Poetry

for Carl Hays Drizzle this morning, but a cool glare in the brain, and I’m staggering again down     Cherry Street toward that cratered-out joint on Broadway where one happy night, eons ago, I cut a rug with a hopped-up     redhead. Nothing came of that, Carl, except a few short hours of     inexplicable…

I turned sixty in Paris last year. We stayed at the Lutetia, where the Gestapo headquartered during the war, my wife, two boys, and me, and several old Vietnamese ladies carrying poodles with diamond collars. Once my father caught a man stealing cigarettes out of one of his vending machines. He didn’t stop choking him…

At the moment when you stop mid-step and look into my eyes, as if at a ship on the horizon, blue sea and sun, and light drains out of the sky and your face is lit by its own sun in the far-off land we will sail to in the boat whose mooring line you…

The bedroom slippers’ silk linings. The dressing gown of brocade, stitched with the zodiac. The pajamas underneath also made out of silk, for which how many individuals of the species B. mori, having munched the succulent, pale-green mulberry leaves and insinuated a sack wherein to magnify themselves, were steamed to death from the inside out?…

Drizzle of rain pattering on the dwarf palms, dark towers and blue parapets of clouds Over the ruffled blue gingham of the sea, sweet scent of seawrack and fresh life borne on the wind That ambles along the sands and sticks of drift like a nosing poi dog Wig-wagging from the lava rock point along…

While the machine sucks the black suds from my mother’s blood and then sends it back stinking clean into the pistol-tube nailed down into her chest, I climb out of my shoes and slip a cotton swab of water between her teeth, her dentures sliding off the back porch of her mouth. Nobody knows, never…

translated by Clare Cavanagh This year I bore no fruit, just leaves that give no shadows I am afraid, Rabbi, I am afraid, Lord, that I’ll be cursed by him who hungers, weary on the endless road to Jerusalem  

You take the fragments of the world and put them into boxes, each one smaller than the last. Lock each one. It’s a kind of violence. The blue triangles of your mother’s dress, or the birds that flew backwards that morning. It was an unremarkable day. Flat weather. Repeating cycles of traffic. There was nothing…

I live in the USA, where we take Our right to pray / not to pray As fundamental, as unalienable. My friend prays what he calls fake prayers And wonders if these prayers are doomed To fall on deaf ears because they are full Of fake, prayers of one who will not be sincere. My…