Poetry

It is still dark when the trucks take us to work in the citrus groves, when we pull on our gloves and climb ladders into the trees. In the morning dark, workers go without faces. They are trunks and limbs like the trees they inhabit. I am counting the people like trees, counting in Hebrew…

The front door’s latch slides into its brass socket, the kind of sound that pushes you off, like a flip turn at the pool, your thighs recoil and you’re out past the flags, well on your way . . . only I’m talking about the last lap, when there’s no next turn, the future is…

You’ve told me how they bury the dead in Ghana— how they lay each, finally, in the heart of his life: a twelve-foot wooden cocoa pod or onion for the farmer, chiefs in slick gold eagles two-men-tall, and crab, crayfish, lobster, sanded tuna coffins— because now that you have had me, oh fisherman, you would…

translated by George Evans and the author I love this body that’s lived through life, its amphora shape, its water smoothness, its streaming hair that crowns the skull, the delicate stem of its crystal face ascending exquisitely from shoulders and collarbones. I love my back sprayed with muted bright stars, my translucent hills, wellsprings of…

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…

Did he save them from the Holocaust to profit his soul, or to make a profit? Did he make them his slaves to protect them from the Holocaust, or to protect his investment? “He represented the German system—a guy who could make money.” He made them slaves. He saved them. He profited. Was there any…

You said she kept leaving you for a dentist, a gay prostitute whose boyfriend has AIDS, and the short-order cook who bruised her. She needed someone pretty in her bed. You’d always wait, stay home until she threw rocks to break your window, begging to be let in. She taught you to want bath water…