Something Black and Red

Walking to work

Covering my ears as always

Past the scream and grind

Of savage machines

My feet deep in heavy snow.

Suddenly I saw:

By the construction site sat

Balanced on the edge of a curb

Something black and red

Under a thick layer of ice

Immune to the December sun.

In those days I didn't know

what a scarlet tanager 

looked like dead

or sounded alive.

Happy New Year

As the old gust growled and spat in the sand
And packed the shore thick with pellets of ice,
It loathed life, loathed death—hell and paradise—
Hated the lights that emblazoned the land,
Pitied mortals and their joy and salaam,
When celebrating passing of the time.

Faith

Winter’s loitering...
Ice is asleep on the soil...

Hush! Blossoms whisper.

Good Old Days

Like rice one throws at weddings, fists of ice
Were flung against my own bedroom windows.
I rose in fright, my face drenched in mirrors.
Although I looked the selfsame as before,
That gusty dawn when I woke, I felt old;
As though a crucial threshold had been crossed,
As though was wed to Chronos now, shackled
To pounds of sagging flesh and porous bones.
Back in the good old days my body formed
The (veiled) foundation of my strength, freedom.
The worthless box that held the priceless stone;
The papers of my love letters; scaffolds
To build my dreams, they'd now become gallows.
Back in the good old days I didn't know.

Common uses of a poet

Here some common uses of the poet:
Mutate city into unreal city
thus make it poem-real.
Keep fire from melting ice
and rusting a red wheel barrow.
Reverse-translation into Ashbery.
Use words like iridescent, thicket, and
petrichor; never feel.
Prophet, politician, and philosopher; now
poets hidden in half a page
Of this week's New Yorker.
Impress other poets.