Winter Passage

For weeks the sun

cold

To itself

another

Not the source There

only as white is on the snow

Your body

wrapped in its coat

has left Grapes of Wrath New York on a

northerly route for Naked Lunch India

Driving snow mountains

distant on your windshield Closer

the red clay indigo clefts

in the Sandias, rosy

snowrugs along the road sunfrost

over the land

As you go deeper

deeper you go home / New York

City where your body

stumbled from its cave

Home / your skin

as it absorbs the road

warmed by these mountains

'The way a

person holds his

body

and moves it'

New York / 1935

playing bottle caps

before the synagogue

little boy's body

shivering under God

You arrive

and your body

arrives

at the same

historic marker:

in Santa Fe you buy

a black Indian hat with flat rim

feather stuck in the high

dome's band Try on

abeard Stand

in the Plaza black coat hooked

to the neck

Everybody looks / you dance

war whooping

around the bandstand.

Such dark and quirky

drag

Charms for the new Chief

Rabbi of Albuquerque