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Temperance
I am suffocating on your good intentions.
They cut off my air supply.
What have you done?
Nothing so awful
On the face of it.
But I wear down so easily
When your hands grind me
To a fault.
I know you mean well.
But I can't change my face.
My way of looking at the world.
It may not please you.
But it's mine.
And I cling to it.
I won't put on the blush
Or cosmetically remove the scar
To appease you.
Leave me the bar.
Leave me this last semblance of my sanity.
Of my sanctity.
Let me retain
Freedom so precious:
My own measured thoughts
Unfettered by exuberance.
__________________________________________________________________
My Only Refuge
The old, familiar world is gone.
I need a shawl to keep me warm.
To shield me from the blasted rimes
Which pellet me across the times.
No refuge find I save this scrawl
Which shelters me inside its sprawl.
__________________________________________________________________
After the Epidural
The Recovery Room nurse said
she could tell you were a great
man by the way you looked at
her
The light emitted from the eye
may be deceptive
luminescence
not befitting
a luminary
She also said
she knew you would
not have passed her
in Organic Chem
You smiled at that
and I remembered blue books,
blue books tossed asunder,
blue ink in blue examination books
running cold in my veins,
as I observed how meticulously you corrected,
how demonically you slammed shut
the blue covers
and proclaimed that this one would not pass
your scrutiny and make it to med school,
that your course determined the
course of so many lives
And I shuddered
at all the power
emanating from the blue eye
scrutinizing the blue ink
between the covers
of the blue book
The blue eye
atop the scowling face
The red pencil
scrawling corrections
The gleeful energy
emitted from the eye
Scared me
And I cried
__________________________________________________________________
Rip Current
Another Christmas has come and gone
But this year we haven't spent our Jewish
Christmas at the movies.
I haven't dispensed the bittersweet chocolates
Which you used to request as soon
As we hit the seats.
We probably would have seen the last
Of the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. You so loved epics.
Now I do the Chanukah lights. I hear your voice
As I recite the "HaNairos Hallalu."
You sang it but I can only stammer over the Hebrew
Although I try to preserve some of your inflections.
Bach is on the radio
And I wonder what that has to do with Chanukah
Or succumbing to cancer.
The brightness of eternal optimism
In the face of inexorable odds?
You loved epics and hated weakness.
In your last days you told the Cantor,
"It isn't easy being eighty-three"
Before he played you his new
Recording. You must have recognized
Some of the tunes from your days in the choir.
You didn't have much of a voice
But the vitality ripped through.
__________________________________________________________________
Differentiation
Why does it bother me?
I shall have to read what the psychoanalysts say.
If I resemble her physically, does that make me her clone?
My father, as he lay dying, called me by her name as I tried to feed him.
Does that make me a nurturing Mom?
He died, after all, and I don't think he knew what hit him.
Could have been a wayward tree.
Could have been a bomb.
Why does it matter, this business of differentiation?
This matter of falling far from the tree.
I'd like to be the apple that falls so far
And sounds nothing but dead air.
_______________________________________________________________
Shame's Residue
Eternal longing, magnificent desire
Let thy fire consume me
And subsume me
So that all particularity is lost
And all my flaws
No longer suspire
Let thy lash
Seduce me to ash
__________________________________________________________________
The Bone of the Hawk
I do better approaching objects obliquely.
My directness warps me into tunnel vision
And I miss the crux of the issue.
I misled you, but not intentionally.
I was in the wrong path and bid you follow me.
I was able to swerve when the storm clouds gathered.
You were already past
And I could not draw you in.
You told me to go away
As the veil of death compassed you.
I saw the shroud,
The headstone,
The bone of the hawk.
__________________________________________________________________
Finality
It's strange how the eye is drawn immediately across the room
As if nothing is gone.
Is it that the space has shrunk?
Collapsed into itself?
Before it held a bed.
The bed held a man writhing in despair.
The man's breath got stuck in his throat.
His eyes fixated.
What did he last view in that last huge, blue stare?
The man is gone.
The bed is gone.
The space is gone, too.
As if it were never there.
__________________________________________________________________
Respite
I finally figured out what the black
blank spaces in the crossword puzzle
are.
They are the rests in the relentless music.
The spaces between the crushing lines.
The indeterminates which give me pause
to think.
The sweet rose scent wafting
over the sewer stench
of the endless grids
Tethering me to
the grinding and binding
of the livelong day.
__________________________________________________________________
The Outsider
They saw her sad and wept for her --
But she was bored and turned away.
They thought she envied them their lives.
She sucked the marrow from housewives
And splintered bone from career chicks.
She oiled her joints with the unction
Of the suavely courteous men.
The little children she boiled whole.
But all they saw was her aureole.
