My last night, full of celebratory
lamentations, so much of both, I do
not remember falling asleep, or the
moments before when I must have missed my
nightly meeting with myself, for my dreams,

remembered, were of walking a city
block, lightless and littered with abandoned
relics of a civilization gone,
as if the universe, born with a blink,
ceased with such equal possibility.

But conscious lingering behind, in front,
in eye and ear shot, but strolling beyond
a fine patina of numbers, a stream
digitized but much like the summer haze
at humid dusk,
..............is a dancing girl
pirouetting away under cover
of this strange sheath, streaming in code, and
I cannot breach it, my body’s advance
repelled in a shock where one should not be

Still, I’m alert, moving in step behind
her, close enough to smell the brine of her
sweat, to see the fine map of violet
veins along her calves as they tense alive.
she is a sultry stalk of sex, somber

like a cotton plant through the gin, her head
astute in black, far too young for all this
memory; oh, but when does life muster
care for such, just harvesting you too young

I wake to palpitations, and out my window
Philadelphia cacophonous
calling from behind summer’s curtain, write
me, she begs, write me to life!
................................I answer
Do you know how much of this world has
whispered that same plea? I cannot do it.
She rouses me with a kiss of cool air,
sprung from the memory of spring just for

me, and there is a song burst of traffic,
tires abrading the street, people birthed
into motion, SEPTA roaring from a
stop and rumbling the deep roots of homes,

the city alight in sun, the bare lots
and tar roofed homes, the brown hulk of Eastern
State and the art museum book ending
with Cira all oblong, glass, cleaved uneven-

ly as if born from nature’s unconscious,
its skin chatoyant like a sapphire
put to flame, burning at the city edge.
Then try again, Philadelphia sings.

But with whom do I share such sacred space?
For that, she has no answer, just her space
asking me out from mine, away from page
upon page of restraint, my protection

~

The sun is back, and in the wake of rain
mist steams up from the road like hot sulfur,
Our atmosphere reloading. I am
moving away from the storm’s heart, and it
from me, speeding towards the blue creeping through
the moist green of new summer. Vibrating
myself, somewhere in that ethereal
mist are similar strings, smaller than we
can comprehend, doing their own shimmies,
falsetto or bass (who can know?) over
their six dimensions of space, delinquent
teenagers, precocious and run amuck.
I cannot even master three, plus time.

~

Today, an article about Bobby,
A series of shallow reminisces
Eight of them, pictures of crowds and the train
Bearing his body homeward one final time,
All taken by a young husband and wife,
Activists then, mid-twenties with a son

Retirees now, snow birds ocean
side. It’s strange how we mark days and return,
as future selves, to them as if the earth
bares some sorrow of its own for those days,
as if nature could remember losses,
hang onto and mourn them the same as us

No, nature is constructed more wisely,
God himself a precocious young artist:
brilliant in youth, but faltering in age.
The retired activists capture it
with more accuracy: We had not re-
covered from JFK and MLK.

Vietnam was troubling, confusing.
We were in our twenties. Life went on.

~

My brother looks lonely, even in a
drug induced nap, lolled over on our
back porch, his lips clenched like a vice so he
resembles a child having lost his
parents, faced with a whole lifetime alone.

Along our stairwell, there are pictures,
him as a bloated baby, his cheeks fat
in a grin. There is a luminescence
in his lapis eyes, some unspeakable
verve and happiness.
.....................He briefly nods up
from his nap, opens his eyes and gives me
the curious smile a brother gives
another. We could have been something, right?
Maybe I'm just a cynical brother

but that glint has given way to a fog;
the world has usurped his boyishness

~

I tried to explain, to my grandparents,
courting by text message. They were rightly
befuddled and eventually gave
up on their questions, exasperated.
Facebook, though, they understand, and each have
accounts, finding their old high school friends,
long thought dead, and also us, their off spring,
one generation removed, proficient
at a rapidly intimate world.

They are amazed, and me, the unceasing
narrative of quips, one liners, laments
we absorb, proclaiming them as knowledge,
filling in our ideas of friends,
family and even potential lovers.
It is a strange world indeed, when, drunk
in the late hours of the new morning,
I can be moved by my grandfather’s changed
status: “Home, missing Philadelphia
and my grandkids. Such a proud grandfather!”
Words so easy to type, but not to say

~

A plane has just disappeared in a storm
somewhere between Brazil and Senegal
helpless over those heaving topical
seas where the halves of our planet meet
and those beautiful swirling destroyers,
- of cities, of our human encroachments -
are born (destruction does not lack beauty,
merely conscience). I read about it prone,
in bed, naked, languorously alive.
the passengers, all most certainly dead,
went the way we all tend to go to a
vast enormity of the populace

Anonymously, strangely quiet and
detached, unwitting victim of something
horrible that we, in our infall-
ible selfness, will never encounter.
Such is death from almost any distance,
unmoving, dispassionate, inhuman.
Still, I find my heart taking strange solace
in this doomed vessel of human progress.
Despite the connectedness of these times,
it is still quite easy to disappear