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on Lexington, in the glassy foyer

      of Saint Peter’s Lutheran, four

      Fujimura paintings, the largest

      a two-panel sea of blues and greens

      with—faintly—a fruited quince emerging

      or disappearing, like the entire New York skyline

      in the holiday blizzard we stepped back into

      early that afternoon, threading our way home

      around abandoned taxis. Pushing through the best

      of the storm’s windblown drifts, down each

      unplowed block of the graying city,

      no more than ten souls in sight—all boots

      and mittens, scarves and hats—and finally,

      above the intersection we call ours, maybe thirty pigeons

      playing mid-air, like children or bundled tongues of flame

      not quite ready to complete their ecstatic descent.

      If I could, I’d paint it—the appearance

      of the likeness of the glory of the Lord—after

      late Turner. No borders, no date, no discernible time

      of day. Only the relative coordinates:

      West 51st Street at 9th Avenue.

      Though really it could be almost anywhere.

      Time. Coffee. Rain

      for JGD

      We’ve not seen such rain for months. And maybe

      because of the storm, or what fell from the cheek

      of a young girl asleep in Malaysia, Charlie Hunter’s

      jazzy cover of Marley’s Natty Dread just leapt

      onto the cafe’s new stereo. Here on the fat edge

      of this window counter, as I relish having scored

      a parking space within steps of my weekly coffee stop,

      I elect to consider a notion I’ve heard for decades,

      that it’s better to enter heaven minus sinful parts

      than be thrown undivided into hell. I get a picture

      I don’t like of me standing at that threshold, various

      limbs, organs, glands tagged, “Property of Hell,”

      and suddenly I’m aware that neither the prospect

      of gaining heaven whole nor the anticipation of shame

      at having given hell even the slightest satisfaction

      has proved sufficient to effect the good result.

      Sure, I’d like to be pure in heart; I’d like to see God,

      but these days I’m trying to be kinder to my body.

      Besides, tonight after his lesson at Longy, my son and I

      are on to hang around the square and, after burritos,

      settle ourselves at a front table in a hotel jazz club

      to witness firsthand Charlie Hunter’s eight-string magic.

      I’m holding two tickets for the ten o’clock show,

      and if the radio weather man’s on target, by the time we

      hit the road home this rain should be well out to sea.

      Still Working It Out

      for Robin Needham, killed in the 2004 Christmas tsunami

      Something

      shuddered in the un-

      fathomable dark, and a wave

      shouldered forth

      like an eighteen wheeler

      skidding sideways

      into oncoming traffic—a wave

      inhering by the power

      of a word lovely

      as snow on a navy sleeve,

      the same word

      that shuddered in each

      dark cell of the dead

      Christ, a wave shouldering forth

      like a new heaven, new

      earth, clearing away

      the old, the impossible—a wave,

      a word, terrible as it is

      great, great as it is holy

      and terrible.

      Love Song

      She’s always here, the heron, tip-toeing

      long shadows through tall grass

      and over the spindly gray limbs that litter

      the south end of the lake. I cannot

      always navigate their tangle to observe

      by kayak the slow technique

      of the elegant bird, thin neck and head

      poking spear-like at the rising moon

      to swallow her quicksilver prey.

      But I do not come here to see a bird hunt

      or watch a moose forage or even one

      pair of feasting waxwings dance on air.

      I come out, reclined in yellow fiberglass,

      to inhabit the instant of last light

      suspended between the darkening sky

      and water. I come here to remember

      how small I am, how nearly

      invisible toward midnight I become,

      enfolded by the skin of my slender craft.

      How I love to all but disappear

      when the moon finally sets and what’s left

      to burn inside this diminutive form

      is the faint testimony of ancient stars.

      So It Goes

      Winter antelopes into erstwhile

      dogmas committed against an ivory

      cane, and three ducats of pilsner

      can’t buy me lust or you levitating

      with one hand on the other in arcs

      of unctuous radiator steam falling

      all over itself like drunken blind luck

      or a dispossessed Carnegie.

      Don’t get me wrong. Trains are

      my optimal frame of deference,

      their unsung articles gallivanting

      the transvaal with brash gargoyles

      in a grand quartersawn wish

      to make moguls of slush piles

      the old-fashioned way, by blowing

      in their alabaster nostrils. And reeking

      of time, I am here to report that

      the gossamer intersection of infinite

      space and your sizzling flywheel

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