Perpetually and Forever

In a bookstore in Mahwah,

Not far from where Johnny went

Looking for a job once but

Nevermind, there was a slim

Paperback of poetry

Titled, A Coney Island

Of the Mind. This was forty,

Forty-some years ago, now.

The book looked interesting,

The tumbling sprawl of the poems,

More disorderly than verse,

Way too much white space for prose.

The book wound up on a shelf

And then another shelf and

Then another, in this state

And that apartment, that state

And that and that apartment,

In and out of old boxes,

Until the pages yellowed

And were last seen in storage

Somewhere in southwest Utah.

And all those decades, Lawrence

Was still living and waiting

For his typewriter to write

The great indelible poem,

Living and waiting his whole

Century, and now he’s gone.

Hear It Passing

Dove’s crisp salute will return soon,
Her obstinate wrinkle rasping.

There’ll be that first night warm enough
To call out the outdoor chorus

And then it won’t be just the one
Solitary in the firewood

Lugged into the house, bewitched
By a warm room within winter,

Then it will be more legs and more
Chirruping faster and faster,

And it will be one more summer
Lifetime rubbing legs together.

Indications of Spring

Close observation of anything
Changes your perception so fully
The thing perceived becomes a grouped thing,

And in this transformation debuts
Meaning, which usually remains
Private, although sometimes you can’t help

Trying to explain it to someone,
How you never miss the flowering
Of certain trees in a nearby town

Since that means spring and all of the springs
You can remember since you moved here,
Or how you know a constellation,

Not by any of its well-known names
Recorded from cultures east or west
Or indigenous, but by some name

You’ve made up for it, rearranging
Say, the Hunter, in your mind, instead
As the Condor or the Banded Goose,

And how seeing it, star wings spread out
Above your doorstep, fires memories
Going back now half a century.

Meaning’s always personal, to start,
Observation reconfiguring memory
As gravity clusters galaxies.

You have to get others to attend,
To attend and to compare, to bring
Their own memories, to grow meanings.

Equally

Almost every world is a gone world
By the time you’re scrutinizing it.
Nineteen-sixty-eight. Nineteen-ninety-

Six. Two-thousand-twenty-four. That’s three
Of them. There’s more. A reproduction
Of a painting, used for an album

Cover, itself reproduced in light
Glowing out of electric digits,
Shows the open doors of a farmhouse

Onto a luscious Finnish summer
Of sun all day and abundant green,
Sometime in the nineteenth century,

And you scrutinize it, and you sense
The northern summer air, the wood smells
Of an old farmhouse you know is not

This one painted in oils some decades
Before you were born, but one of yours,
Only equally from a gone world.

To Help the Neighbors

The whole body seems to be blebbing
Since, ironically, some candidates
For apoptosis refused to die.

The inside’s being taken apart
By cells that should have disassembled
Themselves years ago. It all bubbles

With elaborate self-destruction,
And maybe it’s meta-programming,
Cells killing all as cells kill themselves,

But why, biologists want to know,
Why? The martyrs aren’t your cells that die
For your self but for your neighbor selves.