Sorry, Mary

for Mary Ruddy Madigan
(1900 - 1995)

Sorry, Mary, you never got the funeral you’d have wanted.
Sorry Mary, you never got the funeral you deserved.
There should have been bagpipes, step dancers, jigs and reels.
There should have been a fine over-long procession, and a parade
of sad speeches, one more grand than the next --
There should have been stoic salutes in bleary abundance.
A big handsome priest named Francis
Xavier with half-a-load on, full of pomp and bluster
should have presided. He should have marched
‘round all sides of your lavish box, Mary, swinging
his pendulous aromatic thurible as one might a purse.
Sorry, Mary, you didn't get the Mass of Christian Burial
you deserved. And about the rental priest, Mary,
who began the homily: “I didn't know Mary but --”

Sorry only the man you loved most with a passion
had to fight -- for the chance to march up to the altar
of the spare, cheap, Protestant-looking,
contemporary sanctuary, to offer up a few fond words, Mary,
in your honor. And you should know, Mary,
Himself had to cross
both his mother and the priest
to do it, Mary! The bishops still don’t go in
for laughter and poetry over the stiff.
("Save it for the pub" is their thinking.)
And you know how hard that is, Mary,
for an Irishman to cross his mother and a priest.
You would have liked Himself up there in a new white shirt,
making his mother fidget and the old priest squirm,
prompting everyone else in the sanctuary to laugh, and weep,
on account of that bloody blarney of his, Mary.

Sorry you didn’t get the send-off you would have wanted, Mary.
Sorry you didn’t get the funeral you deserved.
At least you got to wear that royal blue number one last time,
the one you wore the day Himself was married.
You looked so smart in it, and it was perfect
for the occasion. The wedding was grand,
but the marriage didn’t stick, Mary;
that’s hard when the groom’s queer. The cosmetician
didn’t do a great job on you Mary, for discreet in all else,
you were never so when it came to face paint.
Twas black brows and fire engine red to set off your ice
blue eyes. You would have flown into a bloody rage
over the lipstick! Scarlet not bloody pink, nor
salmon was for your mouth, Mary.
Though the water-colored decades of
those Spanish crystals winding Ave Marias and Pater
Nosters round your locked fingers were familiar
in a lovely way though the hands seemed someone else’s --
I will say this much for you, Mary -- you finally got a proper manicure.
The girl didn’t have to yell at you, that last time, to wait for final
coat to dry. You looked alright there in the box, Mary,
you vain, elfin New Yorker, though it's hard to look
your best, Mary, when the soul has taken leave
of your senses.

Sorry Mary, you got carried away
by six guys that came with the package.
Pall bearers for hire is how they do it now.
Sorry Mary, that your buckos Matt and Max and Scott
never got to haul your box down the church aisle.
But you would have liked the casket, Mary,
it was lovely and too ornate; upon it were all twelve apostles,
seated in a row, at a great table, getting drunk,
or so it’s easy to imagine, the bunch of them out
tying one on with Our Lord
on a Thursday night!

And forgive us, Mary, for burying you
from an unattractive church.
Saint John's was where you dutifully dropped
your weekly fiver in the shake-down basket,
where the priest was a thief but not wholly
without charm. At least his elegant tastes extended
to keeping the little Yorkville sanctuary well maintained
and full of fresh cut fragrance, a place where God
wouldn’t mind stopping and sitting
a spell on a hot day in the luminous climate-
controlled dark. 'Tis indeed a shame we buried
you from a church you never entered vertically, Mary.

Truth is, Mary, Saint Pat’s would have been
the proper spot for you. The Cardinal himself
should have been on hand to shake that baton
over your box, holy water springing forth from its head,
for, Mary, if you didn't deserve a resounding “Yea,
though I walk through the valley of the shadow of
death” psalm and dance amid in the tenebrous
resplendence of the cathedral,
I'll be damned if I know who might!
I'm sorry for the bland absence of song.
I'm sorry Mary, that more verse wasn't called out
into the November chill, as, leaning upon spades,
the Gate of Heaven diggers maintained a respectful
distance and your clan tossed carnations in a heap
atop the astro-turf blanket. Sorry, Mary, the poet went along
to be polite, maintaining a respectful distance,
for there ought to have been encomium and threnody galore!
There should have been elegiac couplets by the score!
And dirges, and laments and monody and what’s more -
the poet you so well loved should have roared
like a banshee of old: Cast a cold eye on life,
on death--Horseman, but before ye pass by,
have another. Just a wee drop, Horseman,
to keep you warm for the long trip home.
Slainte, Horseman.

Sorry, Mary, you didn’t get the funeral you’d have wanted.
Sorry, Mary you didn’t get the send-off you deserved.
O Mary, your funeral should have been great craick!
There should have had bagpipes and reels,
there should have been an Irish tenor, Mary,
to sing Ave Maria My Wild Irish Rose!’
Sorry we couldn't all go down to Finegan’s on the corner
of First Avenue, Mary where the skinflint Paddy who owned the joint,
that greenhorn who had the first nickel he ever made --
the one who saw you come in for dinner with your crew each week
for three decades running but never once bought a drink on the house --
not even on your 85th birthday.
I'm sorry that cheap donkey bastard he never bought you a drink, Mary,
because you spent a lot of money in that place,
and always left at 20% or more for the girl.
And Mary, I'm sorry no one got drunk at your wake,
not even those of us who're still allowed.
Maybe you should have died l0 years earlier,
when your number was still Re-4-8010,
before your daughters had declared war with one another,
a conflict between the states
of stubbornness and pettiness.
Maybe you should have died ten years earlier,
before so many of your buckos were compelled to convert,
from Catholicism to A.A.. Sorry, Mary,
no one got drunk at your wake.
You wouldn't have approved of that,
but men, these days, are better now,
they like to clean up and fly straight,
take care of their children
and stick around awhile --

Sorry, Mary, you never got the funeral you deserved.
But I’m not sorry you stuck around `till 95.
I’m glad I had the chance to straighten you out on a few of the changes:
No meat on Friday was out; and suicides were in --
by which I mean: suicides were not, as had long been
your fear, barred from heaven. What I mean to say is sometimes,
if the world had beaten a man down,
sometimes if a man wasn’t in his right mind --
In other words, newsflash, Mary:
They were now letting the suicides into heaven, Mary.

You protested when I told you so: “No. Go on!” --
your voice inflected with doubt but also with
the unmistakable rising pitch of optimistic incredulity
ascending with bright lyric force, inclining towards faith --
“If you don't believe me, Mary, ask the rummy priest who rounds.
The Cardinals changed the rules! A man who died
in a moment of weakness, by his own hand,
if he was truly sorry, Mary, can
now enter the Gate of Heaven --”
“Are you sure?”

I’m glad you lived long enough, to believe,
Mary, that your mate could indeed tip his cap, bidding
Peter a “ Top’a’th’mornin’ to ye!”
while passing through those Gates.
I’m a little sorry you didn’t make it to l00.
That would have been something, Mary, knowing
you’d beaten your sister Bridie to the century finish
might have made the victory double sweet,
but you were tired. But I’m glad you stuck around
long enough to learn that, sometimes, Mary,
even God has a change of heart.

Sorry you didn’t get the funeral you deserved, Mary,
but I’m not sorry you stuck around ‘till 95.
It was a terrific honor, Mary, to watch you fail
to crack, Mary as you were spirited
away from East 73rd, and stashed up in Franny’s.
What great craick it was to smuggle a wee dram
past the crocked security guard and to sit in your nursing home rocker,
to pull a laugh out of you by calling your portable commode
“the cocktail table,” while sipping and gabbing
about news and weather without the TV on.

I’m sorry you didn’t get the funeral you deserved, Mary.
I’m sorry your life was so full
of death, but I'm not sorry you stuck around
as long as you did, Mary, for it was an honor to sit with you as you died.
How lucky was I to have you just long enough,
to behold that wild dimming sprite in you,
the hard-boiled fairy,
so steadfast and alive
as it leapt soaring
out of you
and dove
down
into the tiny gut of my girl,
who is called Maria, Mary.
How sorry can I possibly be?
How can I be sorry you stuck --
How can I be sorry you stuck around
so long Mary, when I can glance across
my kitchen table, on any given night,
and watch my girl as she gnaws the wing
of a chicken, or catch her as she knits
her brow in that feral Black Irish way, and gasp,
as I bear witness, in disbelief, or belief --
it hardly matters which -- and laugh
as I exclaim in a whisper, “My God, my God,
will you look at her? It’s Mary!”

The Other Side

Not far from Croagh Patrick and Mountain of the Eagle
where the patron saint fasted 40 days praying for the
salvation for the Irish people, in a country you rarely called “home,”
attaching little affection and none of that shanty inflection
so many Greenhorns favored -- “On the other side,”
in l900, the year Oscar Wilde died, you were born,
but being no great lover of books, not even the Bible,
which the Pope forbade the faithful to read,
you wouldn’t care about Wilde any more than for parsing
the gospels direct - which would have been rough going
for you, Mary, with your two years of school. Yes, just
two years of school, then it was off to the lace factory,
which you called “the lace school.” No,
“Oscar Wilde” would not ring a bell, though queens made you giggle,
and poetry didn't matter to you any less or more than history or
science: silly things for important people to bother with.
The Marquess of Queensbury, creator of the rules of pugilism
was imprisoning Irish fairy, Wilde, as across the sea, in “the States”
the Labor Party was coalescing powerfully circa the l900th year of our Lord,
but once you became American, a quarter decade later,
you eschewed political concerns. A suffragette’s nightmare,
you were; first Tuesday, each November, Mike would rattle
the marital bed, rousing you early, Himself, propelled
by civic fervor such as only the freshly naturalized possess,
before leading you off to the Public School to wait in line
to vote Democrat as did he, to which obedience widowhood
at 50 put an end. Later, at the Golden Age Club,
local ‘pols’ vied for your vote. I too, tried
to sway you, but politics held as much interest for you as
physics or greed. Hell, born poor 50 years after ‘The Hunger,’
you hadn’t a thing against Brits, and so hard were you, Mary, of
hearing, by the time the Roman Church did away with the Latin --
when the priests tried to tell you how to vote from the pulpit --
you missed the whole bloody thing! Had you heard, you would have
heeded Father, for any priest was better than no priest,
and a crooked one was as good as any for a Special Intention.
So long as you put your envelope in the basket on a
stick each Sunday, any priest, even a queer priest or a drunken one
would put in a good word Our Lord. Friedrich Nietzsche
died on the continent the week you were born,
near Lough Mask and Knock, where the Blessed
Virgin magically appeared, not far from Cong, and
Fir Bolg where a race of small dark pagans mated
with the fairer tribe, Tuatha de Denaan, in a wood
frequented by fairies ... Wilde? Nietzsche? Neither
would interest you, for philosophers were good
for about as much as poets, atheists or queers.
And though you were crazy about God, your strong
overriding preference was for his mother. You never learned
to speak to either of them direct, but how you mastered
the speed-rosary’s decades faster than the godspeed of
light! But unlike so many American Irish, you
never let the Holy Roman Church succeed in making you mean.
In the l900th year of Our Lord, prospectors were
flocking to the Klondike; workers were breaking
ground on the streets of New York where Paddy ‘sandhogs’
dug out those subway tunnels wherein your mate
would spend a third of his life in the dark
as a man with a steady job. He was born
in the city, a lad who hailed from Limerick, but you,
you were born where the Armada first touched land;
where pirates armed with ferocious blackness
paused to plunder and sully the chill, pallid grey-eyed colleens,
leaving their white seed and indelible pitch behind
like tattoos borne in blood -- a blackness which descended
down to me, for which I thank you.

Bodies of Water

for Scott T. Somerville

You were never a water wimp.
Even at Orchard Beach, you were good
to go. A natural swimmer, graceful
and strong. All of us were.
Natural swimmers, that is.
In water, that is. But I was afraid to be
out over my head, afraid to swim
at dawn with you and Brutus out on 95th Street
when the lifeguard chairs were still
overturned in the sand on the shanty
‘Irish Riviera’ where we learned to tread water.
You always went way out.
You were never afraid to get
your ass kicked by a wave. There was no fear
of losing control, cramping up, no fear of water
rushing to displace the spirit
of your lungs. No fear of the Earth’s
humors, the protean green of its scary
unknown, no fear of the curvaceous machine of the tides.

And how you love baths! "Tropical Rain Forest":
smoke a joint, fill the tub with aromatic
bubbles, darken the room, put music on,
pull the curtain, turn the shower on and float
away down the Nile in your vessel. You'll go
in the water anywhere. When you come out,
it's always with your head bowed down as
you shake the water off your blond head
like a dog, wearing a Miraculous
Medal, Virgin on a chain. I
never went to the beach with you
where you didn’t swim.
If there was water, you went in.
At the riparian patch of Yonkers’
Hudson by Ludlow Street Station,
that run-down stretch where the hookers, junkies
and faggots congregated where you learned to fish --
How I lament my sexual naiveté (my imaginative deficit --
maybe there’s still time, Snow Whitey -- a few moist
years -- before the onset of desiccation.) In Rockaway,
we learned to swim across from Playland, apprentices
in anarchy-cum-juvenile delinquency on lavender boardwalk nights.
We snuck on rides, harassed arcade suckers.
It was '69, the summer my breasts arrived.
I liked that 13 year old Tommy from Kingsbridge.
I guess maybe you did too.

In junior year at Riverdale, they made us read the
The Awakening in English class. I don't remember
much about it. I read it so fast on the 20 bus.
A bored sensitive housewife
takes a lover, but it's not just a romp --
it's liberty. There was a seminal passage
about swimming and sex. We had to dissect it
on the final. In The Swimmer, Burt Lancaster
searches for the true meaning of Life.
He hops over a fence and dives into
the pool that belonged to Armina, grandmother
to Lola and Eve. He was looking for something
he would never find. All he found was exhaustion and
emptiness in the shallow end of the Pool of Life.
And who can forget “Daddy” in Come Back
Little Sheba, a chilling flick you've seen
a hundred times. Don't swim
after eating a ham. Don't dive
into a waterless pool. Don't let
a drowning victim pull you in.
Use a rope or pole.

It never mattered how cold the water was,
you'd always go in. Wappingers Falls in May,
unremarkable spots on the Sound
where I snapped that shot of you
carrying my man like a bride, the two of you
lean and fashionable in the parking lot heat.
It was the year of the pale pink bikini.
You look terrific in your suit,
no matter how many cheeseburgers,
no matter what body
of water you swim in.
And those bedroom eyes of yours,
sleepy blue, and the curls, romantic,
emblazoned with sun like tendrils on the pate
of that lush god Bacchus, a wild spray charged
with coppery light. I first read Euripides
at age 15. At 19, I met him
in a dream. The poet was avuncular,
charming, sage, lean, more bald than grey.
Wearing a loose white robe and sandals,
he sat elevated on a great rock
overlooking the Aegean where he entertained
a simple question I’d been puzzling over.
It concerned the huntress.
I learned Adonis does get it in the end,
a disappointing conclusion indeed:
armed huntress clobbers beauteous male love god.
Later I learned the Aegean truly is
"winedark," the color of dolphins, eggplants and plums,
not olive like the sand-salted Atlantic, nor Mexican turquoise,
nor your own warm favorite, your ice
blue water with its penetrable
salt, water clear enough to read through -- Jamaica --
where it is your pleasure to swim and bake
beneath the dangerous sun, your nearly naked flesh
well-anointed with luxurious emollients
and fragrant French tanning products.

That day at Coney Island, I had joyous news
to break, but it was the day you became a Mermaid,
and you were so wrapped up -- so rapt in the thrall of drag --
your emerald costume -- your jade tail and kelly eye-
liner, green lips and bra-straps of teal
dropping, drooping down upon your nice pair
of bare hairy shoulders, your conch shell choker
and a ratty Godiva wig -- I wanted
more -- I wanted to throw you over
when the time came to sink or swim.
I wanted to jump in after you.
I wanted more of a role in your management.
I wanted to throw you
a line, but when I did, you hung up on me.
My boat capsized. It wasn’t the worst
of your nefarious multifarious infractions,
transgressions, crimes, violations -- but
there was piracy, mutiny, pandemonium on the High Seas.
Storm weathered, I shoveled out your little house on
“the Island,” your little place
on the water.
I knew I was lucky
you were alive.
I knew my digging
was the sort one normally does for one's dead.
That Hollywood still, that poster of Bette and Joan, I left it
behind like a landmark, left it
hanging like a flag on a sinking ship.
There are plenty of fish
in the sea; why shouldn't you
have all of them, Sister Girlfriend?
And I hope you know, Stella Maris,
I hope you know -- you must know --
that come Hell or high water --
I love you madly, my wild Irish twin.

Portrait of a Woman with Her Marker

Thinking it a fine joke in the autumnal chill,
having gotten a pair of vodka martinis into the old
girl, Mary, 85 in 1985, which left her flushed and
flustered, wild-eyed and elfin amid the greenery,
he posed her where angels fear saying “Come on, Mary,
how about a quick one with your arm thrown
‘round the stone?” She’d thought of having the rock
inscribed well in advance of taking occupancy
below, of having the name carved in beforehand,
but the daughters said it was “tacky.”
“It’ll just have to wait until you’re gone.”
(Would you jump into my grave that fast?)
Mary was afraid someone might take her dark
spot in the common ground among the faithful
departed, among the consecrated bones of erstwhile
communicants: among the Evanses, McKennas, O’Briens, and Rooneys,
among the Heaveys, O’Haras, Kennedys and Killarneys,
in the company of Mulligans, Fitzgeralds and Molloys,
O’Learys, Donohues, Riordans and Kinanes.
among Kinsellas and Costellos, for all her days
among DiGiornos, Dippolitos, Lucacentis,
Cartellis and Falcones, and Capuccis, Ruggieros, Trovatos and Mazzones.
She was afraid of someone looking to cut
the line at the Gate of Heaven
cemetery, of someone coveting her
place within the verdant realm,
someone waiting to descend into her
dug out hollow in Valhalla’s hallowed ground
which contains remains of her
mate, gone at 50, by his own hand;
daughter killed at 22,
son, drove off a bridge at 30,
girl, dead at 2, buried for Christmas
Black Irish Mary with her way
(of all flesh) with her cold
eye cast “ Come on, smile Mary, darlin’
How about a quick one, a shot
of you and the headstone for good measure?”

Four Green Fields

for Gregg Michael Somerville

In the middle of the summer,
in the middle of the month
in the middle of the last year of the life of
the first Catholic president --
squared-jawed second son
of an Irishman -- a second son
was born to my father.
“What’d’ya do?” called Dick
from down the opposite end of the Caryl Inn?
“Name the kid ‘Gregory’ after the Pope?”
“Name’s not ‘Gregory.’
Just Gregg. On the night of the child’s birth,
as the mingling of spirit and meat and
light was taking place
and the world was drawing
a fresh soul into the irrevocable
spasmodic din surrounding him,
pulling the boy forward
by the soft brute propulsion
of his own ferocious soul
hungry for light,
feeling the rhythmic work
of his mother against
his flesh, its loosening and
tightening upon him
as he made his way
toward the true light
and therefore death
by the muscular dint
of an ordinary miracle,
the sire of the magical
Second son, Gregg
Michael sprang for a round for the bar.
Fractured illumination leapt in glass.
Glints flickered like votives in rows
of curved whiskey glass;
a veil of smoke lay softly over
the amber gin mill pall
of the Caryl Inn
where the father had killed the
pain during labor and delivery.
Dick, down the bar, sent roses
to the hospital, but not the father
of the newborn second son.
It wasn't about the money.
Even if money was tight,
a guy ‘on the job’ could always
pick up a dozen roses ‘on the arm’
on the occasion of the birth of a son --
but Irish girls were made for birth;
the labor was short, the delivery
“unremarkable.” A fine son
was bouquet enough for the sturdy girl
who had no need of roses.
One a year, God willing,
according to “Father.”

She’d given the father two sons, now,
sons enough to make up for that
poor showing first time out.
A firstborn girl is no man’s desire.
A man needs sons. A girl is cute,
so long as plenty of sons come after.
But men make sons,
and the second son would be all
the first was not!
He would be handsome
and quick. There’d be nothing slow
about this one. The second would be quick
to football and words,
fast on his feet, and sharp,
smart as the girl, God damn ‘er.
Best of all, he would not grow up
to be a broad.

I had four green fields
Each of them a jewel
Then strangers came
and tried to take them away
I have fine strong sons
They fought to save my jewels
They fought and died
and that was my grief said she.

When the time came for
the child to be called in Baptism,
the priest raised an objection.
“The child must bear
the name of a saint.”
The diminutive version --
“Gregg” was not enough.

And so the middle son was called
To Christ by the name “Michael.”
Michael after the armed
angel clad in armor and boots;
Michael, archangel,
chief of seraphim,
pug of the firmament,
Heaven’s bouncer;
Michael, God’s rough
draft, God’s second shot,
Michael, patron saint of cops.

“Who gives this child in Baptism?”
A square-jawed brother-in-law
who had cheated on his toddler
as the child’s mother lay dying of
giving birth stood up to speak for the child.
“I do.”

On her deathbed, the mistress taunted the wife:
“Soon you’ll be dead and I’ll be living
with your husband, and raising up your girl.”
The brother-in-law was a creep,
But he was a Catholic creep deemed adequate
to serve as spiritual guardian and holy proxy
to whom it would fall
to usher the child toward emulation of Christ
and the strength of the Holy Spirit
and glory and solace the Church provides.

Only half-Irish, the father of Gregg Michael
hated the Irish: Irish men were pussies who
let their wives chase them ‘round the kitchen
with the frying pan and made them slap
the paycheck down on the table every Friday!
The newborn was Irish but he wasn't
going to be some beaten down Paddy
who’d let some Donkey bitch get him
by the shorthairs.

Children was woman’s work,
and the second-choice of godfather
to the second son was a ‘stand-up guy.’
He had a pair of balls on him.
Soon as his bride was safe in the ground
than grieving widower was dropping his child
off with his sturdy sister (An Irish girl
always knows what to do
with an extra child) and running
off to Florida with the swine
who deserved him.
But Jesus is as lenient
as the Church fails to be.
The godfather of Gregg Michael
would get a fresh start,
a clean slate. Widowhood
left him free as a
Vulture. The square-jawed
dandy, with his well-pressed suit,
a few bucks in his pocket had a long
life ahead of him which he could spend
half-in the bag.

The saint’s name “Michael”
Was a tribute to both
his grandfather and the blood
uncle who was the parents’ first choice
for a godfather, but the
grandfather was dead,
and the godfather could not arrange
for furlough in order
to appear at the font
to speak those sacred
promises the infant could not.

On the day of the Christening,
it’s likely I shifted, half-numb
feet in stiff plastic Mary-
Janes, patent-leather party
shoes, itching in a church frock
of pink, no doubt, a scratchy crinoline
slip underneath. I had grown
tired of commotion surrounding
the baby the baby the baby the baby
the baby this the baby that.
“Be quiet” was an injury and a bore.
I craned to glimpse the baby boy,
ridiculous in a dress.
I’m surprised the old man went for it,
a boy in a dress.
“Who will answer for this child?"
The godmother and the creep spoke up.
“Michael, do you renounce Satan
and the glamour of Evil?"
I do renounce him,”
the brother-in-law answered.

The baby almost slept through his own epiphany.
Not even the surge of the Holy Sprit
caused him to stir as the man in a dress
anointed the chest of the boy in a dress
with grease in the shape of the cross
as he called the boy “Michael.”
But when, raising the boy aloft
above the creamy marble of the holy
pool, the cleric began to pour
water rhythmically and thrice
over the infant’s hairless pate
and the chill trickled down the round of
the still-soft hairless head of the boy,
the shock of the stream awakened him
and the magical boy unloosed
a watery protest, a bubbling wail --
the full force work of unfinished
lungs. His cries rang out.
They shook the shadowy still,
accompanying the bounding
intonation contained in Father’s baroque
ora pro nobis litany of the saints that
ascended into heaven
from his guts and outward
sifting serpentine diffusing upwards outward
into the apse, transepts and nave,
winding its gorgeous twine ‘round pillars of granite
mingling fog with declining
light of late afternoon as glories
pierced opalescent glass
divvying up the Creator’s pure
light into streaming sectors
limited by lead, dispensing emerald,
caramel, sapphire and burgundy
in the Gothic dark, pouring downward and
forth garish lavishments in a slant
from the heavens through the rose
window like swords sculpted of dust,
slender, direct, cutting open the souls
of all whose hearts were open to
the lightlessness punctuated by tiny
tongues of soft echoing gold
flame in brass tips atop
tall candles all around,
illumination minuscule interruptive,
glimmering in the somehow noctilescent
and consecrated dark, radiant
like of God’s night sky divided from day,
resounding roundly in the apse.
Swinging his thurible, Father unleashed
a burning; frankincense and hyssop
surmounted the shadows,
penetrated the dark,
flooded the great space
with a fragrance which lingered
long beyond visibility, and thus
the sin the newborn second son
was said to have been born with
was washed away, as the menace
Limbo constituted, slid off as if
on grease left in the shape of an X --
the cross upon an innocent head.

I do remember the contagion of
fidgeting, the clearing of throats,
the tangible tension of 30 hung-over people
waiting for a drink. It was a Sunday summer afternoon.
Flowers lay before the rerodos
before the tabernacle of gold
and shrine to the Virgin,
gladiola, upright as swords, carnations too,
and lilies of white --
I want to say Stargazers, too,
to tell you of their brazen pink
demeanor and sexual nose
were represented all for the glory of God,
and Tiger Lilies raving, too
fierce as Jesus in his tantrum,
turning tables over in the temple,
the beauty of their God-sculpted biology
all proudly out, but I can not in honesty say
their loud dazzling was represented.

Gregg Michael was called in Baptism
in the summer of ‘61 at St. Elizabeth’s Church
on l87th Street in Washington Heights
between Broadway and Saint Nick,
a New York church the Irish built
in a neighborhood named
for named for a slave-owning general
we call “the father
of our country.” St. Elizabeth,
patron of difficult pregnancies
was the mother of the miracle
baby John the Baptist
whom many in his time
mistook for the Messiah.

After the church part, it was friends back to the house,
up five flights on West l90th near, where the gals wore chokers
of pearl and festive frocks and nylons with garter hooks and snaps
revealed when they placed their maraschino garnished Whiskey
Sours down as they stooped to lift toddlers up
from their spots on the oilcloth
floor, their several scents fusing: Aquanet, Jean Nate,
Four Roses and Cashmere Bouquet
as they ascended from coifs and wrists
to collide in a stifling clash with living room Pall-
Mall clouds and Aqua Velva, Vitalis, Schaeffer
(for when you're having more than one) beer.
A bright ham stuck with cloves sat up front and
center on the folding table, surrounded by
potato salad, short stacks of Wonder
bread and cold cuts arrayed. If anything rotated
on the phonograph turntable it was the Clancy Brothers,
singing The Minstrel Boy or Four Green Fields --

Long time ago,
said the fine old woman
Long time ago
this proud old woman did say
There was war and death
Plundering and pillage
My children starved
By mountain valley and sea
And their wailing cries
Shook the very heavens
My four green fields
Ran red with their blood, said she.

The father of Gregg Michael
didn't write very often but
he drank like a writer, kept his typewriter
prominently displayed, and fancied himself
as “a writer.” He had committed
a few dozen verses of Robert
Service to memory. He had managed
to type up a chronicle of the times,
a dirty little book with “Revolution”
in its title. The mother of the man's young,
adding her secretarial acumen to the mix,
typed up and submitted
the manuscript around to every publisher in New York.
There were nibbles, but mostly there was rejection.
The would-be author soon gave up writing,
blaming his failure on Jew publishers, the Donkey wife,
“the job,” and the Pope (four brats in five years).
He gave up trying to hit ‘The Big Time,’
gave up seeking Fame and Fortune.

Although he gave up working as a writer,
he never gave up drinking like one,
talking about being one, or calling himself
a “writer.” Sometimes when
he was really in the bag
he even called himself “a poet.”
“I wish my sons , “ he used to say,
“I wish my sons could string a sentence together
the way you can. I wish my sons
had your your balls,”
he used to say to me,
his first born,
the daughter,
named for the Irish
grandfather; called after the angel
clad in armor and boots
“I wish my sons had your talent,”
He used to say,
pulling me close
beside him on the couch,
against my will,
as I pulled away,
his whiskey-breath syllables running dopily
together like some lost train
of thought run into a bog,
his brute nature all proudly out.
“I wish any one of my three sons
could write like you.
I wish I could take that away
from you, and give it to them.
That kind of talent
is wasted
on a woman.”

If he had been any kind of a writer,
the father of the magical Gregg
Michael would have understood
the sin in that.
If he’d been any kind of a father
he might have thought it
without spelling it out.
If he had been any kind of a poet
the old man would well have known
it doesn't work that way.
If the father had been any kind of a writer
it would have taken him up,
The Word, in its wings.
If he had been any kind of a writer,
neither Donkey wife, nor brats,
nor “The Force,” nor any Pope,
nor even “the sauce” could have
kept him from it --
Michael -- Michele -- Do you
renounce Satan and all his works?
I do renounce him.
I do renounce him.
If the man had been any kind of a father,
his daughter would never have torched
those few pages of his novel that night
he came in with his load on, and loaded
his 38 revolver for effect,
so that when he stuck it up
against the head of the mother
of his fine sons,
the result would be dramatic.

If he’d been any kind of a writer
it wouldn’t have taken him
three years -- three years
for the wordsmith-cum-lieutenant
to discover the incinerated page or two
my transgression, my unholy blow.

If he’d been any kind of a writer
he would have known
the Muse is a “broad.”
The Muse ferocious and hard
to figure.

What kind of Muse
would waste her song
on the likes of him?
There was no amplitude,
no plenitude, no filling up
with spirit, no inspiration,
no fervor, no Grace, no love
for, no confidence in
The Word.
His Muse never had his back.
And he, he never had the balls
to stick it out
like his daughter.

Italicized sections are excerpts from
Four Green Fields, lyrics by Tommy Makem

Pressure and Heat

Marilyn the Tortoise, was bequeathed to my brothers and me in ‘69
by our drug-dealing Cuban building superintendent who, running
one step ahead of the local Anti-Crime Unit,
was forced to leave his French
Provincial mustard velveteen sectional
sofa and the largest RCA model television
money could buy. He packed up what he could of his tight cellar
dwelling in haste, leaving family pet, Marilyn, behind.
She lived her truncated reptilian existence in a roasting pan
lined with gravel; she ate lettuce when we thought to feed her,
and had little choice but to shit where she ate.
Thinking her dead, one day, we discarded her.
Little did we know, tortoises fly
in the face of time -- almost as if death fails
to tunnel into the tender part of their living meat.
Little did we know our Chelonian -- our Testudine, Marilyn,
descended directly from the Triassic age.
Little did we know the tortoise we neither
named nor renamed might have lived
a hundred years had we not
treated her like garbage,
consigning her to a slow death by negligence.
We felt sorry and stupid and full of
guilt and fear at the pediatrician’s office
as we read up on tortoises in Children’s Highlights
and discovered our Marilyn, who had lived a life unmarred
by the vicissitudes of glamour, might have been hibernating
when we left her for dead. We toyed with imagining
she had surpassed our expectations by cheating death,
that Marilyn had scratched her way out of the garbage room
on those slow claws of hers, her life preserved,
scutes unscathed, and had ventured down Broadway
to the northernmost limit of Van Cortland Park
where she might graze free in a world more capacious
than the silvery oblong limits of her roasting pan.
The tortoise comes closer than many to deathlessness,
but immortality eludes even these creatures.
“Athanatos” she was not,
though Marilyn Monroe was
sometimes called a “goddess,”
after whom our tortoise was named;
she lacked the carapace that serves as armor
offering protection from predators.
And though premature death
penetrated Marilyn, she persisted, ever-
frozen above the grate, the white skirt of her
frock, a buttercream flourish, an Elizabethan collar
aloft, a circumnavigating froth about her full
hips for our pleasure. We loved our dumb bomb-
shell blonde. We loved her nude
pinup shots on the beach
where the wind lifted her fair
mess of tresses and caressed her pink
freckled flesh. We loved her gleam, her slow motion
Miltown ode to her “best friends.” Whether heart-
shaped or pear-shaped, it’s all coal
converted to ice under the pressure of heat
that wends its way toward the prismatic
luster of the whiteness that is full
of color, improbable and rare. We loved
the genuine blonde whose platinum
came from a bottle. We loved our Marilyn,
more concubine than queen, who captivated us;
we prized our glistening treasure,
more adoring than adored, adorned,
incandescent and ablaze, yet dying
too soon; fated to become a monument.
Marilyn would be 80 today, old as a tortoise,
with brown roots and her cartilaginous flesh gone
grey, but forever sewn into her Happy Birthday Mr. President
gown, her pink wiggle deliciously bound
in a luminescent mesh like fresh catch
shimmering on a line, her mouth a ring of blood,
translucent as she was transparent,
whom the camera loved, who developed in the dark,
fatherless; orphan daughter of a madwoman, child-
less child, shuttling from man to man in search --
We loved our serial adulteress, our heavy-lidded slob,
our beaming, extravagant latecomer, our woeful
comedienne, our glittering junkie, our starlet spawned in
Spring who failed to claw her way to Autumn.
We loved her breathless baby timbre and
those real tits God gave her. We loved the moist
tenderness of her generous living flesh, her damaged
divinity. We adored our Mrs. DiMaggio
whose Yankee Clipper left roses on her grave for years
after she took a Louisville slugger to his heart.
We loved the Commander-in-Chief's ‘booty call,’
the playwright’s fetish, Albert Einstein’s wet dream --
and though she was anything but Spartan, we loved her
as some Helen of Troy for our day, the piece of
ass that launched a thousand ships.

Boob

l:56, 2:09, 3:43, 4:11... a digital clock flipped off
red lucent numerals in the spare charming
space where delirious with somnolence
and the accumulating lack of it,
I would enter and rock
in the blackness
to tend to those who would teach
while altering permanently
how I did it
the true value
of sleep, and its dreamy contents.
Often when I entered
watery cat-cries of appetite
and insecurity capsized me
and left me weak with love-
sickness amid blue stars and
baby rabbits, in the presence of
my heart’s desire
made flesh, my five-pound lovers
with heads no larger than my heart
or fist, with fontanels not yet
having drifted to cleave,
like continents sifting toward abridgment --
They needed a hand to support their necks.
They needed time to get the hang of it.
They needed official lactation expertise.
They needed me to stroke
their tongues in a flattening motion.
They needed to attain gestational age.
They needed a stubborn Irish Molly
at the helm of Operation Mammary.
They needed the bitch
attached to the hooters
to marshal her leonine defiance
when the hospital nurse and the moron
manning the La Leche phones
pissed in the new mother’s milk,
saying: “A baby who takes a bottle
will never latch on.” Or, as Adam Klein
extrapolating, quipped: “Better dead, than bottle fed.”
They needed me to believe
they would catch on.
They needed me to know
they would latch on.
They needed me to nurture
the hunch I’d be their lunch today
at 13 and 9 had I not plucked them
from my breast at 3 like some kinder,
gentler Lady Macbeth.
They needed neither Enfamil nor Isomil.
They did not need the “Simulated Nursing System:”
consisting of tubular plastic to connect
siphoned mother's milk to nipples
designed to fool the baby --
but they needed me
to give that a shot.
What they really needed
was their mother to wear combat boots,
What they really needed was
a real motherfucker.

On those frigid January nights,
I fed a baby every hour,
every hour between midnight and that instant
when a gradual progression toward light
catalyzes rapidly and collapses
into incandescent sapphire,
so I turned to a cretin in the dark.
Though I was wholly
submissive to the issue
born of a marriage to my ‘one love,’
helped along by well-stoked hope
and the alchemy of meat and love
which bore the imprimatur
of a voice in the light
and my already impressive
capacity to adore
in the abstract --
I was all theirs, but
I was still mine too --
So I craved a voice
in the night with talk in it,
a cock of the walk talk
that was its own voice
I gave myself to the light
of music and love, by day, but
I turned to a broad-shouldered dope
to help me through the long nights.
He was all wrong for me,
but he was all right, too.
His was the signal through which
my maiden (m’aidé!)
nocturnal transmissions
had come 25 years earlier.
Electrons traveling to me
at the speed of light, assembling
into magnetic fields of auditory
vision. I picked up WABC
in the Rockaway Bungalows
through a receiver shaped like a suitcase,
My birthday gift the summer men
walked on the moon.
There were buds in the bikini top,
and an Irish boy from Undercliff
in the Bronx, out for the season --
When sand jammed the works
rendering its turntable non-
operational, Cousin Brucie came through
with the Fifth Dimension and Crystal Blue Persuasion --
“In the Year 25, 25 ("…if woman can survive--").”

But this girl was a woman now --
And it was no longer vinyl
the station’s overnight jockey was spinning
in the winter of ’ 95 but politics.
It felt good, getting
pissed as I changed diapers,
It felt good to be disgusted
by moronic right-wing positions.
It made me feel like I still had opinions,
that a world beyond
the fruit my womb
still thrummed with
rough edges, short fuses
and a long memory:
a world well-embroidered
with prosody and music,
grit, conflict, and muscle
and heat no amount of oxytocin
could neutralize. He waxed prosaic
on education, religion, government and crime;
He was a toady to the megalomaniac
Republican mayor of NY,
an apologist for the Church,
a mook in love with the ‘stars
and stripes,’ the Armed Forces, “Boys in Blue” --
He was everything I can’t stand
or get enough of in a man, all
rolled into a single Meathead.
I turned him on, I tuned him in,
I used him each night, until my Prince came
through -- until he and the Princess
gained proper mastery of their lips and tongues.
I felt ashamed, choosing the boob over Coltrane and Mahler.
Choosing the boob over National Public Radio’s trenchant commentary.
Choosing the boob over Sonido Suave, Spanish lessons with a beat
you can dance to and “corazon” in every strain.
Choosing the boob I saw a few times on the Uptown 4
from Utica to Woodlawn and back again.
A big dumb sexy animal with tight
T-shirt biceps and a red beret trailed by a
coterie of hot Latino toughs, martial
artists, busted-out Crips and Bloods, leaning
against the (Cuidado, Peligroso Do not lean
against the train) doors, juvie grads and unarmed
hoplites with dental gold, walkie-talkies and
crude tats, amped on bravado and justice adequate
to give a dopey half-high college girl hurtling through
the South Bronx past Mount Eden and Tremont
a false sense of security in the middle of the night.

Becoming Mom granted no immunity
to the sexy rasp of the big dope in the dark.
There was new life, sure, but I wasn’t dead.
A bad boy with a pair of pumped-up pecs
could still get to me. So I chose the boob
over Sibelius, over Dylan, over Callas.
What need had I for song?
My daylight waking hours were song
incarnate: rapturous love songs
odes to new spawn, torch songs,
aubades and serenades, arias and
songs trumpeted by haloed
cygnets bathed in dawny light --
Somehow listening to the overnight clod
kept me from being swallowed whole.
I liked his trattoria spots and how he peppered
the palaver with “brasciole” and “Va Naple!”
gleaned from a Barese Canarsie pedigree.
I liked the dirty water hot dog-gobbling competition
recaps and malaprops -- "credos" for “kudos” --
One night I even failed to shift
to another frequency when the overnight oaf
characterized poets and “poetresses”
as loony kazoonies and called
Ginsberg “a perve.” I was laughing
through a certain desperation
that was a flip side of elation
in the wee hours. Footage to
counterbalance echoed in
the soft spot in my head
I reserved for idiots;
decades earlier in 79, the lug-
head had made the local Eyewitness News.
He was running his ‘deez and doze’ mouth
about Mahatma Gandhi. I enjoyed the hint
of anarchy in the mastermind behind those mass transit
‘angels’ who danced out the pin-
head of the chief operating boob,
and I marveled over how a jacked jerk
like him might even know who Gandhi was!
So each night I welcomed the throwback
whose 50,000 watts of powerful sound
even the Mafia failed to silence
into my sancto sanctorum,
where I let him get a piece of me
in the middle of those mid-winter nights,
as I lifted one breast at a time
out of my robe, and inserted a rude
digit into baby bird mouths, bright
as gutted cherries, and squeezed
with thumb and forefinger
as if upon a trigger, aiming
to force open the jaw,
in the hope of jump-
starting the sucking reflex.
There was nothing radiantly Gerbers
about this scenario --
but the babies needed me
to be both muscle and nectar,
they needed me to be
three parts thug and one part Madonna.


After 6 weeks they latched on.
Tiny Falstaffs, they quaffed and slugged
and slurped like happy baby hogs,
nursing incessantly and in tandem.
Sometimes the twins held hands
as they drank and dozed,
capitalizing on the bottomless
amplitude of supply and demand,
bellying up to the Milk Bar
whenever the desire struck.
We didn’t care who saw
or what anyone had to say.
When the kids reached for their sustenance in a cup
it was the rayon, nylon and spandex cup
of an black 34D underwire demi called “Emma.”
Guys rubbernecking thought it was hot, or a threat, or both.

Once, upon watching the son glug away with gusto,
old Mary Madigan was put in mind
of a 4 year-old-she knew in County Mayo
whose family would stop by Ruddy’s on Sunday after mass.
Throughout the afternoon, one would catch the boy
running about the pub looking for his mother.
Finding her, the lad would call out:
“Hey Ma, how about a suck?”

When the third child came, she knew exactly what to do;
she wasn’t fifteen minutes in the material world
before she was guzzling like a field hand.
She was beautiful!
I called her “Breastina.”
She lived on my hip and claimed my body for her own.
I was so in love with her
I hardly fought it
when she assumed herself to be the rightful owner
of the sweater meat.
She became my “Crazy Dangerous Boyfriend”
Precocious in all things, she talked early.
When, on rare occasion, I said “no”
to the bodice ripping sprite,
as she reached like a pie-eyed pirate
for my decolletage; she’d engage me in dialectic
and most eloquently advocate in favor
of her right to nurse at will.
So much trouble to go to --
when that deep brown stare
alone would have easily done the trick --
Why argue, when you can just melt
your opponent?

translation: excerpt from Dante's Paradiso XXXIV

... Madonna, so great and full of valor are you
That whoever longs for grace yet fails to turn to
you consigns his desire to try flying without wings.

Your goodness not only gives succor
but most often, for those who ask,
you bestow it even before the petition is uttered.

In you there is mercy; in you compassion and pity are bound,
and magnanimity and magnificence, joined. In you,
the bounty of all goodness in any creature can be found.

This one, here, who from the most gaping hole
the universe contains, reaching to this high point,
has seen, one by one, the lives of the holy

souls, supplicant, now asks that by virtue
of your grace you might raise his eyes
that he might look toward the ultimate salvation.

And I who never more for the vision of my heart
Yearned so much as now burn for his --
all my prayers go out to him -- I pray they do not fall short

that you release every darkening cloud you can of it,
the shadowy pall that falls over his mortality, by the power of your prayers,
so that highest delight of full bliss might be displayed for his benefit.

Again I ask, you O Queen, whose powers of inspiration
can bring about what you desire, that in light of such a vision,
he may preserve the wholeness of his adoration.

Conquer his heart as you guard his mortal motions.
See Beatrice with so many beatific hearts
attending her, see her hand hands clasped in devotion.

Those eyes by God beloved and revered,
fixed on him who prays, so demonstrating
how to her all oratory is dear --

Then, into the Eternal Light she turned her
gaze into which it is not to be believed that any
clear-eyed creature ought venture.

And as I approached the finite reach
of all longing, as well it should
so did the ardor of my desire outstretch.

Bernard signaled to me and smiled and though
I turned to him then, I was already taken
where he wanted me to go,

by my eyes, to look, my vision becoming more pure
more genuine as more and more I found myself entering the ray
of highest of light which radiates so true and sure.

From that instant on my vision was greater than my power
to speak, a faculty mighty vision causes to surrender;
so too memory in the face of such offense, memory falters,

as with the dreamer who still sees even after he wakes
the passionate impression that remains,
though a dizzying imbalance takes

time for him to solve. Such am I, with vision almost ceasing
as the sweetness distills through me
borne in my heart, sweetness ever increasing,

So like snow in sunlight as it dissolves, it is lost; so
lost in wind like the very light
leaves bearing sentences Sibyl’s oracles spoke.

O highest light so elevated above any mere
mortal conceiving, to my mind
restore even a touch of what you appeared

to be and to lend power to my tongue’s articulations
that a scintilla your glory contains
might be left for future generations;

that by turning somewhat to memory
and intoning a little in these verses,
the better conceived will be your victory.

I believe the sharp intensity I suffered
as I beheld the ray of living light might have smitten
me fully had my eyes not averted it.

I remember how I dared to sustain
this, until with my eyes I attained
the perfect aspect of infinite goodness.

O abounding grace by which I presumed
to fix vision on the Eternal Light
By which my vision was nearly wholly consumed --

kept from taking it in -- O, abounding grace I presumed
to fix my vision on -- O Eternal Light -- so much so
that I came to somehow behold all it contained.

In its profundity I saw that its content bound
by love in a unified volume
whose loose leaves the universe scattered around;

substance, accident and their customs,
elements conflated in such a way
that what I can say of it is a pale glimmer of simple light.

The universal form of it -- the nugget I fail to understand --
yet I believe, I grasped and held it, because its greatness
blossoms now as I tell of it, and I feel my joy expand.

one sole point of this more loads me down with lethargy
than that 25 centuries did in the case of Neptune
when by the shadow of the Argo

he found himself astounded. So my mind was confounded,
suspended entranced in staring, fixed, immobile
attending ever enchanted with beholding.

Who looks to that light becomes so rapt
that turning away to another aspect
is impossible to consent to, however the good that

is the object of the will
collected therein and goes beyond
its defects to become perfection, still

my words will come up short, fall
short of what I remember, as if spoken from the mouth
of an infant who still bathes his tongue at the breast.

It was no less a simple semblance,
that Living Light I was taking in
because always it is and was as it was before but the substance

and object of my vision was growing mighty;
in light of this sole appearance, it was changing
it was being transformed, and I too

was changing. In the profound and clear substance
of the highest light appeared three circles
of three colors and a sole countenance

and rainbow by rainbow each one seemed
to reflect another, and the third was fire,
spirits breathing into one another in equal streaming

Measure. My words fall short, so frail,
is the conception I fail to capture in words
it is not enough to call my pale

rendering small -- O Eternal Light which in you alone is seated
your sole intention, intelligence you alone
contain, how it smiles, in love, on you!

That circulating conception
which appeared as light reflected
as it registered somewhat in my perception,

which inside itself was its own color
then same seemed to me painted in our image,
and my vision in you was well set.

Like the geometer who for all his thinking, fixates
on squaring the circle, but can not retrieve
the principle he truly needs

so was I in the face, in light of this vision of new grace,
longing to see how the image with the circle
fits and there where it finds its place.

But I wasn’t wearing the proper plume:
had my mind not been stunned by a the jolt --
like a lightning bolt through which what I desired came.

Here, imagination failed, but already my desire and will solved
into ideal equal motion as they revolved
in unison with Love that moves the sun and all its other stars.

2 excerpts from Stations of Light

XIII The Women Holding a Vigil in the Upper Room Are Made in God’s Image


The women are holding a vigil, they are waiting in the upper room.
The women are holding a vigil, they are waiting in the upper room for their prayers to work.
The women holding a vigil in the upper room are waiting with all of the other disciples.
The women holding a vigil in the upper room are made in God’s image.
The women holding a vigil are waiting, their power is waxing, but their voices are steadfast.
The women holding a vigil in the upper room are patient but they mourn and lament waste.
Fruitful and generous, the women holding a vigil in the upper room mother and nurse.
The woman in the upper room holding a vigil know there is strength in their number.
The women in the upper room have confidence in mystery and are wise.
The women in the upper room who are holding a vigil, study and discern.
That their legacy in battle is a meager one does not imply
that the women holding a vigil in the upper room waiting can not fight.
The women holding a vigil in the upper room are a ferocious
tribe of peace makers.
The women are waiting in the upper room for deliverance
when it comes they will be ready and in place, “standing at attention.”








XIV
Pentecost (A love poem)


In this quaking chamber
of my heart I carry a torch
where a halo might rest.

I summon the force
that drawn downward might
dissolve the lock the mind

holds upon itself.
I summon the might.
The voice in the light

that lavishes the strength
of its fire upon me,
the voice that breaks

news, that force that breaks
open the Word, the promise
kept, the created Word

more splendid than a newborn’s wail,
than heroic feet, than cello strings or
the commotion of larks as they feast on scarlet

berries in the cold, wings
adorned with glints of
light as they intone and cavort:

the Word, immediate
as a caress,
as a kiss, as if --

to say: take a piece of my heart
as if to say: it burns for you, my dove,
as if to say: take all of me

as if to say: whoever you are I love you.
as if to say: whomever you call me I love --
as if to say: come, Love. As if to say: come.

2 excerpts from Via Crucis

I. Jesus is Condemned to Death


In the Antonia Fortress a sentence
is handed down, a show of
force goes up against
restraint, goes up against
the bright throb of mortal
meat battered in
concert with shattered
bone, winged
will in flame and
blood on fire's
protest --

an imagist Creator sheds,
blood the rose,
blood the God --

in God's own

image,
God is
me

and I in God.
In my body
a flustered dove
flails in its cage,

failing it grows
restless within

its holding pen
my heart

Inhabits --
O pure bird
that trembles
in the pliant nest

of bones my
thorax forms,
a cage, to encircle,
contain and circum-
scribe an unbound
fluttering even as
my power
withers and propelled by this
plump and stubborn striving

pump of ages and hours
I drain and run
low, I cower
but I do not

petrify into a corner-
stone which promises

to hurtle me through arteries
of decades that reverse
and catapult

all
I am
toward a fate
that is mine

to seal and alter.
A gavel has
fallen. Rulers
have uttered adjudicating
syllables; now muscle
calls the dirge,
makes itself clear
refines out of the terror. A sentence

handed
down --
I come

clean --
a kiss to
cake

my lips
with sand.
I serve,

a strategy
for torture is
in its place.

I embrace
this laurel
etched in blood,

and sandstorm
seething, and lashes
in the auburn

light of nearing
distance. At temple's
Northwest reach

starts the snake
my path is. Outside
the walls of any city

you can name, find
the course
I wind as I am borne

out of the place
of the Roman garrison,
wings scraping against rock --

I fully
submit. Where
my blood falls

roses
urge; where my tears run,
orchards erupt, where the sole

of my foot
falls, kingdoms

grow
erect--
I walk like a man

led out of the Praetorium
led out from
the light

into the pall
of false
charges, but

I love
my jailer, and
loving, I call

out
I demand --
Out, into the

open, Antonia Fortress gates,
fly open that I may fly
forth that I may fly in

to the light -- that I
might harrow --
that I might demand

the gates open --
that children of the Creator may fly forth!

That with my words I may open

Nairobi Prison's maze of chain-link and razor wire,
Brasil’s Carandiru, of California’s Pelican Bay,

let the gates fly open --

Fly open gates of Auschwitz, Birkenau (Zone of Interest),
Bergen-Belsen that the six million martyrs may fly forth
to the face of God. I storm the Bastille, I let fly open those gates,
I storm Shelby County Jail in Tennessee and New Mexico
Penitentiary, South of Santa Fe, that the children

of the Creator may fly forth,

I demand the gates of Venezuela’s Caita, Sabaneta

and Ciudad Bolívar

fly open, that the children of the Creator may fly forth.
And the gates of Zimbabwe’s, Chikurubi, Al-wathba in Abu Dhabi

and the Bangkok Hilton.

I demand the gates of Afghanistan’s Shebarghan,
Australia’s prisons for profit, push
open, and Burma’s Bassein and Buthitaung,
fly open that the children of the Creator may soar out,
and Britain’s Preston Prison, and China’s Kompong Thom.

I demand the gates of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo

fly open

that the children of the Creator may soar forth,
and the maze of Long Kesh, and the gates of Alcatraz,
I demand the gates of Louisiana’s Angola, Andersonville,
the North ran in the south,
fly open that the children of the Creator may go forth -
I raze the prison Slavery is,
I storm Death Rows everywhere

that the prison which makes murderers of citizens
might release executioner and prey
in one bold gust,

all children all of the Creator --
I storm Pentonville and Watson handing poets back their pens.
I neutralize the minds that conceive and perfect

all prisons everywhere.

I throw open the gates of every Hell the children of

the Creator can

fashion, I open Polmont that its untried youth may fly forth,
I open “Hardman’s” Barlinnie and Salton, and Kilmaidham,
I release patriots along with felons -- children of the Creator --

I release political prisoners like me
that all prisons in space and time, shall be empty,
the children of the Creator having soared forth --
I open Prince George County Correctional,
I release Baltimore City Detention Center’s

human roosters, cock-fighting with shanks,

I convert birds of prey into birds of prayer

by the power of the Dove,

I release the inhabitants of all man-made squalor,
I unlock the prison of female genital mutilation,
I release every maimed daughter to the gentleness of God,
I free Fulan Gong and Myanmar monks and Tibetan angels’
and Christians of North Korea martyred every day

for the double crime
of worship and contemplation,

may the children of the Creator fly forth
For love, I crush the prison of subtle misogyny and all patriarchy
For love of all who might cure but refuse --
For love, I free the jailer,
For love, I release bigots, homophobes, racists from

the holding pen

of self-hatred, and fear engineers -- let their gates fly open
and their closets fill with heat and light.
For love, I open Rikers, Attica, the Tombs
that the children of god may fly forth,
In love I demand the chambers of all

lock-down hearts
be bathed in my radiance,

For love I free henchmen and executioners

I storm
where kings dwell,
I toss the keys of grandiose cathedrals

into seas I
stir with quiet might
into a froth

and salt with my brightness --


IV Jesus Meets His Mother


You are all,
Mother,

you could
never stop

in me, as
I am all

you
could

never imagine.
One

last time,
say “yes.”

Call out
at my crowning,

See me as
I am

at the threshold
between being

and not --
watch me

watch you;
know

the full
force of

sorrow,
so you may

throw it back
at me,

the dark
weight

Love
is. Say

“yes,”
bring forth

new life
once again.

Forgive me,
Mother,

for you know
now what I do.

Feel how
I am

in you,
fruit of your womb,

which, ripe,
now falls

not
far

from the tree.

Confessor

I confess a dark
night is burning

inside me. Easter
came, but I failed

to open.
“If I am

still
so sad

in two weeks time,
I’ll go

for mood elevators.
I heard on the radio

the mood elevators
are in the water.

It’s in the water.
We’re all on

mood elevators.
What a relief!

Even you,
my confessor,

assuming
you take

water
fromthe tap,

are on mood

elevators.

God can be
a kind

of a mood

elevator.

As you know,
the word

"baptize"

means “drunk.”

When first love
was lost to me

through death,
I felt my beloved

belonged
dead. Not so

this time --
Maybe God is not

finished
persuading me.

It might
shock you

to know

that

so far I have

written

nothing

about her.

I seem

afraid

to look

at notes

I took

at the side of her

last bed.

It was as

if her last

weight

swam off
in my mind

when with your hand
on her head

you said
“Bernadette, I

absolve--”
What I said

in the box --
holds true;

sometimes it is not helpful
being

an artist --

senses so keen --

A charge

passed

through
my body, as if

she were being
led out of the desert

her flesh
(of whose flesh

I am) had
become,

versus fading,
versus ending.

I am not sure
whether the Holy

Spirit, magnetic
and concrete

was winding
through me

or whether I was
coming down

with something.
Oft aloft,

on ‘autopilot’
when it comes

to faith, daft,
some think,

to permit
myself

the luxury
of a loving

god,
I am,

in truth,
short on faith;

I go on
faith fumes.

I’m lousy
at detachment.

Maybe that's why
(I haven't been called

to ordination
yet.) I envy that,

in you,
the detachment.

Maybe that is why
I write this to you --

as if writing this
is a kind

of being called --
so you can read it

and put it its proper place --
Who the hell

else, might

I tell,

for Christ's sake?

Confessor to

confessor,
but detachable you.

You know,With or

Without You

was playing

the moment

she died,

the Benedictine Monks'

cover -- a song --
by U2.

Yerushalayim

Next year in the City where Suleiman the Magnificent built Bab-al-Amud --
(Damascus) Gate of Columns -- Next year at St. Steven’s or Dung Gate --

Next year at Absalom’s tomb or that of the Prophet Zacharias,
at the Grandiose tomb of the family of Beni Hazir --

Next year at the tomb of the Blessed Virgin, at her place of dormition.
Or at the tomb of the Kings of Judah; let’s crack it open
like Herod did, questing for treasure.

Next year among the Egyptian design of Ez Zehwele’s sepulchers
built into calcareous rock like homes of Silwan, let us descend the 32 steps
into a grotto where a natural siphon yields intermittent
humming of water on the move.

Next year, in the ancient city of “sparkling eyes”
a