Poetry

I search the pond’s portrayal of my face for my father. This woman’s brow, so smooth, disdains its heritage and hides the truth. Its lineaments reveal almost no trace of his. But I must clear an open space to mirror him in, because since his death I feel as distant as “map-isopleth,” which is, I’ve…

Where a love-dock jutted into the Narrows I took turns with friends at a crack of light someone scraped into the one black window of The Eye-Full Tower, and saw through the tight crush of men a woman dancing naked, her sequined bridle glittering down her breasts drenched in luminous sweat and smoke-haze. From one…

for Tim Wakefield On the mound you stand—just so— exhale—so—throw at the same spot over and over. There’s only one way to toss a knuckleball, near-impossibly simple; your fingernails flick it at the distant lozenge of the catcher’s mitt, but it must be thrown so evenly the ball won’t spin at all, sixty feet six…

Think of him all that summer at poolside, in seersucker shorts a size too big and a sombrero, hoisting highballs— a few past a few too many— in memory of his Men. His “boodies.” Or floating in the pool, say, with swimfins, his body, bird’s nest frail after surgery, the stitches running like the Yangtze…

The church had a crying room— up at the opposite side of the altar. Good for the baby. It was glass on all sides like a tank. A microphone brought in the priest’s voice. From the crying room we could see how things happened backstage: someone coming to the priest with a bell and a…

I went into a bar and ordered a childhood dream. A woman came in and sat down next to me. She was rather lanky for an amputee. A voice said She’s too shallow to dive into. You’ll break your noose on her concrete psyche. I didn’t listen. As a way of shattering the ice, I…

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…