climb through the love she carries in her eyes

  leave the strange evening behind

  enter volare’s soft candlelit rhythms

  simmer the magic down mama with a kiss

  on the night of your funeral mama

  on this halloween night you were laid to rest

  EIGHTH AVENUE POEM

  on eighth avenue

  between 116th and

  121st streets

  some of the junkies

  have feet so bad

  they could step

  on a dime

  and tell you

  whether it’s

  heads or tails

  POEM FOR LADY DAY & DINAH WASHINGTON

  there is nothing but yawning space between

  us now, lady day, dinah washington

  queens of the blues, your memories breaking stillness

  the octaves of your genius voices razing where

  silence reconstructs itself

  is pregnant punctuation of absence between chords

  a hesitation of sound, arrested like speech

  of a revolutionary nailed to a star

  your memories of eyes & slurs

  bending around your sicknesses fill us with omens

  we know is nothing but indigo-blues stabbed

  with light deepening between us now

  like sorrow, your voices of broken necks twisting

  black men lynched, slurs through your muddy syllables

  flowing like the mississippi river over bright

  bones black flesh use to wrap itself around once

  your voices of highways & night trains

  blues with dead men & heroin

  secret as the voice in the moon of gin bottles

  filling this awesome stillness of empty rooms

  the octaves of your memories scaling—

  silence reconstructing itself, stillborn—

  in this indigo new absence, your voices

  punctuating between chords, becoming syllables

  the image of your voices in memory

  full of omens, like your sad, beautiful

  faces rooted in this american apocalypse of blues

  rooted in this american apocalypse of blues

  IMAGE

  within the murmuring of darkness

  silence grows wings of shadows

  locked between cued spaces of syllables

  the moon contemplates its own distance

  from itself, yawns from the breath

  of God, nails itself

  deep in black, shimmering velvet—

  a rune-pearl replacing the sun

  after trembling sundown runs

  after trembling sundown runs

  RIFF

  may days bring an explosion of music

  bouncing off edges, walls, polyrhythms

  nodding sad junkies seducing daddy death

  swinging around corners, cool breezes

  floating, touching everything

  love left whispering now, new shadows

  crisscrossing connections tucked away

  in memory, winter yielding, spring

  resurrects all things possible

  & the sun laughing always on the run

  III.

  IMPRESSIONS 8

  american lawrence welk

  saturdays

  football games

  hot dogs & falstaff beer

  chased by fire

  of bourbon

  mcdonalds & a&p

  sears  bank of america

  crackers

  in chicken noodle soup

  ivory snow liquid

  miss america  kentucky fried

  Palmolive   dove

  commercials

  madison avenue

  cowboys

  hillbilly black

  militant japtalians

  niggindians hungericans

  mestizos mulattoes

  quadroons

  slick hip styling spirits

  of the greased way highsign

  give high of speech

  step the low road

  strut bojangle

  their words in motion

  prancing say “gimme some skin

  lay a fin on me” confront

  soda crackers

  in this gumbo soup

  chaos of conflicting

  dreams this

  american gumbo

  soup of chaos

  & conflicting dreams

  IMPRESSIONS 12

  buck dance antlers frozen

  in the still air

  like fingers gripping death

  by the side of the crooked road

  a young deer dropped down

  in its tracks

  assumes a praying position

  a bullet hole in the middle

  of its shocked

  forehead

  IMPRESSIONS 15

  bright day in pennsylvania

  steel blue

   the mountains clear

  from here & out hear cold

  the naked sky

  soft at duskglow, when the sun

  sinks clear down

  through winter trees bare

  skin leaves shake down

   snow mounds cover

  the ground & footprints

  like inked words on white pages

  print themselves

  into snow

  stretch themselves around

  & into the dark, awesome

  silence, grows

  into worlds

  JUST CRUISIN’ & WRITIN’

  writin’ poems

  while cruisin

  at seventy miles

  per hour

  on the pennsylvania

  turnpike

  can be spiritual

  fun

  if you don’t

  run into

  anyone

  IV.

  HARLEM LATE NIGHT LYRIC

  trucks growl these iced empty streets

  as do voices fleet silence punctuates in flight

  stabbing screams of death

  pharoah blows through his saxophone light

  some carry as lodes of memory the language of tradition replaced

  by catastrophic absences

  the awesome muted hush of talking drums

  where then the machinery of benevolence predicted

  where the infant rose of new breath opening as a fertile womb

  was promised once somewhere back in all those doctored scriptures

  a seeding sun disguised perhaps

  is what was promised us in autumn

  now winter reminds spring is just off-stage

  recharging love perhaps then will arrive—enter rooms—

  lovelier than the fragrance of fresh-cut roses

  the swelling of sweet tongues lathered in saliva

  the cooing of birds skying through eyes

  THE DAY STRIDES THERE ON THE WIND

  for Leo Maitland

  the day strides there on the wind

  its wings are the people’s thoughts

  breath contains

  & finally it is the speech of God

  that shapes everything

  that brash shouting trumpet

  leaping out of a window somewhere

  that lonely saxophone woman walking

  there in your erotic imagination

  the books opened & closed

  that tell us nothing

  but what they are

  these smells from hidden kitchens

  emerging from other smells

  surround our nostrils with incense

  show & tell everything that you are

  is most things but standing up naked

  so we wrap ourselves in illusions

  wear the mask that dunbar spoke of,

  wrap our dreams in dreams

  of others who never know

  what to do with their own

  so we sit watching patches of light

  falling through the hairdos of trees

  still the day strides there on the wind

  & its wings are the people’s thoughts

  that it contains

  & finally it is the speech of God

  that shapes everything

  V.

  MEMOS & BUTTONS

  he couldn’t even spell albuquerque

  had tuna fish garlic breath

  mixed in with cigarette blues & a job way beyond

  his capacity

  he was a bona-fide ten martini man over lunch

  same exact thing during rush hours

  walking around

  with a copper wire for a brain

  someone was sending

  morse code to

  he was a modern man of technology

  read the wall street journal & forbes

  religiously every day

  commuting on suburban trains with spittin’

  images cloning himself, locked in

  & gigging for xerox, texas instruments,

  ibm, hadn’t read a deep book

  in God knows when

  computer printouts being his bible

  found himself thinking one day

  of murdering his invalid wife, widowed

  mother & three teenaged children

  he was a modern, western man of technology

  who carried his mind around locked up

  in a leather brief case

  liked to push memos & buttons

  LAS CRUCES, NEW MEXICO

  For Keith Wilson, Donna Epps Ramsey, Andrew Wall, Charles Thomas & Thomas Hocksema

  the high, great mesas, flat as vegas gambling tables

  rock-hard, as red dust swirls into miniature tornadoes

  dancing down roads red with silence as these

  faces of solitary Indians, here where white men quick-tricked

  their way to power with houdini bibles, hidden agendas

  of bullets & schemes of false treaties

  & black men alone here, in this stark high place of mesquite

  bushes, white sand mountains, colors snapped in incredible

  beauty, eyes walking down vivid sunsets, livid purple scars slashing

  volcanic rock, tomahawking language scalping this ruptured space

  of forgotten teepees so eye listen to a coyote wind

  howling & yapping across the cactused dry high vistas

  kicking up skirts of red dirt at the rear end of quiet houses

  squatting like dark frogs& crows, etched silhouettes high on live

  wire popping speech, caw-cawing, in the sand-blasted wind

  stroked-trees caw-cawing all over the mesilla valley

  & here along the rio grande river, dry, parched tongue bed, snaking

  mud, cracked & dammed north in the throat of albuquerque

  mescalara, zuni, apache & navaho live here,

  scratch out their firewater breath, peyote

  secret eyes roaming up & down these gaming table mesas

  their memory dragging chains through these red breathing streets

  while geronimo’s raging ghost haunts their lives with what they did

  not do, stretching this death strewn history back to promises

  & hope a hole in the sky, a red omen moon

  where death ran through

  like water whirlpooling down a sink

  & this shaman moon blown here a red target of light at the end

  of a tunnel of blackness, where a train speeds through now

  towing breaknecking flights of light, where daybreak sits wrapped around

  a quiet, ancient navaho, wrapped in cosmic, american colors, sits

  meditating, these scorched, white sands, flat

  distant high mesas, shaped like royal Basotho hats, chili peppers, churls

  pecan groves, roadrunner, chaparral birds, salt cedars, sprouting

  parasitic, along bone white ditches bordering

  riverbeds thirsting for water

  meditates these flat, wide black, lava rocks

  holding strange imprints of fossilized speech that died

  before they knew what hit them, as did those silent

  clay faced ancestors of this solitary navaho sitting in breaking

  colors, bursting sunlight, meditating the lay of this enchanting

  blues land, changing its face every mile or so

  & in their faces indians carry the sadness of ancestors

  who wished they had listened to those long gone

  flaming words—battlecries!—of geronimo, whose screaming ghost

  prowls these bloody, muddy streets, baked dry now by the flaming eye

  torching the sky, they wished they had listened to instead of chaining

  his message in these coyote, howling winds

  kicking up skirts of dirt

  whose language yaps like toothless old men & women

  at the rear-end of quiet houses, whose lights dance slack

  at midnight, grow black & silent as death’s worn-out breath

  beneath these pipe-organ mountains, bishops peaked

  caps holding incredible silence, here

  in the mesilla valley

  where the rio grande river runs dry

  its thirsty spirit dammed north in the throat of albuquerque

  at the crossroads of fusion & silence in the red gush swirls—

  whispering litanies sawblading through ribcages, dust memory—

  snaking winds all over the mesilla valley brings

  long-gone words of geronimo,

  haunting las cruces, new mexico

  long-gone wind whispering, geronimo, geronimo

  IT ALL BOILS DOWN

  it all boils down to a question of what

  anything is being done for, in the first place

  a reason, perhaps, stronger than the pull of any

  magnet, perhaps, the first recognition

  of clouds cruising through seas of blue

  breath, shaped like battleships

  on the other hand, it could be a fascination wearing

  rings on sweating, claw-like fingers

  something we have forgotten, knew nothing about ever

  like the future of a question only time holds answers to

  such as the exact moment death puts a lean on flesh, perhaps

  & the thin suit vanity wears collapses

  in on itself as the spirit takes leave of breath

  & voices swell into a cacophonous blues, mother

  somewhere in all of this there are connections fusing

  something perhaps, in the mellifluous

  nodding of crazed junkies—that sad colony of leprous, popeye feet & hands—

  is a dance, a catatonic premonition of unheeded weather reports

  like the knowing somewhere deep

  eclipsed suns will perhaps experience joy

  in the shaved light—

  a shopping list of syllables is what poets carry

  when confronting the winds of language

  beyond that only the wind knows what it is doing—

  like evil laughter gleaming machetes swing under streetlamps

  slicing quick words that cut a man too short to shit sometimes, perhaps

  a concertino stream of blue ragas when

  breath flies suddenly back here, mysterious, as in those moon glinting

  eyes, fixed in silence, the dime-polished speech of felines

  in a midnight moment of celebration

  a bone dry, squawking hawk talking away up there

  suddenly, beyond dues, disappearing into blue quicksand

  flapping wings of unanswered questions

  down here, it all boils down to questions

  ribcages pose & leave scattered under terrifying suns

  on desert floors, the timeless, miraging sands holding

  light, the steaming, seamless language

  in flight & flowing into midnight

  moons climbing between me & you

  116TH STREET & PARK AVENUE

  for Pedro Pietri & Victor Hernandez Cruz

  116th street fish smells, pinpoint la marqueta

  up under the park avenue, filigreed viaduct

  elevated tracks

  where graffied trains run over language

  there is a pandemonium of gumbo colors stirring up

  jumbalaya rhythms

  spanish harlem, erupting

  street vendors on timbale sidewalks

  where the truth of things is what’s happening now

  que pasas on the move, andale

  worlds removed from downtown, park avenue gentry luxury co-ops

  where latino doorman just arrived, smile their tip me good

  tip me good, tip me good, greetings

  opening doors

  carry their antediluvian, rice & bean villages, old world

  style, dripping from zapata moustaches

  shaped perfect as boleros

  their memories singing images underneath shakepearean

  cervantes balconies, new world don juans

  smelling of cubano cigars, two broken tongues

  lacing spanglish up into don q syllables, cuba libre

  thick over sidewalks, voices

  lifted & carried up into dance

  into mambo, cha cha slick steps out

  on the ballroom floor imagine themselves

  rumbling car horns, palmieri fused

  machito fired, pacheco tuned, barretto drums

  bolero guitars wiring morse code puns, root

  themselves back in villages

  of don juan, romeo,

  zapata, marti in cuba, writing poetic

  briefs, under cigar trees the lingua-franca

  of nicolas guillen, morejon, cruz & pietri

  laying down expressions of what’s happening now

  & weaved through this pandemonium of gumbo

  colors up under

  the park avenue, filigreed viaduct

  criss-crossing 116th street fish smells pinpointing

  la marqueta

  where elevated trains track over language

  run over syllables up on elevated tracks, fuse words

  together, (w)rap lyrical que pasas on the move,

  andale, spanglish harlem

  nuyorican sidewalks, exploding fried bananas

  timbale shopping carts up into salsa

  sweat new borinquen slick steps

  buzzard winged, moustached, newyorican muchachas

  in a new world black latin groove, where the truth

  of things is what’s happening now