TWELVE POEMS

Composer's note: The initial inspiration for my Twelve Poems was Paul Muldoon’s poem “The Briefcase,” in which he reflects, while waiting for a bus, on the possibility of “the first inkling” of this poem (inside his briefcase) being swept from his side on a city street in Manhattan by the rushing water of a sudden cloudburst: “I knew I daren’t/set the briefcase down/ to slap my pocket for an obol—/for fear it might slink into a culvert and strike out along the East River/ for the sea. By which I mean the ‘open’ sea.”