AT THE CITY GATES

Rav Samael came to me while I slept

Insisting I go with him to the City gates

Where, as most days, he would wait

In case the Messiah came. (When he lived,

Samael went every day but after his death

He’d take the occasional day off

To arbitrate the law suits of the dead

And meddle in the affairs of cats.)

The gates were as I had imagined them

Guarded by old and sleepy soldiers

Who invite us to sit with them.

The last public letter writer,

Whom I’d not seen since the 1920s,

In Paris, was there. Her table

Seemed more rickety than ever

But she was younger by a decade or two.

Her prices were fair so I told her

My ideas for this poem. Reading it over,

It seems different than I meant it to be.

PHOTOGEIST

Eugene Atget, a chronicler of lost Paris,
Photographed a secondhand store
A day or two after the owner's cat had died.
In the print the cat's ghost can be seen,
A semi-transparent black shadow,
Standing patiently near a battered table
Where unhappy books lie in heaps.
The cat believes the owner's ghost
Will appear someday in the picture
Coming out of the doorway, perhaps,
Or rising from the mismatched pair of  boots,
Carrying in his torn jacket’s pocket

The memory of a fish head.

IN WAITING

Rimbaud escaped the poems
Besieging him in Paris
But found them waiting
At Java, Aden, Harrar.
From spite, he ignored them.
Some of them linger still;
The more sinister muses
Always seem to have a few
Tucked away somewhere.