looks at the mountains, sees
Olympus, hears Alpine elephants
rumbling; gazes at the sea, hears
blind Homer speaking to Cavafy
in the wine-dark waves;
looks into a hole, the smoking
hole of lower Manhattan, the
ghastly chasm of mortality,
his father’s and his own;
lives to tell each tale

from superlative land, alpha man
with a plan – best car,
best house, best small business,
best hardware, best software, best
industry, best family, and he’s
darned good looking, too – when
you’re at the peak, where
do you go from there?
hire others to participate in
your joy and smoke cigars

the hard part, staying in
touch over a lifetime marked
by weird experiences, speaking only
in adversity, writing only occasional
brief email – the easy part,
admiring you from the opposite
coast, your (scary) competence and
certainties, the vastness of your
earthly capabilities, a nurse with
bloody knowledge of life’s wounds

wrinkled apple face, her smile
was a frown turned upside
down, her housedresses and aprons
soft and worn with decades,
she made her own bottled
ketchup, if she had dreams
she shelved them in the
dining room breakfront, took care
of four brothers, two sisters
in their ancestral Indiana home

somebody cares about her and
she cares about somebody, they
care about each other and
they care about a baby,
I don’t know much about
them, I should ask more
questions, I think she’s from
Guatemala, the baby they adopted,
their need to care greater
than my need to know

Transylvanian translator, poet
dedicated to a regular life of morning
coffee shops and notebooks, evening
microphones, eternal youth, and writing
poetry of lilting whimsy with
an odd humility that contradicts
his ultimate ambition – to be
Architect of a Surrealistic Universe,
with two gardens of Eden
where he can regularly vanish