The wind
both always
and never
vanishes
Over the years
the skinny busboy
will thicken
or become a scrawny
chain-smoking
old man
the palm trees
sadder
in this salty
fumey wind
they don’t like
being boxed
on the concrete
trafficy
seawall
All things
are pointers pointing
as if
the palms
wrote in their own notebooks
watching as
I grow
defective
When I’m gone
someone else
will come
to something else
built here
look at the water
never quitting
mull the wind
the future
like the past
except for the decoration

© 2008 John Gorman

The angel glows, a little like a jukebox,
bright sleazy colors in his robe and wings.
Our Lady, the Tower of Ivory,
curves in humility like a sectioned tusk, though she’s not
passive, clearly.  She’s been reading from a thick book,
a codex—a little out of time, as the architectural
angles, in their receding perspective, are a little
out of kilter on the two-dimensional plane.
A pot of something, maybe hyacinths,
blooms symbolically.
Art flowers blossom at Gabriel’s head.
The Holy Spirit, cramped a bit, to fit the composition.
sheds rays of red light, drops of blood
(a Freudian interpretations also tried to suggest itself.)
In the room, not a room but a patchwork
of cobalt lozenges, Mary’s face is severe,
unreadable, a little famished.  She doesn’t
look fourteen.  The androgynous angel,
his credible foot resting on a cloud puff,
is more the maidenly.  It’s his arms, their positioning.
Art, like bigotry, sums things up quickly:
Men kill, women bless.  When I take off my glasses
to check the way things balance, two blurs bulge
and cooperate asymmetrically.  Nice work.
It’s not Chartres or Chagall, but the message
comes through.  The priest, returning from
convivialities at the front door, watches me
jotting notes in my checkbook.  Catholic churches
house every odd sort, he’ll let it go.
As I U-turn out of my spot by the parking lot
onto Avenue K, a street-tough young man,
dressed up, but not for church, bends gracefully

She’s learned to talk to cops with a Junior League hauteur
but the voice is too reedy
her mesh bags make it clear:
I have nowhere else to keep my deodorant.
We don’t believe her when she says she isn’t stranded.
She’s brushed her hair
but the face she turns from both to booth
around the little universe of the coffee shop
is bloated by medication, by nights in awkward places,
its puffed flesh gathered carelessly by men who’ve mocked her
inferior men with rooms, with cars.
Through it all she’s kept a composure,
“My fiancé is coming to get me.”  
Somewhere he exists, this phantom of the electrodes,
but tonight the man in blue radios her in.