Poetry

That summer in the mound of sand someone left beside the cesspool lid, my father managed to grow a watermelon— it’s not what you’re picturing—maybe not even edible, the size of a softball, but, hell, it was a watermelon, and, all year round, the man worked two jobs in the City, and only came out…

“If ever, oh ever a Wiz there was, The Wizard of Oz is one because—double-time!— because-because-because!” Mania does liven up a song. We detoured for candy cigarettes. My old pastime— I smoked; he sang the entire score. Dad was well, so he got visitation. It had been—I’d lost track of time— a year? He launched…

The high school kids are so beautiful in their lavender blouses and crisp white shirts. They open their mouths to sing with that far-off stare they had looking out from the crib. Their voices lift up from the marble bed of the high altar to the blue endless ceiling of heaven as depicted in the…

After the funeral, after friends and distant relatives departed, and the house, once again, grew quiet, we opened closets and bureau drawers and packed away in boxes dresses, shoes, the silk underthings still wrapped in tissue. We sorted through cedar chests of linens and lace, the quilts she had sewn sitting by the window on…

For awhile the house sagged on itself, then new people moved in with teacups that chink in a different key from the teacups that lived here before. There is an innocent pouring of coffee, a holding themselves apart, a surreptitious glance into my garden as though I grew rare greens. How hard will they struggle…

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