Sometimes it seems as if your life
is all about trying to balance
on a swinging boat, the painted kind
you used to love at the old time
carnival on Dun Laoghairepier.

It wasn’t Coney Island but what
did you know of foreign parts?

The helter-skelter where you slid
hell-for-leather on a burlap mat
down a winding metal chute
seemed to go on for miles
what with all the howling kids
and the general hullabaloo.

The swinging boat was gaudily daubed
in blue and yellow swirls, slung
like a cradle between two spars.

A man in a lead-colored coat
and tweed cap took your money.
Then you stepped in one end,
your sister in the other,
and you pulled on the ropes in tandem
to make the boat sway back and forth
like a clock less pendulum.

It wasn’t Venice but what
did you know of gondoliers?

Some days,caught up
in the endless round of tasks
dictated by your To Do list,
as if your frantic busyness
were a requirement for sainthood
or a penance for past iniquities,
you might be a carousel pony
galloping in everlasting orbit
or a girl clad in a secondhand frock
going nowhere fast
in a swinging boat.

From  THE TAGORE VARIATIONS: A Series of Poems Inspired by lines from Rabindranath Tagore

The horizon is fiercely naked,
still and keen and cruel.

I am like a remnant of cloud
uselessly roaming the sky.

Let the cloud of grace bend low,
take this emptiness of mine.

Float it on the wanton wind
and vanish away in the dark.

Precocious pupil, teenage layabout,
he’s played provincial brat, brash schoolboy slut,
barbarian beast, filthy louse-ridden mutt –
until piss-artist drink-mates chuck him out;
absinthe and argot mingling in his throat,
teacher’s best pet, deranged, turns foul-slanged slob,
illumination-seeker, cannon-gob,
working his passage on a drunken boat . . .
And then he’s twenty-two. And poetry stops.
And then, as if he’s cleaned up, done the cure,
and doesn’t need the hit, crack, high (or crutch?),
his previous life, he says, has been rinçures –
rinsewater, dishswirl, drainwaste, sloshmurk, slops –
yeah, been there, done that, thank you very much.

Tired of naming cattle & fish,
Adam turned to the birds.
“Raven,” he said;
then “dove,”
prophetically,
these first creatures of the air
who’d be symbols in a later time
of rain and flood and rainbow.
Of the birds who would
sing at dawn and dusk
he had little interest;
so Eve decided to try
her onomastic skill.
“Nightingale,” she whispered.
“Ibis, heron, flamingo,
parrot, peacock, tanager,”
mystery, grace, magnificence
of thought, motion, and design.
It took a woman
to properly name
the birds of Paradise.

Oh to be Adam
again
with all his ribs
yearning for a woman
as yet unborn,
mouth free
of the taste of apples,
ears without
the hiss of snakes,
mindless of
nakedness and shame
in the garden
of gentle creatures
waiting for a name.

(a “footnote” after Donald Lev)

I jumped off
the Brooklyn Bridge.
Twice.
But I failed.
I didn't die.
The Guinness Book of World Records
called me up,
said I should try again:
If I lived,
I'd set a record.
So I jumped a third time
and succeeded.
At last I've achieved . . .
Immortality?

અમરત્વ?
(ડોનાલ્ડ લેવ વિશે પાદટીપ)

હું કૂદી પડ્યો
બ્રૂકલિનના પુલ ઉપરથી
બબ્બે વાર
પણ નિષ્ફળ ગયો
મર્યો નહિ
ગીનીસ બુક ઓફ વર્લ્ડ રેકર્ડ્સ
-માંથી ફોન આવ્યો મને
બોલ્યા: પુન: પ્રયત્ન કરી જુઓ,
જો હું જીવી જાઉં
તો વિશ્વવિક્રમ થશે.
એટલે હું ત્રીજી વાર કૂદ્યો
અને સફળ થયો.
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અમરત્વ?