Happy twenty-eighth to everyone!

 The Twenty-eighth Day of August
 
 
I know you celebrate this day too
With a planet of kids who quiver with glee
for the 28th of August. How lucky
We are to have the Twenty-Eighth
 
A very special day around the world
Like it’s our very last day together
Fires lit for dancing around and around
Wondering, arms raised, how to live
 
Today, 367,000 umbilical cords will be cut
Final signatures dashed onto papers for divorce
The last breath for some, 173,000 sized-up in
Shrouds, furnaces, caskets, pits and pyres
 
Such an important day we revel in
Parties in such lovely nations that we live
And other places, Chicago, one and a half
Persons will be murdered by handguns
 
Today, countless excruciating paper cuts
With nearly 500 organs lifted from cadavers
Set into the woozy chests of the unconscious
Who will awake to sons and daughters dancing
 
For me, it's just a day. I’ll take my coffee
With milk on the patio 6 days into retirement
Work the garden. Otherwise, on this special day
I will try, beyond all odds, to give birth

Memory, tail of a primeval beast

 It is as if    It’s not enough   

 
 
The babbling brook of the fish tank in the kitchen      That’s enough
Dreaming fish      who do not know they are enough      and are enough
Is enough      The eleven sixteen on the clock      of Thursday night     enough
After blueberries have fallen in the street      the size of hail
 
Not enough the young woman who asked twice     to see my fruit trees
Not enough     those fruit trees a year away    from fruit    not enough    a chat
With Gabriela    on a screen by the Mediterranean     Definitely not enough     to lay
Naked in a bed of human sheets     with storm drips      the tap and groan of drains
 
Note the sound of each bubble rising     with the deep fish    See how moonlight
Coats color upon them    Enough light    floods the kitchen floor
Pouring a little wine across the evening floor    A percentage enough
To share    if my children      my girlfriend      and friends    were here
 
Let’s concede the condor is enough     The pepper and salt    together, enough
Probably neuroscience is enough     Enough for now of climate change
Looking up at a blackened sky that pops with beams of stars    so we are told
Will always be sufficient to be the way     it is
 
And it may just be enough     to swallow the wine     bitter, but loud      
As memory     tail of the primeval beast     loneliness     that haunts present
With past     that is as acrid as it is empty    as the fish floating in still motion
To the time honored horn     of the urban train

On a flight to Tunis

 Beautiful Blood

 

On a flight to Tunis

You are sleeping on my lap

We will awake in a bed

Beneath a prayer to Allah

 

And eat dates

At the shore for lunch

By the Phoenician walls

Where migrants dash

 

How cool your skin

After these Andalusian days

Days of fortress and climb

Of conquest after conquest

 

War in Gaza, bombings   

In Tehran, migrant raids

A tax bill that will, again

Cripple the poor

 

Luckily, through it all

We saw the Museo de Picasso

Learned how to misconstrue

What is seen

 

How to reposition forms

Let go of the elements of color

Calling attention to that

Which you will not see

 

Studied how to annihilate

The logic of nations that fixes

Our species on butchery

And other bad manners

 

Learned how to penetrate

The clouds with lances

Of pigment until they drip

With beautiful blood

A moment that changed the way I see

Stung

 
A moment that changed the way I see
Myself in surf on my trip to Tunisia:
Hardly a highlight it hurt so hard and long
On an evening when the sun was gone
After burning us bad in the day
 
Wading into the cool Mediterranean
Off Hammamet, deep enough where the sea
Moves you where it wants, and you are left
To wonder on its pull. Dark enough the mind
Cannot contend with the possibilities
 
It was in the second I was watching the sky
Lit by a gone day, dark enough for stars
That the creature stung its fiery lash
Maybe it was caught between my ribs and arm
Or just wild bent on cancelling the night
 
Precisely at the moment that I was letting go
Of the worries on the beach and considering
Straight ahead of me, in the far distance:
Gaza, caught between the Army and Hamas
That’s when the thing swam up to strike       
          
I could not solve the war of the eastern shore
Instead, a little agony in my side
And a new way of thinking about the tide
How perilous the calm, reliable waves
How painful the fusillade of stings they bear

The Principles of Earth

The Meaning of Life

To whom can one turn for the meaning of life
When a powerful distraction is a mango and knife?
Turn to the experts:
 
Neuroscientists speak of expanding consciousness
In magnetic resonance with the body at rest
In the sweetest homeostasis
 
Buddhists meditate on sutras channeling clarity
Of fire in mind, orchestrating the eight
Guides on an elegant path
 
Bending thoughts against steel, the ironsmiths
Hammer impurities to oblivion, a metaphor
For purity through elimination
 
Writers speak of pounding away at the keyboard
For plot, booze and cigarette past midnight
Hanging on every word
 
Seamstresses are all about patterns, sizing up
What will be cut, stitching together disjointed
Slices into a future shroud
 
Astrophysicists reconnoiter how tiny you are
Modeling consciousness on a subatomic level
In the universe, infinitesimally you
 
Why not trust the auto mechanic, wrenching
A gestalt of organs in the whole machine
To keep from breaking down?
 
Or the glassblower warping an expanding globe
Of randomly arranged atoms of molten solid
As vague and precarious as you?
 
How to answer this question of life?
Each can help with the trained and worthy task
of savoring with skilled salvo
 
Already there before you, dangling, ripe
Mango of opportunity in red-orange and green
Lauding the principles of earth