Webster's defines it as:"The quality that makes a thing what it is; the essential nature of a thing.
Webster's also defines it as a trifling or subtle distinction, as in argument.
Both definitions fit.
The poems have been organized into fascicles; poems woven together by common theme, idea, or timeframe.
Simply click on the title of the poem you'd like to read and then click the Back button to return to the list of poems.
I hope you enjoy what you read here.
Commentary is always appreciated. I can be reached at the email address below.mgangemi@sover.net
Freedom
Photograph
Anger Management
After Running Hard Off the Edge of the City
Dance Me
Desire
Midnight in Summit
Eve's Dilemma
Louise Andreas-Solomé
Alice and Gertrude
Genesis
Isaac and Jesus
Holy Man
Orion's Hell
Beethoven
Ludwig's Charm
Veracity
Market Street
Misery
Almost Haiku
Argentina
The Language of Drowning
The Sound of Gathering Density
Orgasm
Capsized
Fire
Four Hours Past 12am
Creature
Random Attention to Detail
Amputation
Moonlight in March
The Golden Gate
Sharing
The First Week of War
Excerpts from a Letter Found in the Pocket of a Corpse
Howling
Sunday Morning Before the War
Embedded
À la même fois
Monsoon Season
Sunrise in Scottsdale
Mauve Ghosts
Love Letters Found in an Old House in Vermont
Premonition
I was twelve then
Spring in the city meant longer days
More to do.
I had fallen in love with a classmate’s cousin.
Wrote a story about it
Set carefully in the Old West.
But they found it
My sisters and their friends.
That day
Warm city sun
Everything smelling green
Traffic moving through the park.
It was the first time
I burned myself
Page after page
Over the garbage can in the alley.
In Jersey City
Lots of guys who survived WWII
Worked all day with a vengeance.
Mamas home with those gaggles of kids
Because the Pope
Knew something about carnality and power
They didn’t.
Wives watched Johnny C
While husbands unwound with the guys.
Smoking cigarettes, tossing back drinks
Remembering shattered faces, blown-off legs
Smart, tailored uniforms.
TV. Black. White.
I was watching Johnny Carson
Late one night,
With my mother.
Maybe I heard it wrong
May be my antennas worked
Even then
When Johnny said:
War and Prostitution
The two greatest professions in the world.
Canned laughter
Blasted into the bedroom
Like white, sharp bedlam.
The construction of that applause
Was so damn loud
I knew I was up
way too late or a school night.
Words have everything to do with it
Your version,
Or mine
Assembled on the horizon
Called memory.
During that last summer
Incessant westerlies
Relentless heat
Drove green flies
From dry dune grass
And they would troll the beach
For fresh, sunburned flesh.
You and I
We had our rituals
Sharp ping of pebbles on the window
Six a.m.
Roseola clouds
The first rush of cool water
Sun bleeding gold over our heads.
We had surfing in our blood
Proud I was
To feel what I felt
That last summer.
Then, late August moved time aside
With the swelling scent of Nor’easter winds
Waves like maddened cattle
Sharp spray shattering around us;
I never thought you were particularly brave,
Just graceful.
And me,
Afraid of heights, stiff with fear
I’d still wait for the angriest wave
To
Throw me under its weight
Demand my surrender
And I would struggle against
Holding my breath.
Today, I drove through your Midwest city
On my way to California.
I am smoking a cigarette.
I am
Slouched in this motel chair
Out of context: stiff with dread
I remember that you could not swim;
Did you really believe that I
Would have abandoned my wave to save you?
I finish my cigarette and sit there
Remembering that last morning
Toweling off in the outdoor shower
Suits on as they always were
Cicadas tisking in the heat
And you said:
“Funny, you don’t smell Like a guinea.”
Just like that.
Did you notice how I froze?
Did you hear my stupid laugh?
And now, twenty-five years later
I still didn’t understand why it's so hard
To see you again.
Because how
How could you have ever known
How I smelled?
We never,
Ever,
Touched each other.
When she told you
You closed your eyes
Sighed
Reached back
As far as possible.
The rolling, glycine tube
Of a wave
Distracted her.
You dissolved.
Four hundred miles
South of where we used to live
I survey my new landscape
An unforgiving stretch of beach
I run every day
Out of fear and obligation.
Lines of blistering, swelling clouds
Sweep westward over the dunes
Hulk, swirl, and threaten to engulf me
Powered by squealing gulls
Who fight to penetrate the heavy, wet wind.
Most mornings along this coast
Fog exhales salty reath
Beady-eyed pelicans glissade
Over breakers and the teasing spray
That reaches to maul their flaccid pouches.
Before we left NY, I lied again
Blurted the thing
without thought or pretense
Habitual, you told me. Inevitable, I said.
Determined, at any cost to stop your words.
This pride
The harbinger of every frenetic rhythm
I danced to spare yself
Is pain imposed to distance myself
From languages I had learned.
Under this sky
Swollen with autumn
I run parallel to the consequences
Of muscle, heart, and conceit.
Impulses I cannot explain.
The remains of atavistic performances
Endless memories of my own defea.
They killed me because I looked at her.
My eyes were thrown to a blind prisoner
Serving time for fraud.
I was buried; she was paroled
Living;
Seeing through my dead eyes.
No one can cut
Without
Good reason.
Pure,
Ugly necessity
is reason enough.
I write this down
In lieu of confession
In place of danger,
And because
After all,
I am too busy
To fuss with it, today.
Imagine Alice and Gertrude
Sunday afternoon near the Tuleries
Waving to babies and young boys
Mufflers snug around their necks.
Imagine Lucy Arnez
Crossing America in the longest RV
The US of A ever saw,
Like a freight train
Seventy miles per hour through Ohio.
You know, in some of those skits
Lucy could have been Alice
Forty years younger and Still in Oakland
Gertrude wailing away on her saxophone
Jamming in the smoky speakeasies of San Francisco
A jaunty black beret on her head.
But Lucy wasn't Alice B
Even with Ethel at her side
Coveting all the hats
She knew she shouldn't buy.
Alice in her Paris kitchen
Chopping onions
Mr Hemingway bragging in the pallor
Gertrude half-listening
Tapping her foot to rhythms in her head
Because, after Paris,
What could they have done In Oakland, California
Except walk through Berkeley's Rose Garden
And watch I Love Lucy at eight.
So tell me about sentinels of faith
Who believe everything written in that Book is true
Adam into dust nine-hundred and thirty years later
The world populated through incest
Stiff-necked Paul ranting about fornication and impurity
Scraps of his letters littered across Asia Minor.
Millennia have passed since Eve screwed up
Glaciers with photographic memories
Have slid over the same ground year after year
Ever since Noah tumbled out of that ark
Blinded by survivor’s guilt.
Perhaps some things are true and
God made it all happen In seven days.
But make no mistake about it;
Adam was lonely
And Eve,
She was lonelier still
Walking through that garden
Hand over her breast
Whispering:
Where are you?
From the old desk
Smuggled history
Sedition fastened under a drawer
Whole pages of rebellion
Spelled out to mean:
I adore you.
Across the hall, an abandoned bedroom
Her portrait on the lonely wall
A small book of Elizabeth
Barrett Browning
Lace under the reading lamp
Solid, safe bed.
Nietzsche bitter
Lived for Death and Louise.
She refused him, of course
Bored with his
Über-ejaculations.
He judged her
Against his writings
Flush with tactics
And promises.
Entitlement vibrated Fred Nietzsche’s soul
Like a stonecutter’s hammer
Chisel still pounding
Hours after the last whiskey.
Louise, he wrote to his friend,
Projects animal-like egoism
Her mind honed,
Like a knife.
Leave it to Nietzsche
To write that
You see, even then
It was all about power.
Remembered you
In the fog
He knew
Lost dim lines
Soundless
Memory rushing
Adagio
Falling
Snow.
You know how it starts
Each inflected memory
A work of
art.
Expect that
Knock upon the door
He will be standing there
Hands clasped behind his back
Listen to what he wrote;
It will be easier to understand
How he drove them all
Mad.
Walking Argentina
Nasturtiums wild
Pampas grass
The mystery of salt
Maté, spiced
Mar de La Plata.
A million memories
Colors became poems
Spilled in the seaside café
Of your South Atlantic fishing port
Conch shell scraped of life.
We could have been
Scarlet red and indigo
Stunning toss of dice
Breathtaking lapis
Hiss of the sea
Seeping into its own sand.
Wind breathes
Beneath droughts
Sunlight through the curtains
Spun vermilion
Bumble bees spinning
Delirious dance
Ocean spilling
Furious, furious tongue.
Turn over:
I have rowed across the river
Slept in the sand
Placed my belly within your reach
Waited
For the river to rise.
I have tried to explain
Air structures water
You say you understand;
Sun-ripened
Tart peaches
Burst of fig.
My belly your pillow
Your body my blanket.
Fill your lean-self
Round
My belly full
Inevitable birth
Without that piercing
Orgasm without that
Orgasm.
Between women
Nothing
Is simple.
This is what I tell you
What I don’t
Is the sound of a head turning
Sound of water cascading
Down the face of wise
Thunderous rocks.
Unbearable separation;
Air from rain
Rain from river
River from ocean
What we didn't say
Equalized the weight of
Our saturated secrets
We came ashore and explored
That grand, indifferent forest
The ruins
Of a forlorn mission
An empty courtyard
Intractable walls
Ferns held captive in the stumps
Of the scattered stones.
Completed and whole
We loved
River, rain, ocean
Humid air
Forest brimming green
Ours
Con nada
Con todo.
After the suicide finds her way You will see
Feisty gulls Sharing the succulent flesh Flesh of a shattered oyster.
The unfamiliar lake. Finite
Falling into delectable water The hips of Marin. Crisp Resurgent greenery Memory inhales Breath-taking tender
We have cancelled the satellite TV A radio voice, in the monotone Everyone and no one On Friday evening, a radio voice Old friends say we are paranoid
Because everything The rush of radio warnings The papers say our government And the moon is full This is America, after all And here in Vermont
Water Palm fronds It has been three months When will it end?
Comprehend breathing Simple differences lay Liars do not want to live How disappointing To be found Say it will pass Did I do it?
Yes. It was unbearable Something unavoidable My genius A most vulnerable Then If you consider Make no mistake about it The price of oblivion
In lieu of freedom Hydra’s trinities Done Find the room inside Extend your credit Accommodate the suffering
Shortly after you left I went out with women She showed me the key
She was And I succumbed Everything
Sleep is impossible Perseveration
If I could shut them off Whose shadow
A liar The light of the world Who figured it out first
Bewildered apostles crawled from that table But remember Isaac? The following Wednesday Her baby, her Isaac A herdsman, like his father And Jesus? All those hungry disciples
I remember you telling me The sky over this desert I remember
It was supposition on my part I stood in the rain for hours Let’s blame everything on the dead I am trying not to look at the keyboard Lower case letters mumbling truth like a widower
The sun Waiting for the breeze
In the 1950s Passionate Desi Arnez the NY band leader Frederick the pianist He had finished
Rumor has it his agent Written off
Seven beeswax candles Tumble But I do wonder I miss our fights over practical things;
The water is rising.
The colder I grow I am thirty miles out
They told me not to take this trip alone. I will brave this out I shift and imagine your smile
She was a gnome Notice her door is open She fled years ago
This free form poem is not formatted. The hope is that the reader will experience it as if she were immersed in a highly charged memory.
Orgasm
Light burst through like water pouring sounded like water spilling into the room. That’s how it would be remembered an invitation held open mother-of-pearl-lined maw of an impossible seashell. She closed her eyes so ears could open so mouth could taste what could not be seen even if seeing was sight tasted. She could melt her own bones without wanting anything frail fullness disappearing deliciousness offered salient resistence feeble wrestling pulled light colliding beneath fingernails and toenails wanting only to breathe one last finite breath and know that breath before it was gone like a dream. Unfolding herself into drenched lusciousness she melted texture her back arching for the taunting humid voice rough insatiable furious furious tongue. Without silence thought escapes memory coy and bereft scantily clad in faint sighs echoed perseveration liquefied through skin begging formless need without fishing without baiting the hook filling the sound scraping skin shaping whispers the way whispers slide from woman to woman. She became silver swallowed ocean teeming contrapuntal breathing ragged measured forgiveness all her redemptions tied by cradle-need forgiven forgotten whispers spider webs without vibration cooing-warm silver syllables slipping into whispers, two whispers kissing purring reflections in bottomless pools airbrushed shadows, gilded clouds wild spring grass and everything, everything scarlet coral sound. Space blurring where curves drew breath elliptical curves shaping curves cradling belly indistinct cellular cultivation articulated, exhaled as if ocean had arrived. She was consumed plowed through rounded again and again body flamed floating run through perfectly calibrated tones textured screams, cumbrous velvet-thick blood effervescent breath azure tender-colored infant living in her belly-mind. Yes, she thought this room is empty everything emptiness everything rolling the ship cleaving through waves seconds from nothing claiming savage truculence humble enough to receive flesh and sky earth myrtle pale spring grass tree of life ship of fools voids flooded. She kept her eyes closed heard density spinning hallowed hermetic velvet inhaling body shifting to lilting, lullaby tones lush volcanic forest heat fertility sighing in relief sepia softness wet yes no yes no yes there there sound perfectly layered folds coming melted breasts an immediate bargain time bursting being held being melded being chocolate melted indefatigable willing iridescence swathed innocence re-opened she was born knowing it was enough. But color is carefully arranged innumerable options sound of air and words meeting sound of evening closing its eyes fading around someone’s frozen look across an empty room. Sound of leaving twisted sheets discarded pillows sound of wandering hapless generosity breathing again. Listen: she remembered that stretch of beach near the estuary and the inlet and the way the boats carved their way through waves sunlight sneaking through pilothouse windows currents of sun on weathered faces women watching for signs hands raw from loaded nets exploding in silver hands twisting coils of rope muscles taunt enough to hold dreams aloft mouths greedy enough to taste toss back fire find warmth within each other setting course through slate gray history transcribing the death of all that silver suffocating in the hold of a merciless boat on indifferent waves taunting women fishing in silence finally throwing what’s left over the side. If loneliness could be a question, would you answer it? Divorce yourself from my soul, carefully. And remember how many women you told you loved them; you really loved them until you didn’t anymore. How they didn’t know you didn’t until you just didn’t anymore. And you burned those boxes in the basement boxes stuffed with newspaper wrapped mementoes of being with you, of knowing your body. But did they ever know your body? The way you liked it. The way they thought you liked it. The obscurity of what you never told them how and why you never told them. How you swam away ignorant and wild. The silence squaring yourself with believing. Nothing saying nothing saying something to the mirror and the mirror cracking; telling you nothing after all. But now all these memories complain and reach these words. Grasping lies even if you refuse them the haunting persists begins every one of those moments with something less than the word itself. Reckless knowing words circumventing the soul’s brain without anything in particular without knowing something is missing. Words with flesh and bone in them heat backlighting lip and tongue in them cheek and lash in them touch of skin and blood in them. Words dreaming of truth colliding caressing marks gouges slashes on paper curves and colors in books smell and heat wind and green grass desperate for more . Like toes in summer sand, sand more than the driftwood scattered across it the sharpness of small stones on asphalt more than limping thinking wanting lips forming letters relinquishing accent and inflection no more possession no more newspapers splattered with them no more wrapped mementoes in them no more scrapes and echos no more boxes in cellars no more fishing no more hooks no more miserable didactic no more language belonging to them.À la même fois
Minuscule waves
Melted through pebbled beach.
Details of your life
Sunken treasure. Extricated.
Until late Autumn
Fine-tuned hope.
Exploded
Tongues of lavender.
Rustles the curtains
Slips, a soft Serpent
Fingertips over belly.
You understand
Love is not infinite.Excerpts from a Letter Found in the Pocket of a Corpse
Decided to buy three goats
And learn how to tap the sugar maples.
Of a fifth grade boy, tells us
This country will go to war and
After you leave for work
I finish hanging out the laundry
And rush to make the noontime peace action.
Believes the country is godless
Corpulent and bankrupt
Endless vignetts of dutybound
Patriotism, blood and
Whimpering children.
Tells us bombers have routed
Inextricable evil
They want us awed
Proud of our sons and daughters
But we are shocked or
Terrified in turn.
New friends say very little and we still
Can’t sleep through the night
Even here, in Vermont
On our isolated, beautiful dirt road.
Flimsy and cruel
Reverberates in the same predictable
Patterns of religion, economics
Politics and morality
Different definitions hunkered down
Among the hay bales.
Blues in the dark
World shut out and empty
Seven bottles in the trash.
Won’t recognize us
Because we are less
Than the sum of any marriage
Cobbled together
For the sake of the children.
Only once a month
And we still suffer history
With a perpetual tic.
Isn’t it?
Mighty rivers, golden plains
The city by the sea
But every one who can
Has their passport ready.
We shake our heads and wonder
Where we could possibly go
When the first blizzard
Of the season
Rushes in to take
Our breath away.
Drips from umbrella
Day slides
Wickedly in front of me
Timed between
Coffee and rain.
Sway like claws.
34 weeks since I cheated.
As a trace element
Between how we learn
And what we do
They have to.
Not enough
Again
and everything
Fall into place
Wonderment
Laundered
With starch.
For understanding
The ways of women
Matured somewhere
Between Kate Millet and
The Indigo Girls
Aspect of my
Liberal mind.
In the Nineties
I found reality
Transfigured
By the untold truth
Of Republican lies.
The trauma of blessed
Drunkenness
Then you are there.
Is not paradise.
Seek yourself
In a deconstructed
Family.
Daughters : Companions : Substitutes
Tremble before submitting
To the cleaving.
Every day with impunity.
The castle
Wander deeper
A little coy
Bargain away the pain
Feel the cold floor
Discreet wrinkles in the wallpaper.
Bones of a mother's lie
Every mother lies.Dance Me
The Berlin Wall crumbled.
Who taught me
How to dance.
Very early one cold winter morning
I stood outside with a friend
The air pulsing
A moon slung low in the rigid sky
To her new apartment
Shining like a jewel
In the palm of her hand.Desire
Big
Dense
Powerful.
To my need.
Could have been
Perfect.Midnight in Summit
Spring wind
Flinging rain
City lights drizzling
Crawling cars on the street.
Shards of memory
Which hour of what day
Would they wait for me to
Remember how beautiful?
Will spread like ivy
Across the facade of my face?Genesis
Is very clever.
Was a lie.
Suffered the least.Isaac and Jesus
Tried to escape his soon-to-be
Sacrifice for the love of all men.
Jesus confounded all their claims to His Soul
Piecemeal with brilliant piety.
Confiteor aside, they were nervous
Somewhat inhibited. But, oh that Jesus!
In the end, he put it all together
Station by station
The two most important Marys
Weeping at his feet.
Poster-boy for history’s almost-child-sacrifice
Saved from his daddy by a disembodied voice
Isaac trussed like a goat
Terror-spewed vomit
All over that cold stone.
No Marys to clean his face.
Abe mentioned it to Sarah Casually, after dinner,
Shards of green lentils in his teeth.
Stuttered uncontrollably
For the rest of his life
Obedient and beloved.
He slaughtered lambs and sired
Many sons.
He came back
Like Swartzennegar.
Hasta leugo, he said.
Came back too.
They founded a church.
Made the Marys special girls
Slaughtered millions
And sired many sons.Monsoon Season
What it is like
To be you.
Filled with ghosts
Slow-motion lightening
Hot wind battering mesquite
Blackened pods of mimosa
Skittering across the patio.
I saw you
And became empty.Random Attention to Detail
Wondering when the violence would return
Spitting history at its survivors.
Waiting for my heroine to return.
The worst of hope.
Spelling our lives in fits and starts
Sipping old coffee under a fluorescent kitchen light.Sunrise in Scottsdale
Bubbled over the stucco wall
Its tentacles slithering
Over the shoulders of
The solitary statue
Bracing itself for the hideous heat
That never comes.Lucy & Desi, Frederick &George
Lucy and Desi Arnez
Were America's
Icons of diversity
Like the Romantics
Frederick and George
The Frenchwoman and the Jew-hating Pole
Loved the rumba and salsa
Late nights at the club
Without Lucy
Hated to perform in public
Lived in Paris
Drowned in his own blood
Far from home.
An exhausting tour of England
Was pretty much broke
Cold and damp.
All alone.
Fell in love with him
But he died anyway.
Abandoned
By George.Moonlight in March
Dripped
Messy
Of blue
Notes
Rolling and
Stretching through March
Where you went
Swag in the trunk
Cat shit three-days old
You hovering in the next room
Listening in on my depression
Swank
Miffed
Stinking
Like cheap cigarettes.Capsized
You are silver outlines
In the air pocket of this boat.
The clearer you become
We are saturated with echoes
Dripping, ragged breath.
Bleeding from the slivers
Of this relentless storm.
Trapped, ready
I will remember every detail
Heavy
Calm.
I decide to let myself go.
Reflecting mine
The water covers me
We are home.Fire
In a sanctuary of promises
Spiritual skeleton
Brooding and smoking.
It creaks in the slightest of drafts
In a languid sort of way
Nicotine stained walls
Weary shades
A depressed cat circles the empty kitchen
Took practically nothing with her
Not even the books.