Nicholas Benson I wanted I wanted to visit the graveyard — The Third Cemetery of the Spanish and Portugese Synagogue Shearith Israel in the City of New York 1829 -1851— but was distracted by the billboards and construction raging the constant crunch of demolition somewhere a jackhammer the flash of a welder dark limousines pulling in and out of the adjacent parking lot a vast dark blot where the owners are never seen — behind a fence only a dog could love all the stones had fallen in and were strewn over the luckless grass — my eyes were drawn to the spectacle of a working lunch aboard a stationary vehicle in the fragmented miracle of sidewalk split into millions of disposable parts as clerks customers clients and patrons channeled and conducted docile and distracted over a temporary plywood bridge continued unabated conversations with the absent. Fallen There was the gigantic screen of plenitude & the inability to concentrate if not on two or more disparate things at the same time and falling in love with the green the gold and the black and moving on the purple the pink the white tearing through the veil of light without thinking entirely surrounded by petals their broad billows tough and tight, firm as concrete. From inside the day I imagine I fit perfectly within a million guises, this world and no way not to say I'm here. * I no longer want to write as though my unstated, all too involved context were your second nature, the sunflower's glad turn and gravely hung chin: you there, not there. Yet they gently tug, a tenuous chain of thought, suggesting words sufficient to assuage, lift, succor a fallen gaze. Slope, moon, stone Stone harmonium the beetle flow of night has come the water in the river walks on to us clothing dissolves like nothing the moon deflects message of tomorrow Each stone of the surrounding wall that kept invaders at bay — undeterred minions, everlasting — now stand for your obstinate will your silently-declared all-knowing acclaim. Recognize these lips, your legs said, rescue your breaking heart or snap yourself in two: simple heart, whoring nature - the you I know at nine a.m. and the you I can't find this night; and you can't come after me (slope, moon, stone) because I'm going home and you don't know where that is. Black buoy, incandescent wick I straighten my necktie, trickle shards into a glass, and settle back, resigned. I'm patient, like Mayakovsky. Your face, my hospital, arcs open, an acrobatic swing discarding emotion. You carry an empty bag, lay it down and take a quick drag — stub it out and light up another. Deferrals and delays: fuses on relays... Replete with alibis, depleted, the heart knows concessions and mischief. Don't ask in a direct way. Confidently look in to the eyes and smile, but not intelligently — absent yourself — don't think. Time betrayed by use. Ideas made concrete. Nicholas Benson has had poems and translations published in various journals; his translations from the Italian of Attilio Bertolucci are in the current issue of the online journal Archipelago, and a volume of Bertolucci's poetry entitled Winter Journey (Viaggio d'inverno, 1971) will be published in 2005 by Free Verse Editions of Parlor Press. Two of his own poems are forthcoming in the next issue of Mudfish.