Poetry

The angel kissed my alphabet, it tingled like a cobweb in starlight. A few letters detached themselves and drifted in shadows, a loneliness they carry like infinitesimal coffins on their heads. She kisses my alphabet and a door opens: blackbirds roosting on far ridges. A windowpeeper under an umbrella watches a funeral service. Blinkered horses…

So far no one's confirmed the words that say                              we're made of earth.                  Yet there they are in writing.      A title on the blackboard — the teacher                        vanished without warning,                  his lecture gone undelivered.            Tell me, you digger of deep wells,            …

trans. Polish Richard Lourie “Same with this lieutenant we had in the army, name of Wozniak, a tall in the saddle kind of guy, yes, sir,” and along my temple the sober rectilinear chill of the scissors, clack of a razon on a strop behind me, local clarinets grinning on the radio. That I sailed…

(Amagansette, L.I.) Each dawn this road beings with a rooster clearing the pride from his throat he couldn't swallow all night. When trees notice me they begin talking crow since I know nothing of flight, or how corn tugs you from cloud. They are still annoyed with a man who let them think Christ back…

I sit alone in the kitchen thinking about my lover who said it's over and listen to the guy in 12B end his binge with a song so full of wine it sounds red. I pour another cup of coffee, more mud than the last, then look out the window at the East River and…

This could be any city, the poor parts, poverty both camouflaged and signaled by unplowed snow. The morning paper still lies on the doorstep, touched only by the cold gloves of a boy who moves in his own world from house to house, past a silhouette pulling a sweater on, to a woman who answers…

For years I've been trying to remember my father but strangely I can only recall him as a woman in a red dress, though his picture is still on the wall. His sadness was a long letter in a drawer we never opened, my own sadness a door that would swell and have to be…

Dawn. I was just walking back across the tracks toward the loading docks when I saw a kid climb out of a box-car, his blue jacket trailing like a skirt, and make for the fence. He’d hoisted a wet wooden flat of fresh fish on his right shoulder, and he tottered back and forth like…

It will always be just love, spider failure, curious, worn dead life, home in September, far from all love. The radiant agent of the breast is my express, my station of pentimento, my erasure of the hemmed. My sad dream when my eyes said I do not love you, as good as we are. In…