Ok, I needed to post this. I hate the format of this website, and it does not allow me to properly indent things. But, alas, that is the way things are. So this is a slightly bastardized version of this poem. Every line is spaced as such:

I don't know why this won't space properly
.....but it doesn't, and that is life.
One day I will get a better website
.....but for now, I am too lazy


So that is the basic structure...try to imagine it as you read. Every other line, whether the stanza is a couplet, triplet, or quadruplet (wrong word, I know), is indented. Anyway, enjoy.



"Impromptu"

has that wintry feeling,
sparse and sere

Movement beckons, dense coastal land
original land, colonized, gentrified
generationally unknown (to me)

Shrouded birds, inland types, small and compact, little winged pistons
descend and disperse like a petulance

We’re in an alley way, constructed
gold gilded flora
like apple skins boiling in cinnamon cider

residue of my grandmother stoking
an embered fire

She read to us at night from her books,
drawn with spider veined hands
the words left blank,
her voice changing the story each time around

All stories should work like hers‘,
fluid as memory

~

Jersey’s devilish pine lands,
unblemished, mysterious

slope to the ocean, hide homeless and lore
feel older than their stories,
held wonder before Mrs. Leeds.

Edge away and the grizzled, knotted pencil pines are spoiled,
ominous lots have been cleared
backhoes blink and dig

like my grandfather tending his rock garden
his spade clinking in frozen earth

In deep winter, he is on arthritic knees
his hands red and swollen and slow

Twice his weary heart has stopped (then started)
A paper mill man, all pulp and gristle
the rocky earth is his sanctuary

~

Sun dappled toes, curled
decorate the collected dusts of my dashboard
(we all collect like dust, and are wiped clean)
Toes of a dancer, hardened and narrow

Why are some days like an alcoholic binging?
And others (today) lifeless as tundra?

What changes occur?
Has my nature altered

Or merely fled, fleeing,
fluing,
To flee northward

through coral reef New England tapestries,
continentally outbound,
where my language cannot be found?

~

The city’s monolithic grey
Its life teaming like an iceberg,
hidden
(the world is an iceberg, waiting to ambush beneath the surface)

One day, this, too, could have been a rock garden
for someone to till

One day this was nature unkempt, and hid
mystery

From the lower deck of the Verrazano
(buffeted stormily)
I try to imagine before this city,
all wild and cliffs and deer in tall marsh grass
(the Verrazano is pummeling water)

As a species, we cannot imagine
a world devoid of human traverses
(I am no different)

When I was a child, I would lie in bed
and try to feel dead,
to see the world without my consciousness
(it was beyond me then, and it is beyond me now)

~

A late brunch, brackish seaside
tumbling swales, mouthfuls of grey

My parents once came this way
They would have been our peers
precocious, he in divinity school,
she a late night nurse

Now he is a professor and a scholar,
and his knees do not ache from frozen earth
She owns a cozy store that sells trinkets,
and children’s books

(I found a book of my grandmother’s once
three years after she died,
yellowed edges and frayed corners,
in a small cluttered book store)

They are pragmatists, and want the same for me
Their art is in their children,
our torsional hands and feet,

how our legs are sinewy and taut when we run,
how our eyes simmer
with communal blue warmth

and after a late dusk dinner,
the quiet, sonorous summer air
left in our filling wake

~

A cottage with a wood burning stove,
and old hanging gas lights
We read at night and in the morning,
and make love in between
(they could have trodden this very ground,
and perhaps my children will one day trod it, love it, make love on it)

If we were to part, to let ourselves
dwindle

Would I recognize you,
if decades from this cottage,
we crossed paths waiting for a flight?
You on your way home to Tel Aviv, me headed back to Philadelphia
(What will you remember of Philadelphia by then?)

Will your temperate eyes, downy brown
dashed with cranberry,
be unchanged?

Or will the weight of your life
blunt them
For we do not have artisans

to restore the luster of human eyes
(I forget easily we are not all artworks,
crafted from some stone softer than marble,
nor paintings, our layers renewable)

~

Roads home cluttered with dead leaves,
heavy and damp and slick with rain
Barren trees like grave markers
commemorating the dying way to Philadelphia

Perhaps all roads forget
the scholar and trinket nurse and artist and mill worker
Cities, too

But we will inhabit the spaces of our lives
long after no one is left to chronicle them

In spring, we will be the soot of a river delta
In summer, we will photosynthesize
In autumn, we will blow with a hurricane’s might,
tumbling palms and eating seashores

We will fall silent as snow
until we melt