Poetry

                                         for my father                                               1. Today Today, this moment, speechlessly in pain, He…

Hazy Friday afternoon, traffic slugs. I get off a strange exit miles before mine hoping for the shortcut home. Between tenements, the sun’s intuition peeks through a pink bowling shirt on a clothesline. I project the night. After a shower, my evening peck—the click of plastic glasses— kids’ muted voices of cocktail hour— I never…

He could appreciate all The explosion accomplished, The tools they handed him, the manifold tools And their manifold applications. As I was starting to say—the explosion . . . A pungent lawlessness in the air, Like sheep ablaze. He found the barrenness Quite attractive, and said so, So that everyone heard, could hear, But not…

Poised in the garden just before dawn Souls hover in a trance before the window Or fly slanting and darting through the trees. And down on the plain where the sun Has yet to rise but whose heat roils Upward and turns the night to silver vapor, Souls swarm across the stubbled fields. Now, as…

Half of us were enrolled in the Army. Half of us were not. Half of us watched for thieves in the factories and were given no sleep. Half recited the day’s events into machines equipped with sensitive needles. Half never stopped training, and buried dried food at spots marked in red on maps. The songs…

That morning—a humid morning, early Spring, gray birds feeding on muddy lawns, the sound of a chain saw nearby, a red shirt tied to a battered tree, the empty smoke-streaked sky— That morning they held him in the green car and negotiated his punishment. They blindfolded him. His hand was held to something very hot…

You took the room in the attic. Watched television by yourself. I used to walk down the dim stairs to the basement to be with you at night, to listen to stories of plantations and dictatorships as you folded with precise care the underpants of my family. You who knew our human stains: faint arrowheads…

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…