Dear ____ ,
I’m sorry but
today I cannot take
your salad emotions
your disdain crackling like
iceberg lettuce
your leaky cherry tomato eyes,
and flapping onion tongue.
Please dear, just for once
can’t we be
like stew instead?

to be smart
is small art

Sidewalk Trio

1. Oboe
myopic contemplative toads
contemplate stucco walls
under a ceramic sun
while furtive passers-by
furtively pass by
hoping they don’t dodge behind flower pots
mocking them


2. Piano
smell of hot summer showers on ancient city streets
becomes as insence giving up sweet ozone asphalt scent to the igniting water
releasing a history in exhaust fumes
and footsteps


3. Viola
Renee Descartes
Is buying a hotdog
From a sidewalk vender on 5th
“mustard and kraut?”
asks the vender
“I think not”
answers Descartes,
and dis-
appears

“long day”
you say
as you dissolve
like sugar
into your coffee.

Distillation: 3rd Av., 11/17/06, 6:17 p.m.

traffic sweeps up Third Avenue,
crystal spikes cut
clear blue dusk
with pointed yellow fingers