I sit in your T shirt
with its spots of paint
as a certain fierceness pours

A whispering far away

heard by the poet in a bower
of flesh his limbs stir

Oh night, to hear them once again
as if we were at Kyriena’s and the moon
over the Hudson were blue no movie

Picasso made me tough and quick, and the world;
just as in a minute plane trees are knocked down
outside my window by a crew of creators.

I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.

Smiling through my own memories of painful excitement
your wide eyes stare 
        and narrow like a lost forest of childhood stolen from

I am so glad that Larry Rivers made a
statue of me

I belong here. I was born
here. The palms sift their fingers
and the men shove by in shirts,

When your left arm twitches
it’s like sunlight on sugar
to me and my tongue seeks

The fluorescent tubing burns like a bobby-soxer’s ankles
the white paint the green leaves in an old champagne bottle
and the formica shelves going up in the office