New York Memory #3

When I get to my dead father's apartment, 
Liz emerges from ruptured planks and exploded plaster. 

She is covered with soot, like some pagan baptized 
in refuse. The wrecking crew has come before 

we had a chance to vacate the place, stripped the loft 
to its skeleton. My father's furniture has been destroyed, 

a lifetime buried beneath an avalanche of wood and iron.
Beds have been gutted, paintings raped by protruding nails. 

A fast-food cup rises from the ruin like a conqueror's flag. 
The apartment is quickly remodeled, rent raised; 

the revolving door of humanity spins. Over the years, 
I make a point of knowing who is living there. I see tenants 

come and go. I accept that we're not so unlike animals.
I mean, I have this friend who tells me all about bees,

how the queen is revered and protected, ultimately 
replaced in a savage deposition, how the mad 

hive continues, greater than any one member.
And everything he says sounds familiar, and stings.

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New York Memory #14

It wasn't so bad, that November, that sad month,
bleakness settling into the New York landscape.
Wind came off the East River, carrying dank secrets,
tickling the manes of gargoyles, cutting through
layers of clothing. I didn't write those days, took up art,
large canvases, big, loose strokes with acrylic paint.
I walked down Court Street in the evenings, sat on
the Promenade sometimes. My father was dead;
we were just married, and I wasn't happy, but
maybe things seemed all right. We were eating
fattening food, not arguing too much. In a department
store near St Mark's, we decided to have a baby.
Nothing was ever enough. But I don't recall it
as a bad time, that November, that sad month,
kind of like every day was a Sunday evening,
a slow parade of hours leading us toward
the hysteria of a weekday, our usual lives.