Poetry

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…

It sounded like eternity—the sun’s interminable plucking, plucking, plucking at the water’s strings, their one continuous chord. It was torment to witness this devotion to an instrument, knowing he’d lost his touch, knowing the skills in the bone plectrum of his neck fell short of the sun’s flash and dazzle. But—no. That was illusion: the…

Sharper than the scythe, which, like the ladder and the boards I couldn’t lift, was long. And quicker, since it was smaller, and, swung in an arc, would sing. I was the age of Latin in school, mollis for mullein, the flannel of whose leaf girls would rouge their Quaker cheeks with, for whom vanity,…

I sat in a crowded place away from you at dinner and did not pray you’d come near: did not imagine the hall our private room; did not want to approach you with an air of feigned indifference, leaving my meal- time companions behind; did not conspire alone to lure you into talk, to feel…

Only God can make a tree “THIS GROVE LACKS AN ALTAR.” —So Latch built A temple and an altar.                                       Templum aedificavit. How shall I remember the use of his tools? (A coffin-maker among the Immortals. What a scream!)                              —Where is that Latch now? Will I see him again in his shadowy cave On…