Poetry

      With each rebirth, a little more is lost. As pounds of feathers turn to flame—then ash—an ounce, at least, is bound to blow off.       Take the breast. It may appear less lushly plumed than myth has led you to expect. In this unfortunate event, permit us to apologize       on our bird’s behalf….

My father says, “Face it, you live     in a civilization of mirrors and sinks,”         invading my real room, the bathroom. I pull down an eyelid till I see the pained     pink meniscus underneath. I “O”         my mouth, poke the mascara wand at my eyelashes, not missing     by much. It’s makeup’s…

You’re a nurse now and this ward ain’t the schoolbook, so you sedate him, paraldehyde, 5 ccs each hip, and don’t expose it to air, it’ll turn to vinegar, it’ll eat plastic and it reeks, use a glass syringe and DON’T DROP IT. Junkies howl and sweat and beg but they won’t seize and code…

“Name the eight states that begin with the letter M,” Mohammed, my driving teacher, says. I’m forty-one. Am I in school? I glance at the rearview mirror, glad I can’t see my embarrassing STUDENT DRIVER bumper sticker. I spread a ghost-map across the windshield, quickly scroll down the East Coast, top to bottom. “Maine. Massachusetts….

A low sound in the hollows fills low places, fills hollows, carves a hollow from the right place or hollows being in place, a sound I heard in a strange place, in a strange state, just off the road in southern Utah, just over the border, just off the desert, where a field of wheat…

Christmas defeated Chanukah once again last night by a margin of three billion dollars or so, but every time I hear a Yiddish word like bupkes in a movie (L.A. Confidential) or when Oleg Cassini in that new play Jackie calls a garment a shmatta, it’s “good for the Jews,” as our parents used to…

You came upon me like a shadow and you came into me like a shadow and there you dwelled within me and I in you; we were cast on the black water— we were cast by the will of the wind— and thrown upon the darker shore where no things grow and the dry leaves…

Kneeling last night as children sometimes do, After scrubbing off the filth of the day, Undressed at my bed I bent and prayed For some warm dream, for some comforting sooth To say, In the morning, arise. My sleep was elusive, as it often can be, The starry firmament of self reproach Circumnavigating this shabby…

I stood before the lintel; the door swung open then. Your name was there, and mine, and the date of every birth— all was clear as day, but they could not bring me in. Beyond another door and then another, endless more, yet the distance had been measured in the dust— one print stepping after…