--- J A N   C L A U S E N

In mid-September, an ominous bowel obstruction.
Surgery tough to schedule over High Holy Days


        X talks too much but talks so beautifully,
        murmuring, head-wrapped, off Sixth Avenue

        over tea in a real ceramic teapot--
        kukicha, chamomile.

        She wouldn't bare her hair to meditate.
        Tibetan Buddhists eighty-sixed her.


While color clung to the garden, she hung on.
Scenarios of rational surcease


        In a pre-war doorman building on the west side,
        we sit anatomizing disorders of empathy.

        Someone's hit the Pause button on friendship,
        someone's killed the soundtrack for epic suffering.


Deadheaded geranium pungence. Bruised marigold.
Deathward the desperate details


        That cleared-out fall feeling. Orange suddenly.
        Walking under trees, I tip my head back and back.

        The dark blade of an airship on final approach
        plows the filigree of gingko branches,
        
        soft fruit underfoot.
        Why history


Keeping nothing down.
She finally vomits fecal matter


        Beneath my office window, the exigent young hang out
        decisively cigaretted, angling for a world-cure.

        Brave new brooms!
        I don't know what to tell you.


Holly berries already.
The bruited overdose hangs fire


        Preaching in the warren under Atlantic Avenue,
        an island voice croons torment everlasting

        to the 8 a.m. blase.
        The thought-lash nicks a corner of my day.

        Nothing
        isn't possible.


Her heart quit in the middle of a medical procedure.
The election still in doubt


        Ramadan: my neighbor's hung a scroll in Arabic.
        The sun swings low in my window to the south.
 
        I walk for health in that pewter hour of solstice
        when light is taking leave.


The last I heard, she was angry about dying.
An addled teleology hangs around