Poetry

I am an anagramof my father. In America,it is anapound. It is an archaicsystem of measurement.I have my father’s eyes.I am made of lettersI didn’t learnuntil I was five.A is for assimilation,which is an anagramfor cultural exorcism.If I say I’m gladI can speak English,I mean to sayEnglish is an anagramfor God’s tongue.I mean to say…

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 shotof Bedford past Prospect Park, past BrooklynCollege, until I hit the waters of Sheepshead Bay,then turned right and rode toward the bungee-jumpride I could see hot pink against blue sky.A new high rise. Mermaids danced along Shore Parkwayholding solo…

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…

for Yasi I too love small streets—those orphans who don’t want usto make a fuss over thembut are delighted when a strangershows up and walks through,by choice or chance. Big Historyis never there, though the residentsoften display a quiet dignity worthyof long years’ note. Birds alwayshop on the concrete—the scrawnytrees always seem a little nakedeven…