Three Poems

Brief Chronology

“Those who are well fed will never understand those who are not.” —Evangelia Karakaxa, 15, Greece NY Times, Apr. 18, 2013

Better to come along when the green world hides its scars than endure the hail of stony bullets, the welter of cell- bearing meteors from the asteroid belt. Better after the idea of tree has spread, roots grinding rock into soil, leaves and needles making life from air, sun, water. Better not to scratch in Greek dust during spring of the wrong millennium or come of age a Polish Jew in the thirties. Better, I suppose, to live before seas swallow Manhattan and half of Brooklyn even if you owe 50 grand in student loans and wait tables. Cataclysmic stones and the havoc we make of history fall on just and unjust, on tired kids digging out sisters and mothers after a collapse in Dhaka, on gap-toothed factory towns, on the pond scum who live so well off the rest of us and seem to sleepwalk through it all.   Rim My student rose from hardwood— his element (as though he’d lugged maples to the mill and planed them to fit together in a court of bedlam)— and nailed a three as time wound down and his crazed classmates roiled the air. But he for a time suspended saw only a rim in an ocean of air. For him, should walls open and trees, streetlights, and all the mileroads to the river swim into view, only a rim would obtain. For years he’s practiced seeing an orange bar hang from nothing, practiced hearing nothing, thinking, for a snip of time, nothing and then letting waves of sound and thought rush back in without seeming to flinch. Today I sit at a keyboard, counting breaths and watching a thing take its shape on a page, holding in my hands nothing at all. Nothing at all.   After a Shooting Cold as hell, we head to an old conservatory since we need to go somewhere and the dead need nothing. We can’t think while walking into wind. Heat stuns as we enter the tropics, a welter of succulents, a screw pine dropping suckers that root in the dirt and support a vast trunk. A cactus climbing the aluminum frame presses against ceiling panes. Shuffling in black scarf and coat, a silent grandma follows her loud brood, raising eyes to oranges afloat in the green. Above a wishing pond where coins doze in a foot of water, orchids shriek from stone perches. I lean at a rail. A girl on a bench stares. Breathing is no easy thing.