I examine ponderous clouds like axioms suspended in ether mining the sky for its bleak harvest home. You play down the weird weather, these images Scribbled overhead by an air genie And let me play with the boundless folds of my imagination. I see trees I see cars I don't see many buildings I see flags, I see grass and plants I see bears but no ants. I see cornfields, I see windmills That loom like robots over this landscape. Strands of haughty towers piercing the cloud cover Like melted sky butter. I see signs to get off the grid Signs of wounded vegetable life Signs of cursive circuitry love Embedded in rhomboid clusters Of light decay and dander. I see trails for cows I see veils for hay I see bales of hay Some celestial cleavage and light decay. Examining these structures and strictures Like holy Scriptures and Civilization's last clear pictures. These pure pict clouds Surely depict some higher cosmic revelation- From here they look like bats wings With brocaded plumes and graybeard's doodle with clown faces piercing through it. I see above the sfumata quality of charcoal clouds. 40 years after this wireless discovery I'm still looking for poetic blips on my mind radar where Nature's splendor writes in a wondrous cursive gray poem language.

In this decades old house it's hard to nail down the last board of our muted conversations. It's like hammering into water- You speak to me in a voice that is spiders and dust- some sepulchered gurgle from a morose pit- We are almost afraid of the sound of quiet buried here- Sometimes my father calls out to me beneath the rain, but I don't hear him with the competing platitude of furnaces and hissing pipes. The house noises conceal his begging, pleaded voice. Like a muffled scream contained under layers of blankets and pillows. Home is not the peaceable bone. But the clanking of cups, the din of pots and plates. A cacophony made by mealtime noisy children. We seek to exist in this landscape of attenuated noise and discordant sounds, but are often over-heard. I want to hear the voice of my father one last time but it's like hammering into water-

I got stung once by a jellyfish off shallow waters on a Summerside beach. I was only 11. The following year Were my naïve clumsy attempts At poetry written on a big oak desk That drowned with my father. Destiny presides in the water here. My primordial benefactor. You are not my tentacled lover But brother of the deepest waters Where we set our mind traps at ease. There amidst murk and spume of dirty water Poetry is churning in our bathic veins. Our bodies are always trying to resurface. Shaped from liquid void We are like the first ever Trilobites Trying to see their way clear and gorge themselves on minute bubbles. We stumble to shore with our gorgeous gelatinous faces Planted into the salty spit of sand Among rows of low docked haddock drying in the sun.

a thrashing fish struggling to spit free of the hook meets a rudderless boat adrift between winds and currents vying to control its destiny along comes a gentle man who, delighting in her food and drink, fears the dangerous comforts of her refuge he says ...... I just want to be friends she says ... stop kissing my mouth

You disguise yourself as a bag of trash stepping through two leg holes cut into a green plastic garbage bag stuffed with crumpled newspaper, a pipecleaner twist-tied at your neck I decorate you with gutted muffin cups, fat crumbs, grape stems, candy bar wrappers and for good measure a rusting banana peel I disguise myself as the good-witch-of-the-woods and because of the mask and wand no one knows who I really am as I dance through the crowd granting three wishes to those brave enough to confide in me Whispered in my ear I hear every wish, from world peace to good crops, winning lotteries, and winning wives back

1. graduate school fieldwork finds me at the Jacob Perlow Hospice of the Beth Israel Medical Center where the Lubavitcher Rebbe Mendel Menachim Shneerson is dying on another hospital unit not the hospice unit because a moshiach does not die well-wishers crowd the entrance children sing in the park the moshiach-mobile circles the hospital block speakers blaring inside I know an easy rapport with many New York City patients because like Kotter's Epstein I am a proud Puerto Rican Jew I'm a Jewish spic! my girlish pride chastised by Don't say that, you can't say that, don't you ever let me hear you say that tasked to prepare a music therapy self-portrait for class I improvise in binary rondo form a conversation between my namesake song "Maria Elena" and a classic Chassidic niggun 2. So what is a Puerto Rican Jew? My mother would tell you Puerto Rican Jews live in summer heat all four seasons no lilacs, no apples My father would tell you Puerto Rican Jews live in a paradise far from Gestapo selections Some Puerto Rican Catholics will tell you they too are Jews descended from Majorcan Chuetas forcibly Christianized in 1391 who in 1508 hitch an Age-of-Discovery ride with Ponce de León only needing to hide again from the Inquisition in the New World 3. I will tell you in luscious color how Yiddish and Spanish merge in the ear as lullaby while the surf drones and the coqui sings through thick air warm like a blanket I will tell you the connection of this Puertorriqueña to Puerto Rico is like the Sabra to Israel with irrational tribal bonds that don't let go