Poetry

Mount Vernon, NY, summer 2001

Sitting on the concrete steps in the back of my grandma’s house, 
our dad shows us how to burn paper 
with a magnifying glass. Says people kill ants this way, 
how cruel it is. It was true: the magnifying glass...

Our love it lives at 6.3 degrees.
I stooped to measure it inside a dream.
A meager distance. Not the moon in apogee. 

The old Hitachi dual cassette was pain
and elegant with age, and the branches were, 
and the sash window was open with pain, 
and the afternoon was adequate, and pain.

The Earth spun on the Universal fanfare and the three of us were settled on 
the settee when the doorbell sung Big Ben’s [sic] dong, dang, ding, dung.

With no internal shell you keep 
yourself together in a sac
& the matter of attachment.

It couldn’t have been easy getting it to lie flat on paper.
That’s obvious from the asterisks.

You can go down for a jouk, I want to say, a gander 
at the greylags on the green
that’s not so much a field as a grassy space 
where the flats once stood.

a line between the wild and settled regions /
the colored band around heraldic shields
the seam / rim / edge / periphery / the margin brink or limit /

I was daubing s onto our front step with the blood and guts of clover mites
when Speccy Rab headbutted BA—which didn’t end well for Rab’s glasses.