The $64,000 question
Jack Galmitz
The $64,000 question Copyright Š Jack Galmitz ImPress 2015 New York, New York
The $64,000 question
Jack Galmitz
Looking at the sky through the leaves of a great tree cut down for years
The bees’ rainbow wings return to my face I’m in his space
This summer night fierce and soothing as a hiding cat
Rocks and gravel each edge a fall a hammer the rails go on forever
Bare tract of land a blurred sun a bent tree of black
Tired of looking at itself the sunflower bows its head
Sunflower field a universe here
I surrenderthe roaches have taken over
Scraping off the soot from the pot she keeps burning
our marriage
Between mountains a sunset of pixels
My heart where have you gone hiding on ocean floors
Sitting on the porch when the downpour stops
ah, the petrichor
Without god what is there my hand in yours
At a yellow light I spent most of my life waiting for it to change
The hobbled in white clothes stifle in church
How lonely to be an American among Americans
Pink heather and a pink sunset whatever
Headlights in the rain all that steel or is it steel dominating world
I live in a world of post-dreck apartment buildings derelict
Where did those men go the ones with half a body who sold pencils long ago
The nursing home on the floor closest to the sky those who will soon die
The blood floods its banks Saturday night
I love the sea it graciously took me in
An outline in chalk of a man who was struck down a forecast of rain
Father died at night I’d never seen such rain never in my life
Blood blossoms in the syringe you’re off to heaven
Mother died of sepsis an old icebox
Huge hydrangea tree I’m weighed down, too by the deluge
A crescent moon and a star let’s have no more war
What splendor Lake Ontario frozen the waves at cresting
Shot from a cannon when she lands in the net she’s the same woman
The donkey stops and won’t budge enough is enough
The great roads belong to truckers the heroes of goods
A man in a box shipped third class is what we’ve become
Men who work in slaughterhouses have grown cloven hooves
The parakeet I loved so much broke its neck or so I was told
There’s barely room for the Chinese in floats cooling off in the pool
in no time a street shrine forms flowers, candles and crosses
The dog lifts his leg in a street of cracked earth in the barrio
Phantom India
A woman doctor raped on a bus then thrown to her death
Cracks in the road create a silent flower cars tear the petals
She’s lost her anxiety is felt rectangles of light step
I’m frozen meat waiting on the elevated platform a winter night