Wednesday I took the train into New York City from Princeton, to hang out with high-school classmate Kyle. En route, I was inspired by a fluttering black curtain to write this mediocre draft of a poem, which for reasons of timeliness I'm releasing before the usual long period of disgust, revision, and eventual acceptance.

Eurydice, New Jersey Transit

Sliding past the train window, these ruined cities. Graffiti, piled husks of cars, and broken-windowed warehouses.

In dilapidated office towers, the myth of American capitalism repopulated by sad, airless apartments.

In the seat ahead, a pretty girl reads a magazine.

Its sunny, hopeful pages reflect in the window below her sweetly curved lips and pensively set teeth.

From a window in Newark, Cerberus strains at his chains like a black curtain in summer breeze and the angular light of sunset.

Dusk, and then the darkness of the tunnel.

An infernal heat clings to the subterranean tracks as we disembark.

On the escalator, I look back to see her behind me, in a cloud of wandering souls on the dim, receding platform.

By the time I smile, she is not there to see.

Poems vaguely related to the day's postings: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Streetside Elegy

Maybe we would trip along the brick-paved walks in Georgetown, if you were here now, or bluster gleefully into the wood-panelled coffeehouse. Heads would rustle and arch, leaf-murmuring, wind-bent by our entrance. Laughter, swept out on the broomy breeze, would blow back again.

We'd be preciously occidental--order tea and sit outside in the urban dust and chaff. We'd watch ashes eddy across the patio as we sugared and sipped our fleeting tea. You'd forget to stir and find yours bitter; sigh, and set it aside, and peer at me bleakly.

This time, I would speak up. I would say: "Sweet, keep drinking--at the bottom, it gets sweeter."

Blue Peaches

In the kindergarten classroom, apples didn't have to be red. All my flowers had no petals, and all my peaches were blue.

I wonder sometimes if you were there, orange nettles and purple vines scribbled outside the lines across your page and onto mine.

I don't remember anyone I knew then, and they all seemed such necessary friends. I wonder if so long ago I knew you, and something could have been said.

I wonder a lot about all our tender free expressions and how they got us where we are.

I wonder if coloring inside the lines would have made me Republican, or forgetting show-and-tells made me poetic, fictive, teller of tales. What about blue peaches and all my cool depressions?

Even then, did you lean out from rails of landings and playscapes, bravely, senselessly acrobatic? Were you frequently lost, not wanting to be led? I wonder still if something might have been said.

I can't help demanding reasons from the past-- orange nettles, purple vines--but at last there's nothing in a thousand lines of poem that I could say to you.

All those peaches didn't have to be blue, orange nettles, purple vines-- you might have stayed inside the lines. Whatever childhood air they found you leaning in, it didn't have to be this way.

But this, this insufficiency, this poem, is water for a cactus in the desert, for a world that has already learned to do without you.

Me, my spells and charms, my rafts and camels of words, all my efforts to take your memory by the arm, these will not do.

Orange nettles, purple vines, all my wishes and drawn out lines can't speak to what you were then.

All my blue peaches are yours now, but as always you wander outside the lines I am trying so much to find you in.

Nothing can be said. I cannot talk to you anymore.

I only hold your memory, the hard, blue, shriveled pit I cannot swallow.

Boy. Insomnia.

A boy dumps all his pocket change in the river. He makes wishes on the fountain that moves, and his wishes cannot be stopped. They flow from him, not as the rushing silt goes, but slowly his heavy wishes move as the river bed moves, almost invisibly, taking an ever-wider path to the same eventual place.

The boy is a creeping delta of desire.

Even at rest, the energy of love is in him, as the molten fire is sleeping in the cold mud, as the secret orbit is in the atom, as the hidden collisions of water are in the glassy pond.

He goes out walking under the stars.
He likes the light of them, its slow arrival,
likes the urgent brightness that propels them across such distance, through centuries of waiting, to him. He laughs to think of such an urgent message finally coming so quiet and dim.

The boy is a continuous light, arriving slowly in his urgent life.

Late wildflower bloom in November, stage-frightened actor cured by the curtain call, grown man squeezed into the kindergarten desk.

Even awake, in the throes of his shyness, the boy is filled with a wealth of somnolent passions.
His cheeks swell with slumbering kisses— This is a particular trait of his, this unique, wide, toothless smile.
He looks like a chipmunk who has found something too precious to be revealed.

All the love he owns lies sleeping inside him, But he is wide awake. He tosses and turns.

Everywhere he turns, he imagines he sees a face.

He is as patient as trees, slow as a riverbed, Insistent as starlight.

Everywhere he turns, he imagines he sees a face.

One night a face will shine beside him like a moon, And he will finally sleep.

Found this lying around in the electronic snippet graveyard, edited it a little, and ended up with the following untitled poem....

You and I can laugh together at the heavy heft of this thin thing: my pig of pages fatted for the lean kill in spring, to whom no farmer comes.

These verses are content to wallow in their own mud, and it is a fine thought to keep your hands clean of common poetry.

A pig in a poke—we can both find that funny.