Poetry

One whiff of an open pack of baseball cards and I was hooked,

never to return to punks, pixie sticks and sen-sen. Mantle, Mays, God

Picture beauty:
it's not what you think,

But nothing so stable as form-designated hue (especially which is no hue at all) will account for the sudden ruddiness, china-blue and, a few
months each year, light-wheat-toast.

Postcard unto a glint of lightspeed

Memory is a cat.
It rarely does what it is told to do.

In the opposite corner – across the empty tables – is, I think,
Max, the young neighbor-man who when he was about two,

Inside the New Vegetarian restaurant there are New Vegetarians
congregating to sing the praises of five different kinds of pumpkin

She is a wise old woman
with precise hands.

Castor Avenue was Jewish then
delis, yarmulkes,
old bearded men, two by two
arguing in Yiddish

The summer before you moved away
we played baseball til the lights came on

Icarus, sometimes I think we got it all wrong.

Were they true,
The words the field said to me

i wasn't allowed to go in their house.
but my mom let me play in the yard
with their daughter.

Cake-walking down the sidewalk, a zaftig young woman witnessing to whatever lyric is surging through her headphones,

I ordered a Guinness and thought of you,
on the deck of The Inn at Jim Thorpe.