Poetry

I wanted the Persian Isfahan rug with the all-over garden of paradise design, the one with one thousand two hundred knots per inch. Its sinister history was of no importance to me, irrelevant the conditions of the weavers, whether they were hungry or suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome. I loved the way the tree of…

When he sang of what had passed, the trees would lean toward him, he could suspend the suffering of the damned, he could bring back the dead.   Don’t look back! . . . Hell is a spotless room overlooking the ocean; she wants out. “I’m heading for nowhere, what do I have to look…

When I turned twelve and feared I’d go to hell, I used to write lists of my mortal sins on paper scraps I tucked into my wallet. Each time I broke one of the big commandments— not little ones, such as to honor parents which even Jesus, like me the son of peasants, had never…

translated from the Italian by Jonathan Galassi   Oh how there in the glittering stretch that bends toward the hills the hum of evening lessens and the trees chat with the hackneyed murmur of the sand; and how this common life no more our own than our breath gets channeled there, crystalline, into orders of…

for Kyo-jin When Mrs. Im went back to Seoul to die it rained and I thought of her dying. It was March and cold there though it made no difference to her her hair no longer blue-black shoulder-length spirals of a young Mrs. Im the wife of Pastor Im’s brother but frizzy wire ends flattened…

All dressed up in the back of a taxi stopped at a traffic light on Central Park West one cocktail hour in December, I happened to spot a pair of shoes dangling in the air— brown, clownish workshoes dancing like marionettes from the thick strings of their knotted laces, which somebody (with a ladder?) had…

It was July and the peaches were green a man born in the year of the chicken with no knack for wealth or common knowledge lowered the box full of green peaches for a girl to see a girl at the front gate turning eight and waiting for a thing of wheels this is where…

        The funicular, effortless     as a toy, glides humming to a stop halfway uphill. Teeming with tourists, the steps     break halfway again at a terrace where we pause to catch our breath, and half of Paris—         though today, in the August haze,     the view from Montmartre is just the odd tin…

With his two hands     covering his two eyes         he prays in the middle of the road over the clump of fur and bone     that was himself.         He looks like my old zayde in the synagogue     two decades ago         ashamed for his poverty. Comedian of the hard frost,     deft…