USA

All Possible Worlds

Does the crow soaring above me
Intuit this frantic pulse?

On the side of the road,
A deer,

Its final breath
Draped
Across the morning damp air

A world completed.

A verse intended.

A crow circling.
 

© Copyright, 12/31/06, Mark a Greenberg..

Jersey Shore

When early autumn tides
Return abandoned articles to the beach
And all manner of unremarkable things
Accrue to the razor-sharp jetty at water’s line--
Or trapped in evanescent pools,
Drift nervously from side to side
Sheltered behind the sun black rocks,
Causeless and alone,
Entangled in seaweed,

Or when such self-same things
Are unexpectedly resurrected
By children leaping from rock to rock
Hunting for starfish,

Then by tides taken, and
In each step remembering

The wind-throttled umbrellas
That once dotted this beach, and
Bright bathing-suited minions
Contemplating evening strolls

Until Asbury Park’s lucent arcades
Loomed above the boardwalk,
Just lighting the breakers
Rumbling at world’s end.

Asbury Park was always the turning point ---
It’s mock iridescence signaling somehow
That all things --
Memories, detritus
Starfish,
All things
—Even when unfound
And unremembered---
Return.

© Copyright, 12/31/06, Mark A Greenberg.

For Hope


Nothing lasts
And that’s what I tell myself
Imagining us
Pilfering time by the second,
Extraordinary thieves that we were

Surely the great painters must have
Stumbled upon this,
Their beggar’s hand outstretched
And empty; their desperate ships lost at sea;
Their shadows brooding in lamp lit corners;
Even their Jesus pained unbearably on a cross,

Eternity, they must have surmised,
Only just lasts,
The uncanny flicker
At the end of a dream

© Copyright, 12/31/20, Mark A Greenberg.

Meditation on a Deer

Life becomes him,
Darting across the trail

Then doing whatever a deer does
Under the darkened canopy,

White tail flash
Extinguished
In shadow;

Cleaved so precisely
He is invisible,

And but for the padded thump of his heart,
He stands soundless

Peering out

Flanked by sun light columns

Turning galaxies of dust
Unabated,

Heavenward
 

© Copyright, 12/31/06, Mark a Greenberg.

© All Copyright, Mark a Greenberg.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.