East River

just to the east of the east village     beyond the place beyond looking
his cat’s sleep is the transition     in its eye the door to
revived itself as a great heap to carry around
afraid to do so the end of a subway ride among the atlantic oceans

i’m exhausted after walking blocks locked away from elegant staircases
i want to check out     be grinding off
and just as certainly toss up love to the windows
as in the village there’s a murmured life of printed halitosis

	i look into eyes     materials
	all of whom grown up and they just flush away
	to see into other eyes     more distant     magazines this time
	the ship heading inland pulling an ocean
	i can feel it crawling up the skin of the statue of liberty
	eyes lined at it across the harbor like a herd of art

from Yew Nork (2014)

Looking for Gods in Greenwich Village

i remember meeting you several times that week
east tenth street and fourth avenue
your wave from against a wall
your voice asking for spare change
the flood of new yorkness new to me
as the colors of your clothing     the colors of night
black and blue grey     charcoal
brown and an obfuscation of dust
that changed to its native form only
in nocturnal alleys a step from the realm
of streetlights and illumination

you were new york to me
new york beyond wealth and the glisten of rain
beyond museums concerts and organized noise
beyond what i understood as literature

you were bumming too
more deeply into your life than i was into mine
but in the same way our steps
trod between definitions
like those of centaurs on urban concrete

so this is how it probably is
to meet gods     the clarity of their form
their ambiguity without name or intersection
whole streets going back to before they were even
indian paths     and you know their stories even though
you’d never seen them then     
never having really been there
as we looked at each other as a deer looks at a squirrel
each not thinking to imagine the other one
to be a mountain lion
or potentially one of the gods

from Yew Nork (2014)

Motel Room Morning

nothing parallels anything else anywhere
the imagination curves itself around windows
where the glass is furthest in its slow liquid sag
to thickness at the bottom of the frame
distorting the pathos of cars outside the window
their imagined and sad journeys
destinations     too
fictional in the minds of the drivers

	my face is deteriorating
	it’s not just the imperfections in the mirror
	or unevenness of light in a motel bathroom
	if there were a diagram or a plan to this it would fall apart too
	cars stalled outside     their horns’ notes not parallel or random
	this motel room will be here miles after it’s been deserted

from Yew Nork (2014)