Dow Jones Dream
Someone is tossing fish from the roofs
And you swim the violent current down Broadway towards Central Park
Past steel hot dog carts and rusted fish caves once garbage bins brimming with takeout boxes.
Perched behind a drowned oak tree
Alice and the Mad Hatter ask
About the state of the markets.
When the helicopters shred the sky
They will ask if you are here for the light show
And for proper identification
Cash is also acceptable.
The annual burning of the older
Houses bring the wealthier crowds
On their fancy foam noodles, rubber hands
Built with waterproof cameras
They only like the old houses,
Those rusted gates and outdated
Number plates when they burn.
Here come the sirens,
Those jazz songs that warn of the waves, the
Breached seawall Sinatra always plays on payday.
The tourists are never ready for the skyscrapers,
Their windows crashing against rocks until the shoreline
Dots with gray sea glass the marble stairs to the library a hill of preening seabirds.
When they invented the boats, we knew the worst was over, it had to be. So, what more could we do but celebrate?
A body that no longer needed to swim.
Cohabitation
She only opens her door to the winds who liberate the dead pinned to her mirror
To bury them higher up in a hole in the air
The cliff, she says, is crumbling like a poor man’s bread and it’s not those taciturn
Oaks which will save the landscape’s reputation
She also says that she only has to wait for the fifth season for her dead to come
Back to her honeyed tears on the apple-tree’s cheeks
They’ll straddle the fog
Mount the dogs
Soil the hallway
To express their disapproval
Questioning the calends complicates the route of the sun lodged in her chicken house
Since the hens began laying their eggs in the river
Curses on thresholds that don’t know how to gather footsteps she repeats until
It intoxicates her
Curses on hands that turn bread into grief
Curses on water which becomes frost when you drink it
Her long cohabitation with the mountain taught her that birds migrate at night so
That they won’t know the road is long.