it strikes like the hawk which suddenly dropped out of the sky yesterday and missed hitting me by a street people stood around stunned pulled out cell phones to call for help we e-mailed each other planned ways to get rid of your death if only temporarily but I wanted answers: at least a reason why which how won’t give anymore than that bird’s dead-eyed stare fixed on me does... then your voice I swear I could hear it slam right thru that bird’s eye BOOM BOOM poem after poem imprinting on our hearts a blue print* of your soul *”Blue Print” is the title poem of Yictove’s book ------------------------------------------

a guy jumped on a bike in San Francisco didn’t know where / why a few hundred others came: it was the last decade of the century they begin wearing down what asphalts the road.... two days later, September 27th my birthday in a candle lit bedroom I’m riding out a love story with a man I’ll be riding it out with on paper after he’s gone riding it back & forth everywhichway to keep a heart beating... across America from Union Square North to Washington Thompkins Madison Square parks cities across Europe a few thousand cyclists began riding out the century thru the dead waste of work day lives auto politic exhaust fumes what poisons the mind-breath the last Friday of the month clear the road that spans thru this country our lives is our life line... I heared them as I sat in a Village cafe looked out and saw blazing metalic urban angels clicking gears honking down streets they emptied of cars trucks flew without leaving the ground..... never been on a bike like that but know the sheer joy of speeding down a road that doesn’t exist till I’m on it is that what they feared when cops hauled in 50 cyclists before the republican convention what everyone tries to silence: the roar of freedom a road being cleared?

what about the fish,” you asked when they started pumping toxic water out of New Orleans into the lake-- what about it, I thought and the 9/11 smoke we breathed in next generation will cough out; I knew a man...or my lover did... whose exposure to agent orange killed his son born a year after he returned from Viet Nam, goes on living his death outloud... “someone will start hollering about it,” you said, always does point the finger of blame, I answered, take turns at it....remember how it goes in grade school in the yard, someone must be it... when the man I loved died I blamed cigarettes...others, the environment food / liquor bad doctors when nothing else, bring back the god we killed last century _ Poem 2: Agnostic (written 11-12 / 02 revised 8 / 05) By Linda Lerner If forever has a shape it’s this big old stone house in Carroll Gardens block from where I live; clenched in ivy sunk in a quick sand of green in street light looks like skeleton fingers clawing it--- small balconies curves / angles around something I can’t get to; could be out of a Poe story only it’s right here then the sign staring me in the face, big white, impossible to miss: Scotto’s funeral home so how was it possible... ...when my 85 year old father was in intensive care I didn’t believe he would die our lifelong quarrel ever end, I watched the gravediggers stretch a morning into forever and lower his coffin into it and still and each time I heard of another one and who, will anyone with the only person who’d know I’d never leave him / gone refuse to believe it of me, too?

If forever has a shape it’s this big old stone house in Carroll Gardens block from where I live; clenched in ivy sunk in a quick sand of green in street light looks like skeleton fingers clawing it--- small balconies curves / angles around something I can’t get to; could be out of a Poe story only it’s right here then the sign staring me in the face, big white, impossible to miss: Scotto’s funeral home so how was it possible... ...when my 85 year old father was in intensive care I didn’t believe he would die our lifelong quarrel ever end, I watched the gravediggers stretch a morning into forever and lower his coffin into it and still and each time I heard of another one and who, will anyone with the only person who’d know I’d never leave him / gone refuse to believe it of me, too?

my year old gray/white cat stares at a sparrow from the windowsill his big green eye the other tearing shrunken infected months before he came here hungers after what he can’t have but will get the way we do when something is prohibited... mornings: that familiar cry for foodlove blanket against the cold even in hottest summer wakes me and I bury my own needs to give him what can no longer be given to me feel each rib of his tiny body I move my hand across rubbing my forehead in his fur that warms us both... Sam I say not Samsara the name you took before you knew the wheel was turning its last round ...our first sleeplessnight morning I woke to find you on the coach and thinking something wrong lay down beside you your penis rose up like a fish I said licking it both of us smiling in flight and I remember how afterward it fell across my thigh I stroked it and that purring look you had unmapping injuries from lives before ours began.... his name is Sam I say "just Sam"

A day's wages fly in and out of nets jolting fisherman in their Illinois and Mississippi river homes, motors of boats used for generations now excite Asian carp to get back at those who've been plundering their world allow this make-believe...they're thought of at all, gives me the same out when doctors use the term, Vascular Dementia to explain an old woman's memory loss: "I don't know who you are", my mother says who never did, and I catch more than she intended reaching for the impossible: there's still time, and knowing there won't be anything after... "Who is she", her nurse prods, pointing to me. "They don't know who you are", my mother says, "and I don't either."