Poetry

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…

At this distance, from the other shore, looking across the river north and east, you just can’t tell what kind of trees they are, feathered in those ideal humid greens in a sort of flow toward the horizon and the ocean. In perspective they diminish to depletion, into the sunset’s haw and haze, as if…

How Uncle Alvin tumbled from the hayloft, broke his neck. How once a one-armed hobo, a black man, split a half cord of stove wood for a plate of ham, green beans, and fried potatoes, which he ate, slowly, sitting on the grass in the shade of a doomed elm tree. Great-grandma stepped out on…

A piece of paper Which appeared to be blank But on which we see Writing had faded. “My first is of the Possessive of those Given to possession. And my last, the finality Of that proposition. In entirety I give That which in three worlds doth live. Ungainly in the two; In all, long-legged beauty,…

Today you’re going to hike to the very end Of this steep valley, where the path rises And disappears beyond the waterfall Marked on the yellow sign you saw last night Before you went to sleep to dream of today. Now, as you yawn here on the balcony Of the chalet, you hear distant cowbells….

“Break a board’s good as a rib,” says my teacher, flexing his fists, “—ain’t no rib stayed in one place that long!” My shoulder aches from holding my arm at eye-level. My wrist aches forming a crook. And my fingers and thumb, too, for pinching between them a board, the grains of which slope toward…