From The Tatters




An office chair facing a mound of garbage bags tried to get my 

attention. Spirits of the chair and bags, and of the bus, hum on the 

avenue and in the water fish sing the full glory of objects in the body. 



Man said "delicious" as I walked by

Later on, a conversation with Rebecca over the problem of dinner and 

care of food animals, 

even the winged bugs in the flour.



About the feathers

at my feet are feet.



The homemade and humble

dream of white beads.



How can I read the Banana skin

With the neck pointed down and away? 



Birds ignore me, cigarette butts refuse to make eye contact. I might be 

dead after all.



If I can live long enough to know, 

I can start my making. Then I will really have something, like the man 

who mourned his dog. Until the ashes arrived, he felt incomplete. 



Shaky, since a child, I can thread a needle but I cannot hold a rifle 

steady.



Spectral bird made of dust on the 10th story window.


 
A grey clean one. lost on a tue. Picked it up and laid it on a high ledge. 

The Birds of America was begun on a Thursday.



At the Five Points Mission, a bodega door, green and ajar, asks me to 

come in.



A man on my stoop, cradles a pigeon. I look closely at them, gleams 

of purple in their cloaks; today looking closer at the neighbor in the 

window: in pink and on the phone, sitting on the edge of her bed.



I want to write an elegy but without the sadness