Poetry

Mostly it’s the same odd obsession with nothing— the barren verisimilitude, the doggy fidelity to the natural world. So, this thrust of dark eloquence must be a yew, a non-deciduous blue-green talon grabbing attention. It could be that. Or Death. Or Truth. The abstract nouns stomp around the landscape in their stout boots. Meanwhile, the…

I read in a book that in the Kishinev pogrom Forty-seven Jews had been killed But elsewhere I had read That forty-eight Jews had been murdered By fire, by stoning, by rifle, knife, and strangling. And I wondered if the author had accidentally left out My great-uncle Ephraim Belkin, perhaps because He was passing through,…

She is not an ordinary Baby, but a lump of coal. Grown-ups glance at her And look away. Only the children Stare. Their parents tell them Not to point. When Angeline’s mother Wheels her stroller Into the bakery Everyone falls silent. When she pushes it Outside again, raindrops slide Right off her baby’s face. At…

At the hem of horizon a distant armada of cars is gnawing its way through the chop of a meadow going like Columbus toward the end of the world under banner of no return. I dip my brush into black. Over a lip I build a black mustache, a small dense thundercloud, scented with rum,…

If your gaze takes in the world a person’s a puny thing. If a person is all you see, the rest falls away and she becomes the world. But there’s another world into which a person can disappear. Then what remains? Only your word for her: Eurydice.   * She paused at the stone gates…

for X— When cabbalists declare Each deed we do affects Beings in other worlds, My thought turns round to sex,   As it inclines to do, As needle to true north, Considering our case, Weighing it back and forth.   What if we had undressed That chaste July, and what If we were being watched…

i. To His Savior in Christ If I did not, as I do, know well to love you first, I’d love my voice instead, cause you to yield the throne whose impossibly precious batting I could sing all day and never start to know—it is blasphemy or worse even to think it (Domine, me— ut…

Inside the White Star it was warm, ironed clothes, and humming revolution of unsteady washer-dryers. It was whirling blur of red black blue yellow that Beatrice watched like a TV, next to her lover.   Last night she’d looked into lighted windows bitterly, as if she’d been evicted, things thrown out on the sidewalk, cracked…

for Andre Foxxe A good show Starts in the Dressing room   And works its way To the stage. Close the door,   Andre’s cross- Dressing, what A drag. All   The world loves A bride, something About those gowns.   A good wedding Starts in the Department store   And works its way Into…