a blind flaneur

Amadeo Modigliani. Nude on a Blue Cushion. 1917. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Ms. Modigliani ransacked her archive in search of a poem we could remember but couldn’t recite. She found this one instead. I won’t forget it now.
After the Rain
After the rain the garden reaches
deeper into its quiet green inwardness.
I want our lives to […]

My mother asked me once why I didn’t invite her to my poetry readings. “My poems talk about sex and drugs and things I’d be embarrassed to say in front of my mother,” I said sheepishly. She nailed me with her glare. “Well, I knew enough to conceive you, didn’t I? Put that in your […]

[Photo by Bill Cunningham/NYT]
Bill Cunningham’s latest On The Street photo essay returns to Paris. “Many members of the fashion world at the recent Paris shows,” he says, “seemed to pay homage to the look of a Louise Bourgeois spider sculpture in the Tuileries Garden. The spindly silhouette, it appears, has legs.”
Spiders seem to be making […]

Every poem asks the question, what is a poem? A prose poem seeks the boundary between the modes. I don’t have an answer, but this one pointed me in the direction I wanted to go.
San Francisco 1990
On the day I called my sister and she said her daughter’s baby died, just two days old, I […]

This was written for Tom on the August night in 1975 when the world learned of the death of Dmitri Shostakovich.
Letter to Tom Roberts
I stopped reading books. Is that possible?
My eyes hurt. My doctor says there are no
pain sensors in the eyes
so I can’t explain
how there are appetites so huge, too huge
for books or […]

It’s almost time to get on my knees and grub for early wintergreen and wild mustard. These poems were written separately around 1980, when I was living out of the gardens at the Mill.
Edible Dramas
1. Wild Mustard
Forget the proverb about tiny seeds.
Its truth is the hot green flash
of first leaves on the tongue
when you’re on […]

Lawren Harris. Ice House.
A father’s rant. 1996. For Brendan.
Kerosene
When you need to know
how to stay alive one more day
find some sand, an old oil drum
a gallon of kerosene.
A gallon costs a buck.
If you can’t scrounge a dollar a day
there’s no hope.
Fill the drum half full of sand.
Pour the kerosene slowly
till it soaks to the bottom.
Save […]

Lawren Harris.Afternoon Sun, Lake Superior.
For Brendan the Navigator. 1995. The hardest conversation is the one that may be the last.
Voyageurs
When my heart started again
I was naked on a steel table.
A catheter snaked through
the coronaries like slow fire.
A millimeter, breathe in, another,
breathe out -
When I was running out of time
I waited for you, Brendan.
Rollers swept the […]

Lawren Harris. Clouds, Lake Superior. 1923. [Source: Wikipedia]
One of many poems written on the beach at Whitefish Bay, Lake Superior, where I yearn to return like a migrating loon.
Whitefish Bay 1990
My love sweeps a circle
through the night. I can see it
like the light at Whitefish Point.
It is apprehended more than seen,
the threshold of sight […]

Ms. Modigliani flatly rejected the idea of wintering in Monaco after reading about Princess Caroline’s lost poem. “So now you’re sending poems to princesses?”
“That was thirty years ago. I told you about that.”
“You tell me lots of things. I don’t take it seriously until I see it in writing.”
She was equally dubious in the early […]