Poetry

In our father’s schoolteacher’s hand, on the margins of recovered snapshots, nineteen forty-three and forty-four, the World War murderous still, incinerating people in cities, alien, remote, unknown, opposed to us (“And when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting,” said LeMay), yet here with Aunt Gert and Uncle Irv in Williamsport, Pa., American peace in the…

The gods in heavy squabble make the poet choose which is greater, poetry or sex Choose poetry, you are rewarded with a winged horse you cannot dismount, choose sex, you are rewarded with sexual fulfillment with a mannequin of Celotex, frigid, stupid, stiff and thin, choose poetry, you are rewarded with wings of your own…

What would be strange in someone else’s bed, familiar here as the body’s jolt at the edge of sleep—body persistent, solitary, precarious. I watch his right hand float in our bedroom’s midnight, inscribe forms by instinct on the air, arterial, calligraphic figures I’m too literal to follow. I close my book quietly, leave a woman…

pacing the ancient earthworks, the fortifications of silence, I know I am not through with you, I will never be through, and not one of us who leap from stone to stone on the road of boulders that leads to the old lighthouse, not one of us who clamber the grassy slope to the lookout…

Mrs. Rabinowitz is sitting on the beach with her little grandson, who is    playing in the sand with a pail and shovel when a great tidal wave suddenly appears    and sweeps him out to sea. Mrs. Rabinowitz (shaking her fist at the sky): God, bring him back!    Bring that little boy right…

My deaf cousin had a hand in designing the Tomahawk Missile. The blueprints open on his desk for what was to become a show-and-tell-style reunion. I hadn’t laid eyes on this exuberant man since chance threw us together at a party given by his best friend whose brother was your real father’s best friend, and…

The Greeks said: never to be born is best; next best, to die young in a noble cause. “Où sont les neiges d’antan?” Villon asked. “Where are yesteryear’s snows?” is, I guess, the phrase in English. Villon spoke in praise of women not born when the Greeks said: “Best not to exist at all.” Yet…

Our accord’s a ruin. One swipe across the cutting board scatters it. Away’s where I’m going and if that’s blood boiling, leave it on. The heart’s a saucepan, not a cauldron, the pint-size heart. It can’t harm you unless you’ve made illicit decisions. Have you made illicit decisions? Grit your wisdom teeth and don’t expect…

The bullets took their thuggish way, and like words once sounded couldn’t be unsounded. Was I like him? Very sadly, with immense and quiet bitterness one by one the blood members of your body— daughter, grandson, and granddaughter— have heard you say I should never have married him, thereby unsaying us. Small and excitable, he…