RISIBILITY, HAH
 
A laugh is a knife, a club, a breeze
From April's Riviera, a stet gun
Stuttering its fear that it shall leave
Anyone here to laugh.
 
A laugh is a cough, a trill, a shriek,
A bark, surely a bark.
A laugh is a punch in the ear,
A jab in the kidneys, hard.
 
There's a town in America hates
A laugh as bad as a drought.
Generations of boys there dream
That a clown's laughing face
 
Means to eat them alive.
In houses there, a laugh's a razor
That skims freckles from the face.
Another town, another place
 
That's fed for years on fatback,
A laugh's a Papal blessing gone bad.
A needle and thread for an emptying heart,
A guggle of good in a dry well.
 
I've seen a girl torn in half
By other girls giggling up their sleeves
At what she wore, at what she said
And didn't. She's a laugh, that girl.
 
The laugh's on you, I've heard,
The laugh's on me.  You think
It's accidental people have trouble
Remembering jokes?  That's a laugh.
 
There's not an echo of that word
I'd give as gift:  snicker, cackle,
Heehaw, guffaw, snigger, snort.
When you hear a laugh, run for it.

CITY RAIN

The rain has many tongues with which to say

Hello   Take that   Welcome home   You can use this

Like a bulldog drill sergeant, the demanding drops

Get us beyond the dawdle of our days.

When the world is saying Shake a Booty, Buddy,

When the dry mouthed world says do and do,

The rain talks back in soft syllables,

Makes music in thunderous afternoons,

Says, when you are overdone with summer glum

Here's a space to live and open up.

The rain has many fingers, beckons night

To too-bright day, teases and soothes

High offices, the shirts strung across alleys to dry,

Shoos people into subways, slakes uplifted throats,

Provides alternatives, excuses, purpose.

Take off your clothes, the rain says.

Take off your business suit, your fancy shoes.

Walk on water, make faces with the sky.

CRANES IN FLIGHT OVER WARSAW

She looked up, expecting enemy shells with nails

As decoration, close enough that she could count

The points, close enough she could imagine the hurt,

Thinking about her father's dying, her mother's,

How they welcomed what they could not want,

How slow the dying was, how filled with grace.

She looked again and saw the birds, elegant in flight

As wisps of air, as needed as air in a breathless room.

They were flying south, a V of harmony,

Sky-scullers, sewing the world together as they went,

Going home, going away, being the same place.

She looked up, expecting birds, and saw the shells

Disappear, and then again the birds, cranes they were,

Carrying tomorrow in their beaks.  One scratched

An itch in flight, the strangest thing she saw all year,

then took the wind in her face for the other cranes.

SUSANNAH IN VENICE AND AUSTRIA

            At the Kunsthistoriche, Vienna

In Tintoretti's fix on things,

Susannah's there, big and bold,

No shy and halting flower, she,

A woman who takes up the best part

Of a painting, as beauty often does.

This is no hidden arbor

But an open corridor

The city and the gardens

Calling the woman.  The men

Are there, as they often are,

Lurking in their low corner.

Poor men, poor contorted things

Nothing but eyes and twisted limbs.

Beside this scene, the curator's wit

Places a fully armored knight,

His codpiece vulnerable as sin,

His metal heart safe from attack

Clever folks these keepers of art,

Seeing how the painters have saved those

Who hang there, sinners and saints,

And how we need such famous memory

Who otherwise have only history's lies

To let us know the lives we have lived

And how a woman can undress a man

Of all his vanities with a little smile.