lunch poem!

not to rip off frank o'hara or anything.


at 11:30 I leave my house at 11:31 an old woman passes with her caretaker grasping at leaves
12:00 I finish an article in The New Leader deploring our homes and schools
12:10 I pry myself up from the lush grass to the sound of bad jazz little white stones like curds at the river
12:30 I eat tom yam kai all by myself at a cut-glass table
a man is whistling on the stoop of the restaurant and hugging his knees
the sun on his bald hair gleams and gleams
1:00 sated and feeling weak and without sympathetic imagination I trudge home slipping on acorns and up to my ankles in a dross of broken spines
the sun adores the flagged peaks of the trees in their last yellows and the sopping coat of a terrier
the boxer trees with snaky pods like cacao
1:30 that bad jazz starts up again with its militant plaintive sound and I wonder who is playing piano with stiff wrists and who's wheezing into the clarinet
looking down once in awhile and clearing with thin fingers that deep black valve with its brigadier's buttons and shaking out weary shoulders who rasps again over the tiny reed