Autobiographies 3

by Gerard Malanga

Is this #2 or #3?  I’ve lost count.  Oi, vai!
I never know what I’m gonna do or write about.
Curiosity emotes life’s surprises.
I’ve had a lucky life,
though rarely contemplate its implications.  Just as well.
Turning pages made up for those infernal blanks.
“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
Robert Moses was the first & last as I recall who tabled this remark.
A name that namely goes unrecognized.
Time’s funny like that.
Here one day, gone the next.
The moving pen writes and having writ moves on
at the road’s next bend.
I was always being asked, “Are you still writing,”
as if I were some long-forgotten dinosaur
trouncing its way into now . . . and where is now ?
Where is the past, where was the future?
Where’s my toy dinosaur?
Where, O, where?
The tenses suddenly scrambled, make-believe.
See?  That’s a summer dream embedded in the secret language.
Seclusion’s what you make of it.}
Could be walking round the Upper East Side,
or sitting at a desk in the shadow of the Kaaterskills
with a cat leaping in your lap.  I remember
as a child the small gentle hands of my dad sewing
long into the night way past my bedtime.
My dreams waiting patiently in the folding darknesses.