s poked
into the earth to mark the holes
and the dogs chase after the balls and drop
them in the grass at his feet. Once
they brought him the femur of an autistic
girl who had been murdered along with
her unborn child a few doors down.

Her boyfriend buried her by the
creek in the woods out back.
His father shot himself when the
Police came to take his boy away.

Dad hurried the dogs home up the hill.
Someone else found the remains later
and we watched him on the news.