Te fe of Y He (X Maly averAN INSOMNIAC'S FANTASY THE EYE OF THE CAT twilight, seeing all myself unseen, keeper of the night's time. darkens, pupils widen; as one being the night and I prosper Alone in but I am the own The hour and grow bold. I am at home with shadows, with silhouettes in alley ways. Sometimes I think myself a shadow, incorporeal as the wind which etches contours of my dark-rimmed world. My body is as slim as the glimmer of the moon fleeting across lonely rooftops.The silent starscape of the city is my necessary and intended habitat. I walk with the dead of night; I wink at the many potent secrets concealed by dawn. And when insidious daylight threatens the never- finished business of the night I creep down to cool and stillness (to sleep a dreamless sleep) until again I may find my pleasures in the soft and soothing under belly of the night.FOR A PREGNANT FRIEND Her sixth month and she carries seventeen new pounds. The system is feverish with its extra function. Harder to sleep--even afterwards. A new life pushes its way onto West Sixty-eighth Street. Pregnant, she defies the city and its needle fears: night alleys with animal eyes. She defies the city that drinks money. She defies the air-conditioned mausea of office buildings and death-infected hospitals. She defies the icy lessons of first loss and first humiliation, the hot unsheathing of cruelty.She defies the uncharted meridians of madness. fn mind and body are pregnant with daring-- the casual courage of the plood. BotOF SEEDS AND SANDGRAINS (To the Anti-Fascist Dead of World war IT) The tide of fire washed you fit for any Passage: human atoms resisting the unbalanced equation of the Holocaust. You knew a hurricane whose eye of calm visited only @ posthumous harbor: men whose settled, garden lives took on a thorn- forest of changes, young men who had no time to sow or squander sensual seeds, but turned plowshares into swords against death's fiercest harvest.There was the very madness of a winnowing-- the wheat before the chaff; but, though the blade of man made winter is scything still, the grains of your spirit sing the wind alive.THUNDERBIRD Fancying he has stared the sun into hiding, his eyes a darkening hunger, the electric eagle of the storm drops his patient soaring and--grounded by murderous instinct-- wings his lightning. In its brute momentum, the orbiting earth imagines a mosquito sting and spurs its meridians.FROZEN DAWN I awake into a landscape glazed with misgivings. Sunrise: a mere diffusion of light, as one small boy chases pigeons that break into flight. My step on the night-tempered lake cracks it into erystal webs: design of daring. Dead branches litter the shore. Surely, New York ducks escape the arena of winter. But, for now, two play the decoy in a narrowing pool, as if to puff up an invitation to some wayward springtime warmth.UNDER THE SKIN OF SUMMER Fathoms deep, one may ripen and grow tender with the breast of the season, as, far from rigid edges and brutal focus, the intricate essence of light dwindles to dappled candle- power, the icy swell of a current delivers its shoulder-shock, and, bedazzled by sea-borne rainbow flesh, a diver's time slithers away like an eel. The buoyant view finding of snorkeling is tempting:hovering beneath an ocean of nourish- ing air (a glittering limbo), rising into sun's arena for glimpses of teeming beach, and retreating into a medium where heat-breathing words are liquidated. Surface pleasures wink along the apron of the tide: body surfing stirs new rhythn in salt-spurred juices. A child burrows elbow-deep in wet sand, a world of purpose in his eyes. The sweat that breaks along his brow--distills the season's fever.has : ja all Ges Kehe