Poetry

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…

Stone calcifies around it creating an impenetrable shell. In spite of its heaviness it floats somewhere in her body though she is never quite sure where until she stops to think about it. Probing, probing, hoping this time, this time that when she feels it bang against a rib or whack her heart, this time…

Why delay? Today I stopped to rub the fur, like the tender ear of a cat, stopped to stroke the lush gray plush (and oh, the pink!) as if the cat had rasped itself to frenzy, to an ecstasy of itch all raw this steak tartar, this chafe of meat, and because of this I…

I rejoice in the poems not written: the cruelly discarded: the crippled, the asthmatic, the anemic: the poem about a photograph: about what love is like: about how strangely I felt that day: about something about me, noticed. Bless you, go on the ash-heap, that fine compost from muscle, blood, bone, which fuels surely the…