Berlioz and Saint-Saens

you don't know what romantic is until
you're sequestered in the first class cabin
of an old Boeing 747 blasting off
from Haneda across the Pacific with
a 90-piece orchestra and a massed choir
of thousands. the engines thrum beneath you
and before you the light of ten thousand suns,
pagan brass defiling the Te Deum and the organ
these Napoleonic Frenchmen aspiring to be Wagner

or at 19 writing your masterpiece at midnight in the
East Asian Library with the glittering magnificence of
Manhattan all around you and within you, just a little
Sturm und Drang. you go to the Met to hear
Les Souffrances du jeune Werther and while the Met
bedazzles you Massenet's passion is not that of Goethe's.
casting around for a hopeless woman to obsess over
and finding none you return to the library reflecting that if
you're going to blow your brains out it will take more than
a silly French opera to make you do it

scarecrow

now the leaves are tinder dry
wind rattles the upper branches
my body a scarecrow in autumn dark
mid husks of dead cicadas

she teaches astronomy

she teaches astronomy with a scalpel
trims the constellations, launches the stars
distributes them in your mind

scissors out the galaxies -- her lace
garments trace on her body
the ancient gradual shadow and shift

of the horizon. her silence
the obliquity of the ecliptic
her glacial frown the precession of aeons

when she deigns to smile at you
once, in a cycle of millennia,
you melt. you beg her not to cast you
out again into orbits of darkness

little rooms

in the little rooms
the trance arrives
then departs
and so forth

furious priests march in
beating their tambours
the drums, and the incense

imposing women, formidable as storms
rush over you
delirium in their wake

the keys to the little rooms
on a ring in your faded pocket
to find them you consult
the subway maps

these little rooms are always
similarly furnished --
a narrow bed, a lamp, a desk
reserved for you
in a decaying building
down in the slums of time

pied-a-terre

the return to the little room
-- studio, efficiency, or cubicle --
solitary cell in the brain

blundering home at odd hours
you miss the address, or the building's
down, burnt out, demolished

or the elevator refuses to pause
at your floor, and you wander out in the night
the mesh, Manhattan street matrix

it was the decade of the solitaries
long-distance hollow-eyed striders
up and down the wounded bleeding avenues

at last, guided by some god's hand
you stumble home to the little room, safe place,
asylum, undisturbed, it endures in time

narrow bed, desk, and lamp, and in the drawer
the deck of suicide cards, your old poems
cryptographs line the shelf

these days, at times, barbarians camp on the floor
these wild young artists, festooning the walls
arrogant, misguided, they disturb your space

on the shelf they've set up their own poems
dressed up as books, you take one down
decipher it and read to the airwaves

at first it seems garbage, wild pencil scrawls
howling, bad language, no form
the volume dissolves in your hand

then reclining you recite aloud
to your amazement the old bards gather
chanting greybeards join in

at first a low hissing, then a hum
voices echo, hit the cosmic stride
the volume dissolves in your mind

in the little room form is not different
from emptiness, emptiness not different
from form -- form is the emptiness

your mind clears and moonlight
plays over the foot of the bed
then autumn returns, its clarity, leaves sigh
angels blow horns over Harlem

full moon, moving again, it slides
and with it your mind, to the west
over the cliffs, to paradise, down
to the river, on the rocks of time

two bridges

two bridges two shadows
the obligatory madman approaches
explains to me the pattern
of the cosmos in the ripples

why do they choose me,
these fervent compulsive talkers?
does it still appear that I wish to have
the meaning of the universe parsed?

after all these years
it's very simple -- two things
water goes under the bridge
joy comes after the pain