Poetry

I’m resting on a bench in the cemeterywhile Ned scrawls his self-delighted wild-boy traceover the slopes of grass, but we can’t stay long, since it’s a day I need to go into the city,and when I stand up suddenly my left leg’s half a footlower than my right, because I’ve stepped into the sunken, newly…

When I hit thirteen, the noun between my legsturning into a verb, my father sat me down and said: one day you will have a wife of your own. A manwill come—a helpful neighbor knocking while you’re at work perhaps, or a garlicky colleagueat an office party, or a lifeguard on a spit of sand—…

Praise scissors that clip split ends easily as ex-     boyfriends. The one who died in college, the refugee who crossed a blood-soaked Nile, but never could     get over you. Praise coffee and Kentucky bourbon. Daughters pulled deep into Ohioan corn,     romances banished to backseats and barstools, and newlyweds two-stepping to the second line     waving paper…

I flick a switch—out flashes the light bulb,like God snapping his fingers in my face:Wake up, Pumpkinhead. I’ve been running aroundhalf-naked, with the rest of America,wearing only a credit card and a cashmere scarf.Arf, arf. Yesterday, I went to Circuit City’sgoing-out-of-business sale to revel in the fall of capitalism,but all I saw were the sad…

Did you ever see stars? asked my father with a cackle. He was notspeaking of the heavens, but the white flash in his head when a fist burstbetween his eyes. In Brooklyn, this would cause men and boys to slapthe table with glee; this might be the only heavenly light we’d ever see. I never…

At the airport the conveyor bears small yachts shaped like luggageinto the distance, and I am headed, when they let me pass through the X-ray arch, toward home. There is a distancesometimes greater than this between us, since you are in another state—gaseous, solid, liquid, light—and I admitI am often absent lately from whatever is…

By wings whose shapesare but half a heart?     Feathers oiled with     country clubs andgasps of delight? Not for thesethe sandhill craneshakes her beaded voice. Gauche and gangrene,she is the gatekeeper of gibe,     a cement-gray song     edged and pocked in grassyfields, a frock of scarletover her eye, her own letterto time and her maker; a bow, a leap, all a…

(A    small,    and    still    isolated,    incident    inNew York shows what can happen if authenticauthority  in social relations has broken downto  the point where  it  cannot work  any  longereven  in its derivative,  purely functional form.A  minor  mishap  in  the  subway  system—thedoors   on   a   train   failed   to   operate—turnedinto  a  serious  shutdown  on  the  line  lastingfour   hours   and   involving   more   than   fiftythousand     passengers     because     when     thetransit   authorities   asked   the   passengers   toleave the defective train, they simply…

Thierry I am here because it’s too crowded on the other side of this sentence.Take this page—where do I place myself? At the beginning or the end,or in the middle? Or maybe in the corner. I can’t be everywhere, that’swhat I’ve been told my entire life. They say we have a choice, but wheredo you…