Poetry

for Ellen Bryant Voigt Tonight the band’s Nigerian— Afro-Cuban, last week; next week, Cajun: the summer multicultural concert series in the San Juan Capistrano Library courtyard; two hundred of us, all ages, in the audience; Edenic evening air and stars: tickets six bucks. You’d love this music, this place: the musicians are like poets (they…

Hanoch, Pallu, Hezron, Carmi, Jemuel, Ohad, Zohar, Shuni: one Genesis mention’s all you got. Ziphion, Muppim, Arodi: lost in a list even the most devout skip over like small towns on the road to L.A. How tall were you, Shillim? What was your favorite color, Ard? Did you love your wife, Iob? Not even her…

Who knows what led me there—a twelve-year-old leading my eight-year-old brother and his overnight guest into the one clean room of that four-story brownstone and plunging into the booze while our parents slept. Maybe it was genetic curiosity, colliding with vodka, a fifth of cheap Russian, and scorching a tunnel to our guts as we…

Having awakened again at 4 a.m. inside the skull-dungeon in which my brain’s chained like a nasty old man muttering, nattering, keeping me from sleeping with the usual complaints about the accommodations, I focused as usual on my breathing, asked blessings on every living human being by name, alphabetically, one at a time, except of…

I love early mornings in a new hotel, traveling west and up on East Coast time, before room service starts delivery, searching the lobby or even down in the kitchen for coffee, to greet dawn with the night clerk, starting his wake-up calls. I find a paper from the bundle by the revolving door and…

Custome is the most certain Mistresse of language, as the publicke stampe makes current money. But we must not be too frequent with the mint, every day coyning. —Ben Jonson Into my pocket slips a folded note, creased like labia, cached with private promise. Pea blossoms in broth. And my in petto pleasure in thinking…

You came down to me in the hollow after work. I was reaping my just desert of overcommitting myself this March to too many taps.                                                               I was resting for a while on a stump, listening to the steady drip of sap in the pails.                                          You were dressed in a skirt and purple blouse,…

Clock a few miles east on Jericho Turnpike— how new asphalt levels the ride. Consider too the foot-thick concrete slabs (poured in the ’30’s or earlier) we used to drive on, the road beneath the road. Before that, plank: two parallel rows of hemlock, four inches square—sleepers, laid in three to four feet apart, upon…

Heart feels sad. He’s tired of being a heart and wants to be a lung. A lung never lacks a sister or brother. He wants to be a finger. A finger always has a family. Or a spleen which only feels anger and is never sad. Sometimes Heart feels joyous, beats with vigor. But then…