ALL I HAVE TO DO

                          revision of a poem written
                                in 1985 -- found 27 years later


All I have to do is
smell your hair in autumn, 
flame red wet leaves falling
and rain smeary windows,
these white stucco walls 
and oaken floors that groan, 
blue jazz all night kicking 
cigarettes, sipping
Seagrams and 7 
so I feel it all waiting 
for you.

|bi' get|

Let’s beget at

the beginning, baby, |

as in who begot whom

and who begot what –

before there were

voices, before there were words |

because the begetting

leads to begotten

and the misbegotten

and the begotten leads

to more begetting | see

it’s not a who story

or a why story or even

a where story, it’s

not even a story at all |

Scheherazade, it’s just

the begetting |

the endless begetting

because there’s a

lot of the begotten,

as endless as being gets,

get it? | If getting begetting

begetting be – you see

where this is headed,

don’t you? Whew! It’s |

as if begetting begetting

begot you and once

begotten the world begets

its infinite jest, its |

infinite space, its

infinite mind

all over the begetting

creation and begotten |

begotten – let’s

face it: it’s all good

for the begetting

getting our being gotten. |

TO A SWORDFISH ON A BED OF ICE AT THE ST. PAUL FISH MARKET IN MILWAKEE

Not one of the passersby here
expects you, all slick and mystery
skinned, your black fish eye no longer
refracting the sea but reflecting
our faces globed as we stare down
and nudge our fingers on your
cold stiffness, a state that creeps us--
the agony of your death
somewhere vast and now unknowable,
there's no misery of the fight
here, no memory of the depths,
just cool indifference, a marvel
reduced to marble. Your bony
schnozz, once a terror in the dark 
climes, is just a calcified 
protuberance, a lifeless harpoon
pointing viewers to the oyster
bar where the shucked glimmerings
shiver with life. Your crescent tail
once torqued you through the elements
and spanked the surface when you 
battled that angry hook. No one 
here questions your existence, your 
lack of consciousness, you are now
a specimen, you have joined 
the great thingness of our world, 
the broad disregard, the casual 
fear we carry in us, please
forgive us, for you have leapt from 
the sea's great soul and breathed the air 
of wonderment! We are nothing
but our trembling!