Poetry

It started with herrings, which he ate with warm black bread as a child, and ended with two pigs, the forbidden. It started with the strict dietary laws of his father, a pious Jew, a mender, and ended with ulcers, which he disobeyed. He was snubbed by a bouquet of colorful flowers on a balcony…

Now I see it: a few years To play around while being Bossed around By the taller ones, the ones With the money And more muscle, however Tender or indifferent They might be at being Parents; then off to school And the years of struggle With authority while learning Violent gobs of things one didn’t…

So far the house still is standing. So far the hairline cracks wandering the plaster still debate, in Socratic unhurry, what constitutes a good life. An almost readable language. Like the radio heard while traveling in a foreign country— you know that something important has happened, but not what.

There was a time when I watched it happen. Strangers pressed to other strangers in one bed, clothes on, air humid with the cloying scent of fruit juice and vodka: none of us giving in to another and yet unwilling to leave the scene of that possibility, pretending to sleep, actually sleeping. Then waking again…

             Swingmatism    |     You hear a bird sing, you don’t try to understand.                          Sissle    |     Listen to anything long enough it’ll tell you your life.                            Tiny    |     Pine siskin, dickcissel, longspur, purple finch, lark sparrow, wheatear, winter wren, waterthrush, veery.                Ornithology    |     Bird dream felt like fell from the nest, felt like…

1. High school fights were the worst, Young boys losing their teeth Against the chrome fenders of cars, Boys as they got thrown and then flew Then hit One kind of ground or another. There was always a second of nothing As the world came back to the boy, As the tooth loosed itself out,…

He speaks a farewell kiss to me. —Bob Dylan Pagan psalmody singing his checkered face into my sleep, tomahawk at our side, head in the bag. Ready                                  to venture out against the colorless light, slandering a white gaze. That’s all it takes to find the world on                                  its bow, turn a wheel against…

What happened of course was nothing extraordinary except for the bracelet she found in her mailbox—a breakfast of flat red stones, the painted smash of a river bottom. The river, she liked to imagine, in Africa, in Tanzania, in Dar es Salaam. The Rufiji, perhaps, for she is touching a map now and dreaming of…

I stand there under the high limbs of locust watching my father point a black gun into the air his arms steepled for the stillness required to split the proverbial hair with a BB. I would like to throw a red hat to catch what will smack from the barrel but instead the songbird drops…