Poetry

I can’t imagine breaking up with you.
Instead, I think about the neighbors’ problems:
His anguished look seems punishment for truth;
his “other half” is thin and Puerto Rican.

William Blake saw an angel
sitting in a tree. Blondin crossed Niagara
on a cable. And Maria Taglioni
for a Russian highwayman
danced on a panther’s skin spread over the snow
in 1855.

The hawk sweeps down from his aerie,
dives among swallows,
turns over twice in the air,

It’s too beautiful today.
Even the ramshackle
Fine Arts Work Center is beautiful

While Miss Capp, older than the Constitution,
droned of checks and balances, I dutifully
filled my notebook (college-lined), and prayed

each beast tells his own story
this is my story to you
I have loved you seventeen years
and both of us are not young any more
we live in another country

In that bad year, in a city to have now no name,
In the already-dark of a winter’s day, our feet