The Hollow

The little hollow between the
rbecue grills between the apartment
uses abutted by green hills
d sweet white-mulberry trees,
st sitting, September-in-Paris-
ather, I love it just a little
ill, like Coke bem gelado,
rth Africa Jewish French
ysicist, I ask him, is he
y, does he take drugs, is he
drunk, what about Margaret's
reer...tell him why/how I became
Jew, Margaret over at the picnic
table, I'm afraid I'm talking way
too much, but he takes it normally,
I'm the father, he wants us to come
to Paris to meet his family, too
intense, too meddling, it's OK
here with this tall, brown smiler,
"You know what?"
"What...?
"I'm happy."
"Me too..."
Already the generations of The Future
looming up inside me as we slowly
descend into some sort of record
after centuries of, millenia of
unrecorded sky and earth.

Moments Between Moments

Like now when the house next door
goes empty after Paul and Evelyn have
been there for five years, or Margaret's
in Kansas City and Bernadette and Chris
are at the park and the house belongs
to me and the sunlight and shadows and
books and the mask on the walls, or like
today the boy and I out at the farms, past
the old, deserted barns, what, two months
away from the first frosts, tousling his hair
and suddenly entirely THERE in the old
barnyard next to the cornfields and under
the clouds, shifting in and out of Now
like trying to tune in BBC or understand
how it can be that Honey Locust seeds
have to be swallowed by animals in order
for their hard outer layer to be digested
in order for them to
propagate...survive......