For Leona

When I finally went,

you held my toe and told me

“Well, Ralph,

now I can crank up the AC

and you won’t complain”

The big black dog cried

and the Jamaican nurses cried

and you read Kaddish in transliteration

from a sheet of printer paper

Your mother did not roll over

in her grave, though you thought

she would

The grandchildren remember how

I hid the afikomen in the same place

every Passover (under my chair)

and they remember my suspenders

and starched shirts, how I never bought smaller ones

even though I was shrinking

Please remind them

that I used to sit at the head of the dinner table,

that I took them sailing,

that I told them

I loved them

even though I thought it might be

too late

(Oh, and the big black dog

His ears wouldn’t point like that if I hadn’t

wrapped them in medical tape for

his first few months

home, you know

Please tell him I’m sorry

I couldn’t take him to the park)

And Leona,

I knew

from our first date when I slipped

on ice on 43rd Street -

found a diamond frozen there,

brushed off the frost with a warm glove,

never would have found it if I

hadn’t fallen

So even though it might be late now

like it was those last few nights I slept

in a bed next to ours

I would like you to know

that even though I was your rudder

for fifty-four years, I will always

be your bay

Ghazal for Archie

We buy our first bed.

We eat honey in bed,

fuck between sticky sheets,

get stuck in bed.

We set off smoke alarms

sharing cigarettes in bed.

From the second story window

we watch moles burrow in the flowerbed.

The sun casts longer shadows.

We can’t stay here in bed.

You trace my lips with a hangnail.

I clip your nails in bed.

Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, Morris Plains, NJ

A grey New Jersey morning
woke up topless in an ex-boyfriend’s bed
just to go to some abandoned asylum
Drove for twenty minutes and crouched
behind cars and bushes,
scampering to the busted deadbolt
although the security guards probably
didn’t care all that much
I was wearing a red hat
They could have seen me
if they wanted to

Ginsberg, let me tell you,
I have been to Greystone’s halls and they’re still
foetid, the paint is peeling,
the floors are puddles,
it’s empty mostly
I looked for your friends in the hydrotherapy tubs
just found debris and old moss
Climbed out of my skin
and into a glass box
no bottom  –  Cold,
barefoot,
posing for
flashbulbs,
goosebumps (they show up
on camera), flashbulbs,
crawled out ten pounds thinner
crawled back in
found five dozen white-glad rotators squeaking
along linoleum, wheels over the soft moss lurking underneath
squeak over able arms and legs, atrophied,
my magnetic knees collecting
nails and rust, flashbulbs,
goosebumps
glass
pamphlets
anything
my fingers
can wrap around

I laid out in the parking lot
a doorknob, a deer skull,
easter egg lithium pamphlets,
crack them open with my teeth, like a sailor,
like someone who has never been told no,
you’ll break
your teeth
that way.