Poetry

For the families of the deceased buried in Jewish Cemeteries desecratedsince January of 2017 They came with small rocksand pebbles to place on the holy groundwhere gravestones had been turned over and desecrated.They came with their relatives’ plot numbersscribbled on scraps of paper.They came with tears in their eyes,they came with their memories andgrief unfurling…

I watch the little weasel rise just partlyout of a cleft in earth, its facea periscope at sea, this way and that but not slow asan owl does it, the moon behind himin old children’s books, his giant tufted headturning full circle and rich with pause.Because the weasel isn’t patient. It’s all frenzy.Through weeds, another…

Almost two thousand years before Da Vinciimagined a machine whose screwlike overhead motor could lift the machine into vertical flight,children in China played with bamboo toys whose propellers, thin and light as dragonflywings, were set on a sharpened stick and spun into the wonder of an object spiraling in the air.The toys were brought back…

Taller than a manpitched from the earthgarbled needleblackened nowits volute screedbee- and beetle-riddenup and down betweenthe un-sprung buds, the wildefficient feel ofsmockedrabbit-skinnedexplosionspoised so slowlyon its undertakingthat it was so longbeing truethe cold and the craftlesswas not craftspotting the nichesthe leaves thexanthene core.

Make your deadness real to me now.Why should you be always so realand so near to me? I should know that you don’t know meanymore. In every sunI close my eyes and see you everywhere inside me. What does deadmean? Are there shadesof, different ways of being dead? Deadwith the damp smell of lichen, deadreally…

Your body—not disappeared into the grave but into blizzarding swan-colored lines of lace—holding something like your shape. And just like flesh you open, absorbingeach stray iridescence, each veil of updraft, upswirl, white noon scattering your edges, you’resomething like a dress I can’t put on. I am buildingyour body, building a mind to move throughevery curve…

My dead mother is more beautifulthan yours. My dead mother will always be more beautifulthan yours. Even her deadnessis more beautiful.

and everyone was there to watch youdie. We offered youpopsicles, ice, a sponge we’d dab on yourlips. We crowded you,stroked your legs, your hair, tried to keep youkempt without hurting, disturbing you, prodding youuntil your eyes, when they opened, couldn’thold us. We hated that, hated yourstillness, your days of stillness, noteating, not speaking, and we…

Of your things now, onemore of the things that survived you. I wear your long gray herringbone coat intolong gray days, returning alwaysto your other objects: drawers of good silverware, spices, framed madonnas who look at me, wondering what I have done. When you said you were afraid you were going to die,I said Everyone…