Poetry

In a coffee can his flower beside loose bricks ledged on a city rowhouse gerrymandered for six kids, roosts of rooms, tilting floors, swayback roof sloping toward a Baltimore shipyard still as a world war watch Iggy Jones, old boilermaker, the belly on him, down to two cigars a day, living off the mailman’s pouch…

High. Mindless. Cackle at the edge of the world. And the geese are flying there and crying, for two weeks now they’ve come racketing each morning, miles and miles of them, pouring. Where do they come from, where did they sleep last night? I can’t see them, but the question ticks like a clock about…

No author for this fall landscape, nor signs Of limits tested, except the fence just yards From I-89, and a stray Holstein Unfazed by traffic heading for the border. How different from your time in California, Those LSD trips at Zabriskie Point, Warm nights spent cruising, or in Castro’s bars With studded whips and chains,…

They all want me to stop talking to you. My mother with the face of a television blaring answers to the game no one ever guesses— Bill Holden and Deborah Kerr in Bombay making nookie on the graves. The wind cawing senseless to the Blue Moon. Even you are tired of my chatter— Smart girl…

Thousands of tiny fists tamping the surface of the lake flowing like a wide river gone crazy, southeast, westnorth letting the wind push it around in its bed and the boat hull hugging the shore. What else can she do? Even the trees agree, shaking their crowns, throwing down their leaves as if she were…

There was a time I wanted nothing so much as home. In the rain I loved you, in the hot days; The corn ripened; I was a child of storms And of seasons. I ventured and was lost, But, oh, those salty songs of the damned! Death has a green foot, And we dance like…

The trees, so white and so many. I don’t remember it this way. Their slender trunks a comfort. You surrender, that’s all. To a man, to a drug, to wall after wall of birch. It’s not unpleasant. Winnie, steel-gray in October. Whitecaps. This is where nostalgia will take you: a mean wind, a sleety snow…

for Diane 1. Dance, she said. She said, Dance. It is crazy, I know, how quickly I’ve learned to love this dancing, this step-step across the floor when I’d spent my whole life without any music. I had promised never to dance in the white way if I didn’t dance in the Indian way first…

Jerusalem, September 1993 for Raphi Amram How long my hands have been well-worn thoughts of an automatic rifle. Ajar, my wrought-iron gate. A mulberry tree, in leaf, is shadowing the courtyard tiles; the back of my hand pouring wine’s caught in a dark pattern. The walled Old City stares across the valley, all luminous stone…