O.J.’S TRIAL & AFTER

Trouble beats time,
fragile as a wren
draws wind and epithets.
What verdict were we after
no jury can give us?
A certainty of guilt?
Scapegoat?
The chance to inflict pain?
An atonement,
like the million-man march?

It may be too late for time’s
comfortable judgments,
all a-ache and brittle-broke.
Through raw eyes we again see
fish caught in a net,
black and white;
the shadows strain,
the unmothered children
perpetuated by white spite.

Time lets go of even this
and every one of us.
The perished perish afresh,
slapping water against the hips.
Heat sifts, water dips and drowns,
a promise, defaulted,
eager to collect.
Wounds heal and bleed:
the sun about to set
on an empire of hope.

SUNLIGHT ON WINGS

Sunlight on wings
balances sky,
including the earth,
effortlessly.

BLACK HILLS

for Marty Cohen

1.

Inverted quicksand,
Black Hills stretch through a dream of our ride
down to San Francisco.
Back east, no landscape like this;
I hadn’t guessed the chastity of solid night.
What I dream I flood with light,
inner, silent, specious.
You drove us through from Portland,
where now I am headed back.
These black hills point to a change.
I point them there myself.

2.

In the Scorsese musical,
this early shot:
Francine at table in the club,
with a flock of undrunk drinks,
cherries all plucked out.
Here is her character at a glance,
unobscured by song or dance:
she takes what she wants.

3.

The fine gold chain around my neck
my mother gave me when I last
visited before her death.
At first it was tight,
but the undulations of my
neck have loosened its grip.
I slip into it.

LAND OF DREAMS

We trekked for hours.
Why we were going no one said.
The sun left us dazed,
and the moon: a rink of ice.
We bore impedimenta like Christs.
We lugged our shadows.

No voice found shelter with us.
Carrying our homes on our
backs, we had no earth
in which our music might flourish.
(We had a handful, as keepsake.)
No man or woman wept.

Where we were going no one knew.
We wore fluted rags. The children
wore nothing. The boys
were ashamed of their bodies.
The girls also were ashamed of the boys’
bodies. They moved like stone.

How I longed for the dear child
who would not leave
the land of our buried son and daughter,
the land of dreams.
I cannot shake loose her last face,
full of images of the lost.

It is ages since.
I think of her no more.
I do not dwell on the children,
except as I grow white
I begin to hear their dreaming
and my own.

BIRTHDAY POEM

The war over,
tall grass clings to the sun.
Arms full, wounds idle,
we surround an old roller-coaster of love,
go home, claws in our pockets,
broken brick and glass amidst our eyes.

In this city, tongues of bells
are cut out right before winter.
In hospital, nurses dance
when we come in laughing.
They bed us in water.
In waiting rooms we wait.
Someone with shoulders of muscle
rolls by in a wheelchair to say
you are now a father, having lost a daughter.

Under husks of clouds and the moon,
we flee.
What shamelessness!
How did we get here so fast?

The trees, Ukrainians, bordered by Russians, dance, bleed;
others, dead fathers
from dreams ago,
whose babies lie stuffed in their mouths.
The dead search for eyes
through weather-beaten stone.
It is time. While my mother is being born,
we dance through a graveyard with Uncle Frank.
Alone, you bring dead roses for your wife.