Poetry

Magpie calls bounce off the brittle branches flaring off the mountain’s dark. One’s wing just flew across the branch tips. Just the banner of himself he drew across. His darkness cast a kind of laugh against the brilliance of the icy bark. I remember iced branches out our window fifteen, sixteen years ago an ocean…

1. He looked at the seed for a long time. His mind did not comprehend. It did not flower anymore. The seed was just a seed.                                            She had said it was begonia. He tried to imagine what begonias looked like. Purple blossoms, rich yellow, supple orange, blue petals? The mind that made the seed…

If Earth is one of seven ancient wandering stars, where is that girl who, every afternoon,        runs water into a basin of hollow scales? Surely not in the vertical crowds, among colonizers and women passing in shallow hats. Nor riding with the plutonium makers, without hair or     explanations,        whose buckles glow in…

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…

A crucifix on a bare wall. Crocheted cincture with a lover’s knot tied at each end, which swing as you walk (also known as “nun’s balls”). The veil, with or without wimple. Crepe-soled, lace-up oxfords, black, or sandals, preferably Dr. Scholl’s. A watch, plain, and your pectoral cross on a black string— small enamel for…

Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees. —Paul Valéry   The hatred goes back for centuries, everyone says,        a tradition as old                     as making wine, weaving rugs, playing flutes.          My father remarks              he would have expected it from the Croats                     who colluded with Hitler,        but…