Poetry

Yet another Puerto Rican Buddhist. He wants to breathe in peace, while keeping his rice- and-beans cooking skills, his accent, his blue jeans from the Santana years, his wine and rum collections housed inside his head. Today’s lesson: fireflies know they’re grasshoppers’ illusory stars. And that Puerto Rico is only a comma in Time’s poem…

A tree spooked By its own evening whispers. Afraid to rustle, Just now Bewitched by the distant sunset Making a noise full of deep Misgivings, Like bloody razor blades Being shuffled, And then again the quiet. The birds too terror-stricken To make their own comment. Every leaf to every other leaf An apparition, A separate…

The anesthetist seems to bounce off the walls. It is very late. As if underground The trolley with my daughter crawls With her ruined appendix. Wide and blue The gowned anesthetist’s speech is strange. As he pats each wall, words flash from true. His accent is thick as the paint’s veined white On the glimmering…

“. . . the Muse guides mariners in the shape of bees.” —Philostrates Her wild cunning hypothesis: the Sirens in the Odyssey were bees. And I imagine two virgins, joined at the thorax— grounded, centered, perfumed— who could hum the Greeks’ ancient choruses, who knew all the lullabies, the waltzes, the songs a wife would…

Nothing is like the theater. Backstage, with eighty children I fight through wastes of plastic bags to youthful refugees. They drop hairpins, lose their shirts or ask for biscuits, Play guessing games or scrap till they are needed. The oldest cries. The youngest, in a corner, Intent as God, smears blue above her eyes.  …

The cicadas again like kindling that won’t take. The struck match of some utopia we no longer remember                                                     the terms of— the rules. What was it was going to be abolished, what restored? Behind them the foghorn in the harbor, the hoarse announcements of unhurried arrivals, the spidery virgin-shrieks of gulls, a sideways sound, a…

He woke up in New York City on Valentine’s Day, Speeding. The body in the booth next to his was still warm, Was gone. He had bought her a sweater, a box of chocolate Said her life wasn’t working he looked stricken she said You’re all bent out of shape, accusingly, and when he She…

“The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher but also a windmill and a train.” —Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty” At dusk the ring of the horizon turned brown, folded open, then dropped lower, like grain. But there was no grain. And it was dawn again. The wind blew odd furrows…

The woman said yes she would go to Australia with him Unless he heard wrong and she said Argentina Where they could learn the tango and pursue the widows Of Nazi war criminals unrepentant to the end. But no, she said Australia. She’d been born in New Zealand. The difference between the two places was…