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Outside the window of this barge banked against

the many layered landfill of Fort Lee, New Jersey

a grey mist shrouds the island city

now November and drizzling. Two gulls

skim the Hudson’s brackish waters and a sailboat

motors downstream toward the vast tomorrows

of the sea. From out of the drift

clinging neither to water nor air

steps forward the man, Wallace Stevens, middle-aged, mid-­

life on his methodical way

to the Hartford Connecticut Life Insurance Building

dressed in a grey woolen pinstripe business suit.

He hears, while walking the lavender and blooms

that harbor the lane, this music:

Death is the mother of beauty,

whereupon I am standing before an alpine

picture window bathed in the afterwash of an afternoon’s love.

The broad umbrella of a sycamore shadows the front lawn,

its limbs outstretched and glistening

with moisture. On one, a drop

of rainwater curls. I turn

toward the hallway dim with the coming dusk

to join my lover running water for our bath.

I can almost hear the water splashing now

when this, too, is dredged up

from that other man, more stern,

whose thought, some say, is as supple as muscle:

And the time of death is in every moment,

an old knowledge from the Bhagavad Gita, when Krsna,

the conch shell quiet by his side, to Arjuna turns and ...

she says something I can’t make out,

a clear note drowned in the bathwater’s rush.

That was Verscio in May-midday showers beneath snow­

peaked mountains, often invoked

for solace when sad, as if the memory

could nourish me. Yet I have missed

the verve and luster of that followed

in the wake of a summer day,

summer’s past. Imagine: she and I scrubbing

each other down, while unnoticed, a blue

breasted jay darts between the green backdrop of leaves,

the droplet falling mid-air till now it is rain

and muddy waves slapping the barge where I sleep tonight,

the gulls nowhere in sight, the boat long gone.

Publications

“Sentiment for an Old Notion” The New England Review;

“The Look of Things” The Tishman Review

“Gare Montparnasse: The Melancholy of Departure” The Seneca Review

“Persephone Goes” Phoebe

“Crete: August” The Nation

“Pardon Me”; “Perhaps”; “A Lover” Bang! Featured poet of the month

“Pre-Classical Greece” “Sketches, 9:40 am, Bowery and Houston” Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose

“Christ Carrying the Cross: After Hieronymous Bosch” New Guardian Literary Review

“New Suffolk” Passages North

“In Place of Cairns” The Ocotillo Review

“Soft” Sky Island Journal

“The Realm in Which Will …” The Alaska Quarterly Review

“Autumn Song” The Santa Barbara Review

“A Thought Problem” The Colorado Review

“Hecksher State Park” Hayden’s Ferry Review

“Narcissism of Consciousness” The American Poetry Review

“The Holy Ghost” The Green Mountain Review

“Father Stationed at Fort Dix, NJ” Blue Mountain Review

“Montauk” Harbinger Asylum

“Across” “To Promise Is to Return” Poeming Piegon

“Edward Hopper’s Rooms by the Sea: A Verse Essay and Meditation on Form and the Imagination” and “In a World No Longer the Dominion of Nymphs and Maenads: After Hopper’s Lonely Carma”. Think: A Journal of Fiction, Poetry, and Essays

“The Exaltation” The New Ohio Review

“Adrift in the Prelapsarian” Calliope