happy new year's

The new year fizzes in.
A little part of us dies, but we order dessert.
A starlet gives a concert in the snow—
All her limbs show.
Not even the trees look as naked to me.

Me, I’ll be singing the blues til I have no body.
Then—well, they say vocal chords are string—
so I can sing on anything.
A Steinway or a beetle wing.
The wind rushes down like a deep cough.
Forty winters--never enough.

poem because i miss new york

I am an American, New-York-
born, and rubbing the faces off wheatpennies
as so many hundreds of greasy thumbs have done,
watching a pure greyhound piss in the street,
long neck, expensive stride,
while the sun hops fences and shimmies pipes,
wild racket of engines,
solemn ardor in the eyes of those who pass me,
grim riots of vines in chain-links and at Madison
where the storefronts throw my own face
sharp with light at me I am aching
for a marble pool a meeting of gold fins
mouths open in splendid blue gas
while the bearded men pass
murmuring with shrouded mouths
opening their fists suits bunched at the hips
furling their valises, waiting