The painting makes you want to dive into the scene, 
partake of its reality,
perch upon the shoulders of its players 
like some sprite, angelic auditor, or half-drunk parrot
Get inside them, know these people, these classic types,
	from the inside, 
squawking out your own theories and objections
Live these few minutes as they lived them 
You want to trade skins
with somebody else,
taste the coffee, or the beer, with another’s tongue, 
another’s mouth, teeth
another’s heart, limbs, mind
 
Everything that lives for us 
lived also years ago, decade after decade, 
when life was on the line 
Others pulled the strings 
I swung, held on, trying to keep my balance, 
keep from falling,
both in and out of the picture 
This painting, image, coloristic depiction, 
just one more, you may say, 
of so many others 
I seek to pull them out, 
show them to the light
step back into their time, walk their walk,
take them back 
to the source,
seeking always the source,
swimming back like one-celled creatures
drawn to mate with the tiny nth-degree particles of their universe
so small, so subfusc and granular, 
particled and particular to their own existence
 
I will mate with the universe, atom by Adam
Be all Glad Day in the colors of the revelation of unexpected things,
	some things, happily, other than no-things,
in the moments, the miniature infinitudes
of endings, twisting and turnings, 
back to our beginnings, 
back to Singularity when we were as good as we could be, 
as alive as dead
 
a pigment on the square,
blood on the canvas.
                        

Tiny particles, I’m told
deep in the dark passageway of the inner ear
keep the room spinning
adding a new degree of difficulty 
to evening triangulations 
and all the other poses

Who am I posing for?
What will miss me if I can no longer
lie on my back with the bridge of my temperamental mid-section 
in the air, 
a miniature Throgs Neck tying the island of my childhood
to the far fields of the thrown-ahead decades,
swarming to be born
I bring a note to my yoga class,
begging for an end to my torments
and fewer demands on my swimming inner-ear

‘Stones,’ they are called, 
the slingshot of vertigo
ready at a moment’s indiscretion 
to slay the giant in my mind 
lay him on the ground 
and set the room to ‘spinning’ 

A cliché, you think,
and then it happens.
Will I have to give up balancing the world on my back
breathing in, and letting go
(pretending I know the difference) 
to inflate the universe with my very breath,
as if spiritus mundi has been waiting each evening 
for my kiss of life

Don’t worry, they tell me,
there is always child’s pose,
but I will never be the man I was,
that creature of sanity
and pillow of domestic comfort 

until I learn once more to keep 
the stones from rolling. 
                        

Dad’s grown sentimental 
He may not have seen them on the day itself,
but close enough, and any day is a holiday
if the heart keeps warm 
Still close are the melodies 
at their sublimely nostalgic best 
This music –
he cannot forget the music! 
theme music of their childhoods, 
and his second – 
is balm to his graying age
He laughs in his beard
Almost nobody, dietary limitations so common these days
     that every waitstaffer is a deputized constable
for Food Restriction Inc.,
does this any more,
but he will raise an eggnog toast in a lactose-tolerant house,
spiked, of course, 
with the remembrance 
of times, 
     and people
best loved, forever