Paul Celan quote

In his Bremen Prize speech, Paul Celan said of language after Auschwitz that:

“Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all."

For Ezra

Visiting you in the foreign country of the just-born

Country of my blood citizenship

I speak to you in the language of touch

The language of breath

Practice of rocking

You smell like hot milk

The moment around you is curved

You are heavy with light

I love above all your fontanel and its pulse

Below all I love the purpose of you

Wise gazer

Your long fingers looking for a piano  

You, Ezzie, are still all of us

You are the sweet Mama and Dada of your making

Yourself

I surf the waves of your particles

Entangled across 3 thousand miles

                -- Vancouver-New York, February/March 2013

Still waiting

Sixty years later 
Still waiting 
For Marianne O'Connor's
Second kiss

                   -- Vancouver, January 27, 2013

Woke up from a dream wanting

Woke up from a dream wanting

To say goodbye to words

Wanting to see them float away

Bobbing on dark waves

Like candles in paper boats

On Lake Patzcuaro

On the Day of the Dead

                           -- New York, January 15, 2013

Report from Carnepropia

Sleeping alone these months

Citizen of the land of Carnepropia

Released on my own recognizance

Neither downcast nor joyful

Listening to my earworms

To the whispered counsel of my shadow 

                                   -- New York, November 9, 2012

Day at the circus

Came the circus to town

I stood in line

Bought my ticket

Expectations low

And was surprised

For a change the clowns weren’t sad

Clearly they’d made love all afternoon

The acrobats had wings

But were human after all

One of them cried after falling into the net

I could tell that one of the horses was galloping

In a parallel universe

Defying the whip

The mama elephant with huge scars on her side

Cut short her routine

To nuzzle her calf

A terrified girl in the crowd  

Was being comforted by a frightened boy

“The sawdust on the cuffs of my pants

Is so beautiful,”

I thought

“I’ll put my head into the lion’s mouth”

And I did

I did

I did!

That day I was

-- to paraphrase MacLeish --

Seven of the nineteen good people in the world

                                                -- New York, October 9, 2012 

Before the heat gets unbearable

Before the heat gets unbearable
Breakfast in the Secret Garden on 97th Street

Iced coffee whitefish on sesame bagel

Lucky me in the shade
Of one of the city’s only peach trees!

Questions pile up

Today’s question:
Does entanglement

"Spooky action at a distance" (Einstein)

Occur only in the quantum world?

What about that zig-zag couple
Of cabbage butterflies?

What about Rachel tugging at my heart

Across great distances?

In the Secret Garden a grown man trembles
Before the laws of physics

                                    -- New York, July 12, 2012 

Brooklyn dusk

First fireflies of the season
Drunk like me
On the last musk
Of linden blossoms

And if you ask me
Who I am now
I'll whisper your name

                                     -- New York, June 23, 2012

Orson Awesome

For my grandson, 1 year old

Say you were recently born

And still lived inside a mango

But you were also the most intrepid explorer monkey

And each of your fingers was a different color

And you could finger paint the world 

And of course you knew the abracadabras for every shut thing         

Say you loved veggies with beautiful singing voices

And your first ziggy-zaggy steps were a flying leap for mankind

And you thought your name was Awesome  

And books were your best friends even in the dark

Say you were just-because loved by your momma and poppa and Abuela

And nobody knew about the magic carpet of your dreams

(except Abuelo)

And you could fly around the world meeting each and every one-by-one

And you could kiss your own bellybutton in the bathtub

And stack all first things next to their names and knock the tower down

Say your first sayings were historic babblings for world peace 

And your elbows had two minds of their own

And Fear feared you because you were the bravest brave on Copley Street

And you could crack the sky with your cries for justice

 

You’d be Orson and Orson would be you

          

Justly Orson

Muchly Orson

Orson Awesome!

                                                            -- New York, December 17, 2011

  

Giving out grades

Today I gave the trees D’s

My neighbor’s dogs F’s

C- for the sunrise and its deficit of purple

C- for the English language, too

“Room for improvement”

I sentenced

All day

Grading the fucking world

Flinging F’s far and wide

Flunking food, air, birth

Prime numbers and the terrible spaces between atoms

Flunking failure and success

The high and the mighty

Flunking my windpipe and my shadow

D for the cutting of umbilical cords

D for evolution, veggies and flesh

Straight F’s for misters, sisters and twisters

Grading all afternoon

And into the night

Saving my A’s for a rainy day

                                                -- New York, August 1, 2011