Poetry

I am praying again, God—pale God—              here, between white sky and snow, by the larch I planted last spring, with one branch              broken at the elbow. I pick it up, wave winter away: I do things like that,              call the bluebirds back, throwing yarn and straw in the meadow, and they do…

In Portland, every once in a while, one encounters A dying gull, eyes milky as clams, Lying on a patch of grass or safe gutter, Shivering with death fever, black back And white breast dotted over With stationary yet excited flies Drunk on salt and the heaving propinquity Of deathly fresh fowl flesh, and here…

for B.W. and P.T.D. In wet fields the farmers’ cramped hands clutch fast to their hoes. We tumble through stone-colored flesh. All night the plane floating up over the oceans, unknown lives passing through us. So many. Barely enough time to say the names. Gone, as if taken by a huge gray hand entering a…

Not night now, not the night’s one chilling vocable of sharp air, not the cross parental babble of it burning your infant ear, not anything you say in answer, no good, not fair, the fiercest syllables that turn, as soon as spoken, into steam that lifts away, no, none of these is the beloved in…

Late June, dusk in Paris, a man found you, unaccompanied, on a park bench. Slouched, chin on chest, gaze fixed at the brick fountain, its white tumbling spires, you were the man from the night before. At the concert hall, you’d played that long instrument, lean and ebony with silver keys, like a stretched saxophone,…

After I flung you down at last onto the bed because it was two a.m. and you’d been crying for hours, it seemed, and would not stop, all my comforting defeated, spent; because you were too frantic by then to say what it was you wanted, sobbing too much to say it, though you kept…

In Paris, Vallejo’s hotel near the Bibliothèque Nationale charges a hundred a night, and Ginsberg’s seedy room on the rue Git-le-coeur sports flowered wallpaper now, and a couple of Michelin stars. Cabourg’s Grand Hôtel on the chilly Normandy coast, nearly driven from business by the sunny “costas” of Spain, rents “Chambre Marcel Proust” for twice…

The first one was in Michigan and I loved him     like I was digging in a foreign land and he was         the ruin I came to discover. Michigan is as cold as people imagine and when I remember him now     he is leaned against one of those gaudy American         cars, big…

When you shut your eyes to daydream, you’re really imagining the face of God, who, in the fifties, assumed the face of Mrs. Oshkenozi, who sat in her apartment window handing glasses of tap water to boys in pursuit of perfect stickball. Grandpa & his compatriots puffed unfiltered Camels & flirted with imperfect hands of…