Dusk Over the Hudson

The dusk was precipitating on the wrong side

of your head. A furnace of tongues flare out

from your left ear and you gape at my expression. But, sir,

I told you not to come yet. You grin and scratch your sickle,

flicking miniature kings and paupers down into the Hudson below;

the sky is bleeding tongues now, like someone melted Mars

down a canvas. Perhaps it was you? Fix your hair, you say,

they’re waiting. Your grin waves, turns, hops down

onto the river greenway below us, where the kings and paupers

are stripping off black brine. You shake their hands,

brush algae from their jackets, and lead them up tongues of dusk,

back into the right side of your head. Yes, now you see─come along,

my dear. I peer around your sickle at the waves below;

the Hudson has never looked more sacred in your dying light.

But sir, it is not yet night. Your grin smacks shut

and blackness billows out, spreading its wings

over the Hudson. Ah, but it is night now, my dear. Hush.

The Buttercup of Endlessness

Those times I drove us off the dirt-road,

into fields, where you’d sit still for hours,

smiling at the ladybug nibbling your finger pad,

your golden tendrils tangled among the weeds,

counting clouds and buttercups

until the stars came out.

You’d brush the flapper curls from my brow:

“Grandma, you’re my role model.”

I’d cry myself to sleep those nights

while waves of chain-smoke seeped out

from beneath your father’s door.       

Afternoon sunlight, splayed on the wheat-twined rug,

whose frayed ends I blame you, the twirlings of your fingers,

as you contemplated the spelling word of the week:

“Uroboros.”

Your dimples deepened when I knelt beside you,

showed you to twist those frayed ends into a snake

eating its own tail - the emblem of infinity,

even if it bled itself into endlessness.

I tried spreading your father’s words on my toast,

the preserve,

I bit into burnt bread, for you,  

but I have no teeth left to sustain this wear

that promises no respite nearby,

only an old woman, and her dentures, now.

The blonde boy next door asks for you.

I tell him you’re still counting buttercups.

But isn’t that the nature of this,

the procession of years, one can’t simply stop counting,

lest you scratch the blackness, and the record repeats

until memories play endlessly:

The Uroboros never dies.

And I wonder, are we to meet again

before the reading of a will.

Darling girl, I’ve left you everything,
all that I am.

One morning, an invitation stirs in the mailbox.

A lace figure stares at me from down the aisle,

blinks a nod that never reaches the eyes,   

I long to trumpet over the orchestra:

Come back!

There are still more buttercups to count,

you haven’t finished unraveling the rug,

the blonde boy still asks for you.

I try to bury the wave rising, I do,

but there are buttercups woven within your veil.

Talk to me, my love. Your father does not own your tongue.

I curse whatever poison he’s forced into you, all these years,

that’s cracked your memories of me sharp, until I bleed endlessly.
I blame him. And you? You’ve advanced this avalanche

of distance, by sailing away, down his puffs of smoke.

Somewhere, someone is standing in a buttercup field,

beneath a soundless sky,   

listening for the leap of your laughter

over endlessness.

Deforestation (Haikus)

The force of the tree’s
fall subdues the bulldozer.
A monkey stares on.

A banquet of sounds:
City streets taste like nectar
Soured. The trees sigh.

The Final Feast

The Wild Ox paws the tablecloth

into an accordion of folds,      

nostrils flared, spittle spurting,

horns forked forwards

towards the fiend

across the dais.

The Leviathan, pariah of the sea,

files its spike-armored fins

against a wine chalice rim,

whips it tail, trident poised,

scales bristled, brine-dripped:

The crucible of nemesis.    

Each surveys the terrain:

A furnace of hasidim, searing up in song,

buffets flowing with unleavened bread, wine,

desire for the divine.

Sons sway on caftaned shoulders,

boys bounce on garteled laps,

slipping sheets of bread, sips of wine,   

whenever their father’s eyes

beseech the ceiling.

Foes lock eyes,

men lock arms,

children lick their lips,

and the eighth day’s battle inflicts‒

The beast bounds forth, pouncing past

springing sidelocks, swinging hands;

the serpent slithers swift, weaving betwixt

sticky fingertips and goblets of wine.

Twilight unfurls the moon,

the final feast unleashed, song-sheathed,

the tremors of ritual tassels thrum:    

“Next year in Jerusalem!”

Dreamers; oblivious to the carnage

rampaging above their skullcaps.

As horns batter fangs, fins pierce hooves‒     

Sea and land collide,

father and son in stride,

song and bread entwine,

all in service of the divine.

For each eruption of blood and bone,

the rivals ascend, charioted by human chants,

a blazing helix, incandescently white,

until it explodes in mosaics of light.

One little boy, blessed with this sight,

sips from his smuggled wine and wonders,

why the two creatures, now glittering

atoms above his head, did not, simply,

Passover each other.

--Based on a passage in the Talmud, Tractate Bava Batra 75a-b