The Art Vibe - Guest Writer

Upstate

I never miss you.
I never leave.
Sometimes, driving, circling
your ruins, I see the majesty
in apple-mortar red
and bone-yellow gray,
and nostalgia scrapes the sky.

Homes hold on
with rusty fists
around a windpipe.
Miss Havisham's front porch sags,
washed-out, as though
the nanosecond of nuclear war
is your eternity.

Somebody lives here.

We are all dying here.
The dust settled and cooled.
An ice age ago. The Susqehanna
Wrestles, petrified, to flee
Or mean anything.

On the foot bridge I hover,
a half-life reflected
downstream,
the river a slit wrist
done bleeding.

The Graduate Student Writes Her Dissertation

I am waiting
for the rain up here
to turn, once
and for all,
to snow.
I am waiting
to be left
entirely
alone.
But wait,
not like that.
I am waiting
for the network
to collapse
and fall away
Like zeal
From the top-story
Window
Of a building.
I am waiting
To plummet back
To my body.
I am waiting
For bicycle evenings,
A straight shot
And no knapsack,
From one streamline
Thought,
Or phrase,
A promise
To poems,
Your hands
On my thighs,
A life.

1992

In line at the Sarah Lawrence
salad bar, glancing up at the TV
to find Los Angeles
in steel shambles
at the end
of a billy club
of 900 bisexuals.
The girl in front
of you reaches
for garbanzo beans.
She is tiny, fierce
wisp of a thing,
your lover. She has
the frank devastation
of blue
on her side -
all hair, hands
and eyes.
She clamps on,
intent as a missile,
heat-seeking,
and the world
falls off
like skin
or Levi's
for another night.

Tomorrow
is her birthday
and all of the hours
that darken to fill
another February 20th
will be all of the hours
you do not call.

Home