Poetry

I am not yet dead. Do not call this miracle or raise your hands in praise. First, 
you should know how long I prayed, and how I came to know the silence of the Lord.

They put their guns in the only boxes
that they had, and those the well-
liquored strips of gin barrels 

I went back to the city
we visited, to
the restaurant that

No one picked in the fields on Election Day. 
The trucks drove us to a picnic on the Bluff. 
The children sang songs like it was Sunday. 

Now when I get personal
I have only one thing to say
(a dead gay once told me,

I loved you, New York.

The way, at first, Tina loved Ike, loved even the winged
Effort of his anger, loved his punch-drunk backhand in flight,

Oh, obstreperous one, ornery outside of ordinary
protocols; paramilitary probie par 

excellence: Every evidence
you yield yells. 

In the stillness of a windless day,
trees stand full, and proud, and straight.

He was in a poem once, alive 
at the beginning, dead by the middle, 
haunting me at the end.