trim the summit ash and red oak so that drivers

could reduce their speed in time. Astonishing

to realize there was such a thing as too much

beauty. I was nineteen, I had another lifetime to

learn this; all I could do then was stand

near the flame, and marvel at the blisters.

Barbers

Barbers

From the hotel in Martyr’s Square

drive east into Achrafieh in

search of a barber learn

there are four words for barber

three of which are spit out

the last of which — coiffeur — anoints

a tongue with its mellifluence

like the milky coffee served by

the small woman from Khartoum who

never stops bending and refilling

to sit with a group of men wearing

three-piece suits fingering

prayer beads and crosses

to watch a man larger than most

giggle his way through a

haircut he has some advice

for what one ought

to do with sideburns too long

and my beard it is not good

there are ways to fix this and

these men who in another

time would have had other advice

and other things to offer

gather around to officiate as

the coiffeur takes a blade to

the neck and trims until

my head is as smooth and

perfumed as a past

not past but present.

Coins

Coins

The crowd rotates by chemical signals

fired into synaptic gaps,

zeros and ones shot into space,

downloaded onto screens, reassembled

into words instructing Parisians to gather

at République by six, that they do in

the thousands, and begin their waltz

around the draped statue that shows

how good ideas must be held aloft,

abstracted, like twelve lives turned

to martyrs’ treasure, one side

of a coin depicting decadence

and insult, the other, tendered here,

brave insouciance before backward

ideals. A cannon puff announces

their transcendence, from

lives into paper lanterns, rising

from the hands of figures in

black who’ve mounted the plinth like security agents of justice.

Glowing white orbs drift

upward through the silvery

drizzle and thousands

cheer as one, unified,

tonight, as somewhere else

thousands are too in

agreement that a life is not

just a life, but a vessel

for the value we assign it.

You Are Here

You Are Here

When I arrive subway tokens coin

a pocket like teeth, XXX parlors

gum 6th Avenue south of 34th.

We park at Astor on Wednesdays,

wait for the Voice, quarter roll and tennis

shoes, ready to out-sprint all comers to pay

phones, on to mythical three-bedroom apartments

under two thousand dollars.

Everybody takes the subway, the 6, the J,

the N, hips glued to one another.

The F train stop at 2nd Avenue hot as a

smokehouse, we stand over grates

for a whisper of air, land at

Allen Street, three rooms rump-side

of a tenement that rattles when semis

run the Houston light after dark. One day

there’ll be a train carving south straight

through those greasy foundations.

Be patient, they’ve been planning it