Raymond J. Learsy: The Humanities: America’s Great Formative Tradition Succumbing To The Financial Crisis

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A bed without legs
On top, a tall woman sleeps
Hands reaching the floor.

The pineapple orange grove dead.
Late October, stem end rotting
Branches burned, the tone deaf stork
Flying home. In the citrus tree stand
Across the road, someone turns on
An overhead sprinkler, wind borne
Sprites of water spraying our feet.

A red autumn sky. In a month
Our neighbors will climb into cherry
Pickers, their sharpened clippers
Stirring in the fruit, a thousand
Birds flapping razor edged wings
Through blood orange braids of light.

Enviously, my father glares
Not yet knowing these same men
Will cut him too, hanging like their fruit,
Down from a tree. The clippers dulled
From reaper’s work, the rope wet
With orange sap, my father gleaned
At last from his orange grove, dead.

Passing through the colonnades
Of her lips, I can read
Poetry on her breath,
My mouth an apostrophe
Her poetry is mine.

The day hangs on too
long. The silver line of the sun
stretches across the black

mountain of rooftops,
spilling into a broken span
of green lawns and alleyways.

The dying squirrel in the road
dreams of the anarchy of night,
his relationship to truth shifting

with each passerby. Three lone
crickets, confused and tense, no
one to witness their scalloped legs

breaking, churn among the rot
of old men snoring-so goes
the sadness of summer.

The blue-gray cocoon,
hung with a torrent of black
crows, cascades over freshly

painted balconies, where
mothers and fathers leave
their bedrooms to cast

long shadows over their own
children, sullen and strange.

Ah, just think! In 1958
A yellow hatted Buddha
Lunched with Frank O’Hara
On the MOMA mezzanine

Cold lentil soup
Basil tomato and mozzarella
On huckleberry sour dough
Iced green tea with milk

As Second Avenue drifted by
The taxi driver refused to stop
At the dead end curb where wrinkled
Tenement buildings smell
Of smoke and crushed stone

In the quiet of March
We wheeled
Toward Greenpoint
Crossing the Williamsburg Bridge
He fell asleep
Steering with one hand
Cupping the East River for a drink

We drove for hours in the amber
Light and coffee brown haze
Of a shipwrecked sunset
Neither of us speaking
English he dreaming like

A gypsy of Baghdad
Or Bombay
And I confused by a rose and ruby
Blue orchid I once saw
In a Georgia O’Keefe landscape

These lines are sun
Fed polaroids, with West
Nile laden birds
This verse overstuffed
Twin feathered beds
Pictured on the back page
Of an old Sears &
Roebucks catalog

On the side of an elm
A monk has built a
Birdhouse from an oak
That was once an open net
Above the tree to which it now stands
Nailed and rotting like graffiti
On a faded Egyptian tomb.

Two swallows sharpen their beaks
On a long piece of hemp
Climbing the rope in murderous
Pandemonium their long knives
Disappearing behind orange leaves
And burnt black bark.

Not a drop of blood has spilled
On the forest floor
Just bits of birdsong and leaves
Like eyelashes from brown
Feathered trees.

they used to awaken to a suite of silence
like the cinema before Chaplin spoke,
sliding like acrobats across coffee tables
and road maps
to steal words from the voices of
birds.

they used to awaken to ceremonies of glass
pushed like orange peels through
sheets of water,
comb through each other’s
bodies and flutter.

he used to watch
how the tangent of her
shoulder, like a Chinese character, fell
beneath his arm.

they used to live
in the hour between dreams
and children,
when the bathroom
mirror succumbed to the first
leaves of light
and swallows gathered
in ringlets along the eaves.

she used to whisper something intangible.

listening to her eyes,
he used to hear the blue vault,
thin and ceramic,
cracking through the trees.

holding his breath in her mouth
she would transfigure, Christ like
in a crescendo of flowers,
a wall of prismatic light.