Poetry

This is not my making any ecstatic,

sleep-deprived screed

“Think,” Aretha Franklin and Ted White, Aretha Now, Atlantic, 1968

How a fuchsia blouse becomes
bougainvillea, or
a pair of greyhounds staggers
into abstraction, zigzag

Primitive angiosperm, genus 
prior even to bees,

When the fledgling fell 
from its nest, by meager attempt,
by pinwheel descent,
and lay, unguarded,

Famously late, light reaches us
eons past its own extinction,

Vendors approaching men with
women, holding out a solo rose, long-stemmed

Early mystery,
out of what century

The lithograph hangs
immaculate, while the chest
beneath it gleams.

Quartal voicings, the alcohols. 
Swallows in a martini sky, jigsawed