My daughter, born in April, called me yesterday evening to list the flowers open or soon to open in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. And what crowds! Hasidim, Asians, Blacks, an ethnic and global mish mash, and in the pond a pair of egrets. After the excitement of the flowers she confessed to an onset of depression. She had spent many childhood days by the Japanese pond in the company of grandparents and felt bent out of shape spiritually and emotionally by time and loss and everything changed and unchanged in the eternal garden. Welcome to the club.

She's leaving her twenties soon, and me? I'm having her thirty year crisis. Last year she found her first gray hair. I tell her about her grandmother coming here as a young woman--and coming here as an old woman, especially in the spring.

Once, before we left the park, my mother said "Wait." And I waited as she counted the pond's seven ducklings to make sure they were still seven and not one missing to some submarine turtle. This was our last outing in the park. The last count before her last May. The ducks are still there--my daughter's turn to count. April's daughter, bonjour tristesse.

in the garden for the blind
a child yells
look! look!

I guess we all belong here, metaphorically at least. The sudden disturbing awareness in the sense of loss and the loss of the senses is embedded here in braille. The pain I imagine of perpetual darkness in a beautiful place casts a temporary shadow. But kids will be kids and they're all eyes around me.

playing at blindness
my children
feeling the leaves

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The hurricanes caught up with me. Sudden chest pains. Crushing unendurable explosive heart bursting get-it-over-with-already pain.

ER nurse
drawing blood
hovering mosquito

My father died in his sleep, died in his dreams, and I was far away. His last spoken word to my wife was Tylenol. In dreams he still makes me laugh. A character. A European charmer when he wanted to be. Multilingual. And vain about his good looks. Dying in his sleep was one of his luckier moments. It's a dark truth, but after following his example and mastering so many languages, I'd prefer my famous last word to be generic. Ibuprofen or some other such profanity.

chest pains—
time for one more
death poem?

My parents came here every spring. It was our city Walden. I'd meet them at the gate with its iron rotating bars permitting mortals entrance to a place far from iron and steel. We'd come to admire the cherry blossoms, the tulips, sometimes catch daffodil hill in full daffodil delirium. A timeless vision in a city beset by time.The essence of evanescence. A green island.

at the garden gate
my dead parents
comment on the blossoms

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The garden's the next best thing to a "memorial park" without tombstones and a place for living and growing encounters with everything déjà vu. Though I know all the pathways and walks and views by heart, if I visit it's to pay my respects to what was, is, and will be. The garden is a way of knowing--a sort of sacred ground possessing meanings and shades of meaning...and a new déjà vu. 

shades in the shadows
invisible
to any camera

heron stalking the koi
photographer stalking
the heron

The fourteen year old with terminal cancer has accepted her fate but now has her parents to deal with. She's coping, they're falling apart. She tries to hold them together, she tries, she's the coolest with a high five in the children's ward. She tries, but confesses to another patient, "Sometimes I wish they'd stay away. I wish they wouldn't come."

on hold...
wishing for
a different music

NY, 200l, rev. 2017

Context: a stressed-out spring in Sloane Kettering's cancer ward for my wife's operation. She had the operation to save her life and somehow I too survived it, and the post operation, and the all star cast of big chief doctors, Indian interns, West Indian nurses, the poster boy nurse, the visiting musicians, the wicked nurse who looked at the charts but couldn't see the pain in front of her....

waiting
reading donors names
on a wall plaque
waiting

nurse taking
a cigarette break

cancer ward--
bald headed women
talk cosmetics

cancer ward--
the doctor looks
too healthy

cancer ward--
nuclear medicine lab nurse
so radiant

cancer ward--
plucking dead blossoms
off the gladiolas
 
cancer ward--
female corpse walks with the IV
is that my wife?

in the doctor's office
the bad news
such good news

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The grave lay open. We take turns throwing dirt into the hole. We’ll never fill it at this rate. I ask a striking gravedigger if we can borrow a shovel. OK, he says, and watches us cover the coffin as he eats his lunch. It feels good to be alive, to be physical.

If we betray the dead, it’s for the sake of the living....

tossing dirt
on the plain pine coffin––
she wanted cremation

Trying to land in a heavy rainstorm, the pilot guns the engines and aborts at the last minute. We circle and keep on circling until permission is granted to try again.

news flash!
what a relief to hear
the call of the coquí

The prison system let you out on parole. You did your time, I don't know for what. Maybe you hurt someone, maybe you hurt yourself. I suspect you know how to hurt yourself best.

The Last Poets, an electric energy black power group, came to the Seek Program  on 72nd Street. You sat beside me, a long ash dangling from your joint, talking poetry and rock 'n roll. Your hand, trembling, holds the joint. You tell me you're not doing hard drugs anymore, not that I asked. Of course, I don't believe much of anything--your story or anybody's. Unarmed armed robbery? Faking it and taking a real bullet for your trouble? I take that with a grain of salt, a thick grain of salt, like what you spread on the sidewalk for snow and ice.

Prison is another story that weighs you down, pushing twenty nine on a cold cloudy day. Ol' Angel in need of an angel to help you straighten out and fly right. Angel in need of...what? Attention, discipline, love, medical care, you name it, and poetry too. I have a hunch, a gut feeling, a sad feeling, a can't sleep easy feeling I'll see you dead before I'll see you fly. Wish I could be your angel but I know better than to mess with angels. I'm earthbound. I use the subway. I don't have wings. I've got two kids and a wife, enough said. At the end of the day I'm lucky if I have a few words left for poetry or passion.

What a shock to see you alive and happily dancing merengue at an uptown fiesta, Angel. But that's just wishful thinking.... You danced into a dream last night with a joint in one hand and a bottle in the other and pretty boys or señoritas in drag around the floor and you had red pages of poetry in your mouth like a dog and you tried to recite them, trying to bark them out.

Thirty years and I'm still haunted by you, Angel. I hope you didn't end back in the joint.

more than my fingers
those I can talk to
only at night

A few years ago the dry forest hill we live on was host to a flock of parroquets, the local yellow, green, and blue parrot. There were about a dozen members of the raucous gang wheeling around the hill, a cheerful flashy bunch, not the talking kind but noisy enough. There weren't many houses in the area then; now, more and more slashing, burning, bulldozing as houses encroach on the green hillsides.

distant thunder--
carpenters
hammering faster

We're glad to hear the parrots when they return to feast on the red berry trees and congregate in the acacias, but fewer and fewer return. Last year we only counted three. So far this year, two. Countdown to oblivion?

The three to four foot bulging brown termite nests in the branches of the  turpentine and flamboyant trees are part of the story. It's supposed to be a secret that these island parrots lay their eggs inside termite nests. The warmth from the nest hatches the eggs--a natural incubator. If the termite nests go, so do the parrots.

old sketch pad
termite trails
cut through the scenery

Today I spotted one parrot sitting quietly on a treetop as it surveyed the hill. I hope it still has a mate. The single's scene on island can be tough.

preening in silence
the last
of the wild parrots?

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