Poetry

Once thought to be extinct . . . lives at depths of up to 1,500 feet . . . dies of shock when brought to the surface . . . almost nothing is known about it . . . —National Geographic I saw you in a book: bubble-eyed and staring, mouth spookily aglow with a…

In the darkness I can see every line of your face. As if you are in my womb. Your fingers feel for its entrance and I am your mother, imagining what you will look like when you are born. When I climb after you into the freshly laundered white duvet, and look at your face…

1 He said it would always be what might have been, a city about to happen, a city never completed, one that disappeared with hardly a trace, inside or beneath the outer city, making the outer one— the one in which we spend our waking hours— seem pointless and dull. It would always be a…

Old man, why shake a wrinkled prick at the young girls? They scream in harmony, scramble off, and then in mottled light, our eyes meet: you, unbalanced on the hoof of an orthopedic shoe, leaning on a stick, gumming your sly grin back into stubble as with a palsy- humbled hand you try to zip…

translated from the French by Anne Atik Small crystal globe, Earth’s small globe, Through you I see My lovely glass bowl. We’re all locked up In your hard strict breast But so polished, so glossed Rounded by light. Like this horse running Or a lady who halts Or the flower on her dress A child…

My mother, given one name, exchanged it for another—Cohen for Carlan, less “Jewish”— and then for my father’s, whose Edelman had lost its E during the war for “business reasons.” What’s in a name? A Rosenblum without the blum would still a Rosen be. And what about me— Girl who met Goy, and gave away…

Rain spills leaf to leaf, rips some down the chilly greenblack air, falls and falls until it tamps October’s ripened ground that sponges up big plans. Sheet lightning popped across the water and rubbed things raw. The rain’s tinny cymbal-brushing rushes our nerves—we’ll live how long to hear it? Eighty today, Gracey on the back…

We all had to wear hats against the unvarying sun,       Of course; but what was more significant, We’d had to bring with us—along with our freshly prepared       Thoughts, wrapped up in the old way—bottled light To quench any thirst for knowledge that walking through the dry       Valley of grayish terebinths and still Lizards on chunks…

tell me baby, what’s the matter now aw, you trying to quit me baby, but you don’t know how —Billie Holiday you can’t keep track of what’s what calling it what it’s not but stir shade & heavy cream into coffee & there’s breath-flash clean as knife-wind in the brain blown down the full length…