"Americacoma" / graffitti decal / 6" X 4"

Like a dying impulse
the path, littered
with garbage and growing skinnier
as it goes, winds
downhill toward Hindalga.

Up ahead to the right
a woman bends down, grabs
a stone from the bushes, heaves it
at her 6-year-old son
but misses. Still
he starts crying.

The heat.
No relief since early morning.
Not even a breeze.

The early afternoon light
hisses like an iron pressed by an incensed husband
against his wife’s cheek.

The temperature keeps rising.

(revised)

This is where
it begins to arc up

ward, then
at a certain point starts

its descent, although
its trajectory

isn’t yet complete, but
it could be in just

one or two
seconds, see!

Life
passes quickly. Fo

cus. Breathe
quietly while

counting to
a million. Feel it, the call

and response
of history’s flow. You are

a small
crouched animal, stomach

pressed against
dead leaves, eyes

wide open. A ground twig
snaps, you

leap up
run for your life

(revised)

Pilled to sleep. No dreams. Just
the barely audible noise of traffic lights
switching from red to green in the middle of the night.
I awaken. 8:26 a.m. Faded
yellow gladiolas , the wallpaper.
Like Rosa’s aunt
exiting the storefront Pentecostal church, things disappear.
In the apartment next to hers, her sister keeps
a ukulele stuffed in a duffelbag under the bed
and also a memory
of the tiny San Pedrito bird flying
red-goateed from tree to tree in the rainforest
while here in the Baby Site Electronics Emporium
on 34th midtown, the bearded Hasid Jew
in blue trenchcoat buys a boombox. What
nuance of the evening news will he listen for?
I walk away, toward Harlem, toward
something I believe in but can’t explain.
There it is. A smokeshop with a lottery sign announcing
“16 Ways to Win Instant Cash.”
Behind the sign, in the back on the shelf:
piles of Kodak film, some eventually to be transported
in suitcases to India, Somalia, Istanbul.
I buy a bunch of rolls, load one
into my ancient Miranda Sensorex, start
ordering everyone I see to say cheese into the lens

snap: photo of a woman’s vagina
with a terse note inside saying
squirt elsewhere, please

snap: photo of men with shovels on a rivershore;
they’ve unearthed a big coffin that contains
the cherrytree Old Georgie
sure as all hell cut down

snap: photo of people loitering near lemon crates
in front of Rosario’s Market on an island that theoretically still exists further south

snap: photo of a toolbattered hand
opening and closing
slowly in the dark

(revised)

Streets, red lines
in the whites of your eyes.

Street where in 1911
Olof, the carpetmill foreman, choked
to death a seamstress with his free hand
behind a Warburton Ave. barn.
The next morning they found him
gulping milk from a bottle
on a Bear Mountain slope.

Streets like pieces of broken scaffolding
hanging from a skyscraper
after the mind gets what’s coming to it
for climbing too high.

Street lined with trees
on which a child burns her hand
in a rag-pile fire while off to the side
a pagoda door swings open and tiny bells ring.

Streets leading, every day,
to the same jar of horseradish
spooned clean by an immigrant
who never learned to smile brightly
like Dr. Reiniger, the dentist, said he should.

Street on which children rollerskate
in and out of every sex wish your mama ever had.

Street where paper violets
are placed on dead a gardener’s grave.

Street where you live,
street at the end of which everything ends
when you finally open your eyes.

Another fat
cheeked child, eyes
blacker than a monsoon night and a mouth

already
pouting
with distinction. The grandmother

Sundera

smiles
her face turning
each day more spider-web-like.
She holds him

on the evening lane. Her daughter
Holika
the child’s mother
will arrive soon from the city. Night

falls rapidly now. Voices
echo throughout the village while a man

carrying vegetables in a plastic bag

walks rapidly downhill
past rickshaw drivers loitering
in the shadows by the paan shop
on Pipeline Rd.

Late afternoon / Feb. 10

Early morning heavy snow

Yard table in night snow . . . Another foot expected tonight/tomorrow.

I lift up
cancer by the armpits and turn it
toward its walker. Although

omnipotent, its body
is weak
as it pushes forward, wobbling

as it goes, miraculously
draining life from everything
it sees. Amazed

by cancer’s power to outlive
our grief, all those who have gathered
to study it

grow surly, knowing
it has left us
dead inside. Still

life continues. I lift up
cancer by the armpits and turn it
toward its walker. It keeps

going, on and on.