I'm going to read a couple of new poems or not.
Linda mentioned Muriel Rukeyser and this is called "Crepuscule
with Muriel," which came from myself,
so Thelonious Monk comes in there, too.
I preface it with Nellie.
"Instead of a cup of tea, instead of
a milk silk well for the cup of a cup of nearly 6:00 tea time,
cup of a stumbling block, cup of an afternoon
unredeemed by talk, cup of a cup brown loaf,
of a slice, a lack of butter.
Blueberry jam that's almost black.
Instead of tannin seeping into the cracks of a pot,
the void of an hour seeps out, infects
the slip of a cut I haven't the wit
to fix with a surgeon's needle threaded with fine-gauge silk
as a key would thread the cylinder of a lock.
But no key threads the cylinder of the lock.
Late afternoon, like transitory, licks the place
of the absent cup with its rough tongue,
flits itself out beneath the wheels revolving spoke.
Taut thought's gone, with a blink of attention slack,
a vision of death and distance in the mix.
She lost her words.
And how did she get them back when the corridor of the day
was a lurching deck?
The dream life logic encodes in nervous tics,
she translated to a syntax which connects
intense and unfashionable politics with morning
coffee, Hudson sunsets, sex; then the short-circuit
of the final stroke, the end for which all lines looped out,
then broke.
What a gaze out the window interjects on the southeast
corner, a black lab balks, tugged
as the light clicks green toward a late day
walk by a plump Brown girl in a purple anorak.
The Bronx-bound local comes rumbling up
the tracks out of the tunnel over West Harlem blocks,
whose windows gleam on the animal warmth of bricks
rouged by the fluvial light of six o'clock."