for crows at daybreak

A new collection of my poetry titled

FAMILY PORTRAIT WITH TWO DOGS BLEEDING

is now available from:
Phrygian Press
58-09 205th Street
Bayside, NY 11364

The cost is $5.00 (U.S.)

Poem

‘The Shuttle of a Ripening Egg Combs the Warp of His Days’:
ON THE ENDNOTES GIVEN BY SAMUEL BECKETT
TO HIS POEM ‘WHOROSCOPE’ (1930)



I like these notes even though
they really do little to explain.
In fact, these notes read
as if they were lines
deleted from the poem itself.
'Saint Augustine has a revelation
in the shrubbery and reads St. Paul.'
Shrubbery being a word
the novelist Nicholson Baker
doesn’t like. And this one:
‘He proves God by exhaustion.’
Which is an interesting idea
and very interesting line.
And this final sadness
plainly stated and more sad
for being so plainly stated:
‘His daughter died of scarlet fever
at the age of six.’ Imagine that.
How terrible facts can be.

Festive

… jug, jug, jug …
John Skelton

What love is this drunk and misshapen and bullying, menace in
its loud visceral surge. I wish I’d enlisted as witness elsewhere.
So the hulking man tugs the co-ed by the waistband of her shorts,
and hangs her from his wrist like later meat. What love is this
in yellow and black uniform the bee-hive stirs. What love is this
that loiters on the hair-trigger and spits into the bull’s eye.
‘What the fuck you lookin’ at?’ What love is this that forms
into three unsteady angels holding hands in jean-shorts
and halters, floating down the alley where dumpsters reek.
What love smoothes her skirt and skips and smoothes some
more her hands like sparrow wings upon her ass. What love is
this that needs the Black & White to ferry home at 3:36 on a
scalded afternoon in early fall. And where is home anyway
and why did you leave for this occasion taking with you
only the essential right to vomit in the square. What love is this
that seems to shade the lithe red-head as she is tentative in
passing and I am tentative on her behalf. I see her go alone.
Someone won one golden high-stakes game today. This great day.
Victorious were the good and glory their reward. So adjust
your figs, remove your shirt to put it on your nickel skull
and wobbly nab a smoke at curbside but know a detailed list
of casual harassments somewhere boils above the cost of every
glass you broke. What love is this, subterranean and thereby lost,
ugly shaved head looking in at all that loud aggressive joy,
that strains against its festive irons to be invited in.