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…

Give me a man with a quick first step, with court vision that takes in all of me, a man who can play in the paint, score from all over, finding my perimeter, a man who can drive my lane. Give me a man who makes his free throws, ready to shoot two whenever I…

If it is late Sunday in the brain & sunlight falling on the wall of the Food Court and you tell me your daughter at eighteen months still breast-feeds, and if I with my slightly younger daughter sitting at the next table nod but say nothing, nothing, while you speak of the vicissitudes of cracked-nipples…

We are sitting by a blue lake in the middle of the desert, dropping french fries left from lunch into the mouths of giant, waiting carp. You say if this were Poland, a carp that size would be a prize for a fisherman to brag on all his life. To serve, brown and proud as…