On the day that his brother Nachman died, Nathan Malkin, a wealthy sixty-four year old American, was walking along the beach of a nature sanctuary in Israel. He did not find out about his brother's death until three days later, when he returned to his home in Ein Karem, a small village near Jerusalem, and…
What whiteness will you add to this whiteness, what candor? We walk the dirt road toward town through the clear evening. The sky is apricot behind the black cane. Pink above, and dull raspberry on the Turkish hills across the water. The Aegean is light by the shore, then dark farther out. I cannot distinguish…
While history is unforgiven . . . Delmore Schwartz Daughter stands with her hands in her furs. She has told Dad about her nude modelling, has the check to cash. Dad himself has seen naked women standing as if their lovers’ paws had just left their hips, caressing them to their smoothness. He’s seen them…
I used to dislike shopping, the rushing to too many stores, all the details to remember. Now it's almost pleasant. I shop in the morning when the stores are uncrowded and the early light gleams off the beige brick and glass of the store-fronts. Since Joshua and Miriam are grown and gone, there's less to…
The highway was dark, strung with cats’-eyes, red and yellow, passing My window where my face floated; I watched Your face above the steering wheel, as always, calm to the bone; Your brown eyes and full lips droop, but the sadness is genetic only; The space beside your eyes is like a smooth pool. We…
The Seraphim, whose eyes are jewels, read the Inferno of Dante Alighieri anagogically, without weeping. Justice is a simple thing for them, fluttering in their empty robes. But I once wandered through the Wood of Suicides with a girl who thought Pietro delle Vigne had a perfect right to his own flesh even when he…
It was her second marriage and Karen sat at the round table in Marblehead with her new family, listening to their conversation and thinking of what her first husband would see, if he was there. He would notice, she thought, my new mother-in-law's enormous diamond, and he would see this new father-in-law's yachting jacket, and…
I sit by the window of a cafe and watch the thin city rain bounce off the tops of cars and paste the hair of passers-by to their cheeks. Near me, two women talk across the one-legged disk of the table, the grain of shared thinking in their faces. A year ago, we talked like…
(“You can even make something not a poem become a poem . . . by a certain squint or a certain way of leaning our ears we find them.” W.S.) If I could only squint like Bill Stafford then I would be in that country where men and women speak poetry, unsurprised, as trees speak…
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