Poetry

Rhetorical Judea

Most of my life I courted simplicity and tried to leash any wind-breaking plagues of rhetoric that swirled in my brain. I prayed for rational segues from word to deed, pain to relief, and madness to sanity with little success so sometimes words surged like mad lemmings to my tongue and I spoke from a…

1954

Then dirt scared me, because of the dirt he had put on her face. And her training bra scared me—the newspapers, morning and evening, kept saying it, training bra, as if the cups of it had been calling the breasts up—he buried her in it, perhaps he had never bothered to take it off. They…

The Curtain

Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and     rearing. One can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-     renewing field of corpse-flesh. In this valley the snow falls silently all day and out our window We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in    …

February Morning

The old man takes a nap too soon in the morning. His coffee cup grows cold. Outside the snow falls fast. He’ll not go out today. Others must clear the way to the car and the shed. Open upon his lap lie the poems of Mr. Frost. Somehow his eyes get lost in the words…

Unholy Sonnet

Amazing to believe that nothingness Surrounds us with delight and lets us be And that the meekness of nonentity, Despite the friction of the world of sense, Despite the leveling of violence, Is all that matters. All the energy We force into the match head and the city Explodes inside a loving emptiness. Not Dante’s…

Origami for Adults

People who’ve seen relatives die by fire, stand to the right of this line. People who’ve imagined large, drug-taking siblings, crouch down by their feet and warm your hands. People who offer syllogistic explanations for plain brown acts, play musical minds to the tune of any anthem. People who delay sobbing to answer the telephone,…

Rain

I can hear the rain now, its vanishing averted glance, and long branches descending softly toward cool water. And then a voice coming back from its solitude to find me, “When nothing spoke to me anymore the broken statues spoke to me,” and “Be opened my mouth, untie what is upon my mouth.” I have…