Birthdays

We
 
arrived
 
when the days
 
grew legs of night.
 
Chocolates were offered.
 
We ate latkes for hours
 
to celebrate light and friends.
 
We will keep going despite dark
 
or a madman in a white house dream.
 
Let’s talk about something else said the dog
 
who begs faithfully at the door...

We went to all those places where they restore sadness and joy
and call it art. We were piloted by Auden who became
Unbearably acrimonious when we dropped off Senghor into the
steamy skies of his beloved West Africa. The termites and ants
were...

35? I have been looking forward
To you for many years now
So much so that
I feel you and I are old
Friends and so on this day, 35
I propose a toast to
Me and You
35? From this day on
I swear before the bountiful
Osiris...

Light a match. Watch the blue part

                                                             flare like a shocked piñata

                                            from the beating
                                            into the sky,

                                                             watch how fast thin

wood burns & turns toward the skin,

the olive-orange skin of your thumb
 
                                                             & let it burn, too.

Light a fire....

1
Child of my winter, born
When the new fallen soldiers froze
In Asia’s steep ravines and fouled the snows,   
When I was torn


By love I could not still,
By fear that silenced my cramped mind
To that cold war where, lost, I could not find   
My...

As if because you lay
(deeply embarrassing) inside
my body, I could (inconceivable)
follow your swift thoughts into their blue   
immersion even now,
stilettoes flickering, or schools of fish
maneuvering, first clear and then occluded,
though now and then a piercing gleam cuts through;

as if the snow...

My mother groand! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud; 
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my fathers hands: 
Striving against my swaddling bands: 
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon...

I have no name 
I am but two days old.— 
What shall I call thee?
I happy am 
Joy is my name,— 
Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee; 
Thou dost smile. 
I sing the...

Hair still Titian,
but Botticelli’s grip has loosened—

not now Rubenesque,   
and probably never;
 

Nobody in the widow’s household   
ever celebrated anniversaries.   
In the secrecy of my room
I would not admit I cared
that my friends were given parties.   
Before I left town for school
my birthday went up in smoke   
in a fire at City Hall that gutted   
the Department...

This day, whate'er the Fates decree,
Shall still be kept with joy by me:
This day then let us not be told,
That you are sick, and I grown old;
Nor think on our approaching ills,
And talk of spectacles...

     Stella this Day is thirty four,
(We won't dispute a Year or more)
However Stella, be not troubled,
Although thy Size and Years are doubled,
Since first I saw Thee at Sixteen
The brightest Virgin of the Green,
So...

Light bulbs on a birthday cake.
What a difference that would make!
     Plug it in and make a wish,
     then relax and flip a switch!
No more smoke
      or waxy mess
      to bother any birthday guests.
But Grampa says, “it’s not the same!
     ...

My heart is like a singing bird
                  Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
                  Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
                  That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all...

Dear old equivocal and closest friend,
Grand Vizier to a weak bewildered king,
Now we approach The Ecclesiastean Age
Where the heart is like to go off inside your chest
Like a party favor, or the brain blow a fuse
And the comic-book light-bulb of...

You wept in your mother's arms
and I knew that from then on
I was to forget myself.

Listening to your sobs,
I was resolved against my will
to do well by us
and so I said, without thinking,
in great panic, To do wrong
in one's own...

The leaves talked in the twilight, dear;
   Hearken the tale they told:
How in some far-off place and year,
   Before the world grew old,

I was a dreaming forest tree,
   You were a wild, sweet bird
Who sheltered at the heart of me
   Because the north wind...

At least it helps me to think about my son
a Leo/born to us
(Aries and Cancer) some
sixteen years ago
in St. John’s Hospital next to the Long Island
Railroad tracks
Atlantic Avenue/Brooklyn
New York

at dawn

which facts
do not really prepare you
(do they)

for him

angry
serious
and running through the...

Amidst the days of pleasant mirth,
That throw their halo round our earth;
Amidst the tender thoughts that rise
To call bright tears to happy eyes;
Amidst the silken words that move
To syllable the names we love;
There glides no day of gentle bliss
More soothing...

Because you’ll find how hard it can be
to tell which part of your body sings,
you never should dally with any young man
who does any one of the following things:

tries to beat all the yellow lights;
says, “Big deal!”...