Poetry

after a painting by Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) Come with me, toward the leafless trees. See the way they lean, dazed with fog and grief as they seek out one another in the haze? Isn’t that how we are able to go on—by believing all that matters will one day be revealed? That is why…

It wasn’t exactly raining but a little wetness still dribbled down. I had been reading and sorrowing and set out with the dogs as an antidote. They went ahead snuffling in the leaf plaster. Despite the steady snick of my clippers boletus mushrooms kept popping soundlessly out of the ground. How else account for the…

The angle of the postman’s cap looked like he’d dressed himself in dark, the darkness, say, that’s lurching from his mouth, where teeth should be, a smile like charcoal, awkward on this full- grown man, but safer for his world where fuchsia picket fences float above a lumpy car that trails a cautious, chastened string…

The dogs have stopped barking. Even the grass has grown quieter, holding back from the wind. As you and I walk down the sidewalk, our voices are like a memory, whose deep purpose has gone inside, into the walls and floors and ceilings, where it no longer reaches the air but lies in wait for…

Wrung-out, aching, caked with a sweat he wouldn’t claim, living the wrong life, he shook the branch until the last apple fell, never glancing at the others, whose backs, as they gathered, were as arched and gravity-clutched as his, their gestures in the limbs as solemn, as exhausted of flight. Bees drifted where he labored:…

Quentin Carter’s, little Junie June-Bug’s running joke          was “Where’s my quarter,                   you better give me my quarter.” Junie, 12, runt of the 6th grade, School 109, Queen’s Village—          in your face, pest & joker,                   “Where’s my quarter, you better give me my quarter.” . . . This morning,          police arrested…

I never thought we’d meet. Now here he is, swinging his arms like a speed-walker. I thought he’d look ancient—almost half a century—but in my telescope, he looks a lot like me: a few less hairs, a limp I don’t like the look of, but not an old man, certainly, though reading glasses dangle from…

The tree bore the efflorescence of October apples like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. The wind blew in cold sweet gusts, and the burning taste of fresh snow came with the gradual dark down through the goldenrod. The blue and scarlet sky was gently losing its color, as if from…

for Angie Suss-Paul Around the corner where I lived a beautiful synagogue was burning. Around the corner where I lived. Around the corner. A beautiful synagogue. Was burning. Where I lived. Around the corner where I lived a beautiful synagogue was burning. My father came home in the evening I didn’t recognize him. He didn’t…