The Lotus Position

was never comfortable, was it?
And when I was a kid
we would, both accurately and not,
call it “Sitting Indian Style.”
So that wouldn't do.
And to pray without ceasing
was hard enough on Mt. Athos.
Hell, it doesn't even work in novels,
so that was out too. Then I started to get a bit down.
I mean The Oversoul was all well and good,
and I still dig the fact that Svetaketu and I
are both made of honey; I sometimes picture us together
riding in the back of an old convertible,
his dad driving with one hand,
all of us resplendent in gooey gold
getting the seats sticky without a care in the world,
but when someone cuts us off and we ride up to his window,
I still struggle to see the honey in his eyes.
And that the Enlightenment
is already the name of an Epoch
passed is enough to make me rise from my room
to mount my bright red bicycle
and ride, fast and deep into the soft glow of an empty night
until the wind on my face becomes itself
the only prayer that I know.

19to20.04.10

When the morning comes clear as crystal, brilliant blue,
it is hard to believe
in the fragility of my being;
and perhaps that's the point,
sharp as the early air is
with sun and chill and spring.
And I watch
the windows across the way,
the steady stream of traffic below my own,
the clumps of cocoa that cake my coffee mug's
white porcelain walls, clinging like dark cliffs of Dover
above the surf, wanting nothing more
than to escape erosion one more day.
But when my window is thrown open
to give a little of Mulgrew's delicate piano
while taking in turn the syncopation of the street
the equilibrium feels fine,
and I feel myself also
flowing into perfect pace
with the piano and the people
below, at my staggering seventy-two
beautiful beats per minute.

Kastanienallee 103

An einem Samstag im April. . . .

With patience full of joy
I watch the linear boundary between shadow and sun
creep across my table outside this Prenzlauer cafe.

But as clouds blur the border
stark to soft
my coffee cools.
like a bathtub draining water.
until I feel far
from everything
in a way neither good nor not.

For a moment that gray abates
to resurrect the line
and I reach across the table
as for the hand of my beloved
and it's gone.


I gaze over a shoulder to read headlines
through whose syntax I stumble
like a child.


The clouds deepen.


Across the half busy street,
whose pace itself seems to slow,
the fruit seller and his apples, bananas, oranges'
colors cool in the cloud-cover.


And now, now with the border a pencil behind my ear
the Sun makes his Odyssean Return
and somewhere half within me
a familiar flame flowers
that will stay aloft all night.

In A Place With Love Locks

Here in this planned park
East of the Atlantic
small Eurasian Tree Sparrows hop and dart,
the same precision as their brothers
in the States they will never see

as cotton clouds uncover
the sun, flaming the grass green,
cumulus veil of difference drawn away
like dining room blinds before coffee.

And with a skyward squint
I glimpse the breadth of our sumptuous span
of life, and the wide and seamless human horizon
stretching out in all directions, illimitable
and in you.