There is a film 
on continuous replay 
where I see you sleeping 

I cry 
frozen by too many choices 
barricaded behind 
a concrete wall 
of too many emotions 
feeling wrong 
but 
oh so right 
threading awareness 
fleeting time 
cancered chances 

There is a film on 
continuous replay 
where I see you sleeping 

I cry

For weeks the list floats in my head

But it's fuzzy and not easily read

The checkmarks won't stick

The clock does its tick

And that book, was it one he just read?

Do they have the same number of things?

Accidental sib gift-slighting stings

A ball of lights haunts me

It isn't the best tree

The manger is missing a king!

Oh cookies, please please bake yourself

This Santa's feeling more like an elf

Here, you wear the hat

And the pillow for fat

The suit with the fake ermine pelt

A deep breath and now i feel better

A movie, a beer and a sweater

The day it will come

What's done is what's done

This giver's done being a fretter

(Saint Petersburg, 1905)

    Adagio: The Palace Square.

Cold and quiet the crowd of cellos
gathers like snow in the clouds,
menace of timpani rumble,
an earthquake beneath the square,
a call of brass from some distant place.

    Allegro: The Ninth of January.

A restlessness of burning violins,
a swirling blizzard, a sudden riot
of snare drums like gunfire,
timpani horses thunder,
to the march and clash of gleaming brass,
a panic of piccolos and woodwinds.

    Adagio: Eternal Memory

A bent mother searches among the thump of drums
in the quiet dark of deserted streets,
picks through remnants of shattered violas,
crushed bass clarinets and trampled flutes
for her son, the harpist, who lies frozen,
stretched over the splintered carcass
of his wrecked and ruined instrument.

    Adagio non troppo: Tocsins

Tocsins toll in the churches,
a call in resilient G minor,
call to a future of violent trumpets,
trombones, cymbals of power, tubular bells,
celesta and strings but, for now,
the music is tacet in the square.

Symphony No. 11, OP 103 D. Shostakovich

If you speak to me,

Please understand this:

You have no right to know who I am. 

Anything you have to say to me is

Meant for a girl you once knew.

I am not her.

I am not the ashes, heap of ashes,

You left in your wake. I am not 

The tears you once wiped from my eyes,

I am not the ones you once cried.

I am not the one who made you 

What you are. I am not the fire

At your tongue. I am not the trophy

You once won. 

I am not the pretty broken thing,

Busted bird with a busted wing,

I am not the one who held the

Words you said. I did not share your bed.

I am not your veiled, weeping sun, and I

Am not your laughing half-moon. Yes,

We're gone. We ended too soon, but frankly

I'm not here to swoon over you. 

I am not your lover, though I loved you so,

I am the winter and I am the snow,

Beautiful and cold, I am the place you're still

Stuck; intrepid soles sinking into mud.

You may have killed me, lover mine,

But I stand here breathing, one of a kind,

And, darling, I'm back for your blood. 

do not fall in love with me

if you don't want to be broken.

i am a glass-shattering rain

my eyes are the eyes of a storm,

yours are transparent windowpanes.

when i am done with you

you will understand why hurricanes

and people share the same names.

Layers of fog
     early morning
          a gauze bandage

covering a wound of swamp
     shallow bowl of cat tail
          common reed

lily pad
     duck weed
          Siberian iris

long hollow stems
     of snake grass like
          miniature shafts of bamboo.

Frogs, snakes, muskrat
     fawn twins
          brought to drink

by a nervous mother,
     alert, ears twitching
          Heron fishing

lifts one leg carefully
     lowering it down again
          into sucking soft ooze

of mucky bottom
     disturbing nothing
          hunching its long body

peering into unmoving water.
     How different from the miles
           downstream where Henry Ford

imprisoned the dark water
     behind his concrete dam
          to power a factory no longer there.

He seemed just another drunk
on a stool at the end of the bar
every night until closing time.

Once he was a pilot.
There is a photo of him
on the wing of a P-36
that he didn’t get off the ground
at Pearl Harbor.

He did a little carpentry after that,
spent little time with his delicate wife
and their three sturdy sons.
He tended a small garden and watched
as life slowly dried like dew.

Sweetwater Sirens call from the black
Their winter gumbo in need of my head
With its old man's mental allspice
My secret recipe

*

when the winds of whim & woe 
threaten to whip and lay waste 
our weathered, winnowed vessel;

as emotional electrical storms erupt 
emitting intermittent lightning strikes, 
causing men and women alike to scurry home
to society’s cerebral shelters;

i am an anchor that tethers;

in a sea of scienter and temporal tempests
threatening to toss us to and fro at high tide,
against cragged, unforgiveable coral;

which, would we make its’ acquaintance,
would spell the end 
of all we love, hope and hold true, 
in other words - we’d die.

i plumb the depths.

rusty, crusted and stolid,
i am an anchor;

long may i anc.
*