Crossing the Tape
Perhaps you too have known Durer’s famous four—
Famine, Pestilence, Death and War
The woodcut of prophecy he made in Germany,
Where he was born.

Fate tried killing me twice,
At least once before I was born,
Killed every grandparent of mine with hate save one,
Drove Father and Mother into hiding
Where they fought to be safe.
I grew proud of their every escape
When we finally crossed the tape into America.

I was a boy of six when polio came dressed as Fate,
It tore my left leg right out from under me,
Taught me to read in bed
And write my life as a poem
Full of small agonies and possible insanity.
I’m proud of my narrow escape;
Much more slowly I crossed the tape.

But Life is a long-distance race,
And I am older than seventy
A remote grandfather of three across a big country.
It’s hard to keep up the pace or stay ahead
Of Durer’s Fate disguised in a viral shape,
Astride a Chinese saddle,
Riding an American horse into battle.

Though my lungs sit free from phlegm now
I’m filled with fear and anxiety for my little family.
Give me the breath for one last escape
Let me cross this tape faster than Fate.

The Vanished World Of Irnya Ambramov
—NYT, May 3, 2022

In Bucha, where the flowers grow fat on the graves
and broken bricks and bent metal fill up the street,
young wives lose their lovers to bullets and thieves

while mothers search the morgues for the brave—
four hundred sons who’ve been cut down like wheat
cold facts in March as flowers grow fat on the graves.

After a hand grenade burns Iryna’s house to the staves
they drive her Oleh like a cow into the street
where wives lose their lovers to bullets and thieves.

In bath robe and slippers, she starts on a mission to save
him stripped of his shirt and knocked off his feet—
in a town where the flowers shall grow fat on his grave.

One shot to the back of his head opens him up like a cave.
She presses his ears spurting blood in their street
where wives lose their lovers to bullets and thieves.

In Bucha, where the flowers grow fat on the graves
broken bricks and bent metal fill up the street,
she begs a captain for death and “also my cat” she raves—
he aims without shooting, laughter filling the street in waves.

Earworms
When you can’t get a word
or words out of your head
until it nests between the ears—
early on it was Sinatra singing
one more for the road
until poetry came my way—
and she said:
because death couldn’t wait for me
and he said:
so long as this doth live
so long lives thee.

Picasso and Eliot offer the response—
great artists don’t borrow they steal
hopefully not about life
but art as an addiction
how it lives on before and after
you spill your last ice cream on the floor.

Before the grass overwhelms you
like a nylon blanket warming the sun
on your knees
and you feel the bloodworm
or earthworm
getting closer
to body and brain
listen to the voices asking
what creature is this in my ear
preparing the soil and grass for me
and after I might answer
it is the soil of fear
and the grass of inevitability.