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My mother helped me write the first poem because I knew it wasn’t           safe in there.                 Weary people, she began—the cigarette smoke drawing                     sadness in the air                               (as if I should do something with all the people).                 Walk the streets fell into the next line because it was all I                     could make happen….

A horseman was found horseless on the side of the road. We asked afterhis horse, but he had no recollection, of a horse or of his having been ahorseman. And so how were we so sure? How did we know this was aman who lacked the very thing that defined him? We knew because weourselves…

After her husband died she sent herself to other worldsBelfast and Paris and some other ununited states—to bein places—as she put it—that felt as strange as the strangenessof the other earth under the one we dream we are standing on. She took pictures of the beyond and sent them over.She wrote some things but not…

You didn’t want to ride bikes to Coney Island, so I went by myself, rode the straight shot of Bedford past Prospect Park, past Brooklyn College, until I hit the waters of Sheepshead Bay, then turned right and rode toward the bungee-jump ride I could see hot pink against blue sky. A new high rise….

Down where boxes are folded not onlyto contain the thanks of every newborn,but also the regressed-back-into-childhood, third from left, a Korean man-child with rosy cheeksthrows you a grimace as if he’s had it right up to here …He wants to bark sorely underpaid, packs sugar-bricks to build an army of the super-fed. He wants to…

tears for things As for empathy, it was breakfastthat taught me first the feelings      of objects. Each wet Cheerio floated there despairing,it seemed, to be—bare      raft—wrenched like that from its family. Foodwas just the beginning. I pitied      the drooping head of the desk lamp, the light bulb its burning out. I endowedwith the pathos of…

An hour before the time to quit, he saton the wall that was lying on the floor, that we had been framingand I still working around,my hammer’s momentum fading. And tired myself, I sat next to himas he untied his shoe, undid
the double-knotted bow, then pulled slack into the lacingthrough each eye, one after another….

Home this Christmas, the cityburied in snow, I approachslowly the frozen fold of earthwhere his parents laid him. There isabove his body notthe smallest suggestion of snow. Noskidding windblown foliage. Onlythe flags of our people pulsingon their tiny sticks. The sweptgrass glittering. We growthe empire’s dead devotedly herein Ohio. On FridaysI watched from the stands…