South Fork Poetry: Intercession

The worst photo assignment I've had, oh forget it,

it would take too long to explain why I couldn't

follow-focus for a newspaper what would be too

repelling to record and emotionally impossible,

a jumper on the Empire State, and as I tried to

be a committed professional and slunk that way

nauseously, I found a crisis cop had talked him

down. I walked up to this scruffy young Irishman

like Mary Magdalene and gazed as the heavens

exploded and all the fire engines rumbled away,

back to their sheltered caverns of inaction, and

asked, my career reprieved from retirement, how

he did it, and he said "the guy just wanted to talk

to his father and we told him we could arrange it."

Sweet Dreams

Cryptic wisteria, that's an idea, I'll vine myself up

someone's legs. He will experience a vague flutter

like a lost continent below the sea. Crimson reefs

of molten lava surface as an unclaimed Eden through

his mind, nude and primeval, one rib too many, thrown

from a dream like a skipped stone rippling his thighs,

ripples rising and rising. I do not think birds will sing,

however. My imagery is too profusive. I'd boggle his

primeval thinking like a wrench. The machinery would

break down. I'd have to unvine fast before the entire

continent resinks, leaving but a puddle in its wake,

so don't tell me you're all ears, I know that game.

"Well, enough about my problems. What do you think

about my problems?" Excuse me, I'm falling asleep.

These poems are from Star Black's newly published sonnet sequence, "Waterworn" (Tribes Books, $10). Ms. Black, a former staff photographer for United Press International, is a regular visitor to Sag Harbor.