#1 The baby's eyes are turquoise and gray,
and when he's wearing navy pinstripe
the color is the same sky as midnight over
Rockaway....we had just met, in a time before 9/11.
#2 Flight
Today I wished my daughter did not
have to move away;
take grandchildren
to live in Texas, Fort Hood.
#3 Thanks for summer's glint, rey of plum-lit
sweetness; coo and hoot and chortle; thanks again,
thank you, never enough eras to praise, to say
'thanks' for the wing, this fish, the branch.
#4 Audacious to think I'll write a poem a day
this August - but, I try and today, one more
blossom on the sweetpeas, planted from seeds I
harvested last October, one day after your wedding,
tables in the backyard cleared, harvest moon
already a memory.
#5 Daily News, Alex Rodriquez
Let's dance! light of the moon
enhances hormones & synapses,
neural communique, everything is lovelier;
so that when he rips it out of the ball park I
won't care about the final score,
sectarian violence, Arod's outs.
#6 The boy, eight or nine,
if alive today, is in his
70's. (I hope he's alive.)
The man died when I was
in jr. high, McKinley Jr. High;
just a girl, really, a girl with
assignments to write, books
to write, lessons to read.
#7 This morning, on the run, scent of plums, and then
my grandmother appeared beneath the low-hanging
fruit, and I was swept-up within the caress of her arms.
#8 Gemini, twins, duality of bittersweet, 'agrodolce'.
Italian for bittersweet, the both/and that yearns
knowing it cannot have the stars out of reach, the berry
pie wild and sweet, the longing to stay when I know
I must leave.
#9 I say, 'voluptuous'.
You say 'obese'.
I say 'wise crone'.
You say 'dumb bird'.
Yet, see how she floats on her salmon-pink stilts,
the girl from homeland we call water, mud, reed.
#10 Leaving Moab, sun reveals sound of
gnashing, clutch of jawlines eating the ripening moon,
delicate disk caught between the lean-to of August.
