Poetry

  • Lot’s Wife

    after Akhmatova They had no time—the just man hurried across the bridge, followed God’s magistrate along the black ridge. His grieving wife lagged behind as if she had no will, arms heavy with useless things, heart heavier still. She couldn’t recall if she’d shut the door, turned off the iron; worse guilt, she’d left behind…

  • Roman Sketchbook

    AS As you come and go from a place you sense the way it might seem to one truly there as these clearly determined persons move on the complex spaces and hurry to their obvious or so seeming to you destinations. “Home,” you think, “is a place still there for all,” yet now you cannot…

  • Tzimtzum: Contraction

    The contractions         Have come Too soon                You are sentenced         To bed    in the country house During the tedious hours Your sons scrap             Your husband courts An imaginary lover          You summon         the living Mothers:                Hagar                        Of the bitter smile                Sarah                        Whose laughter lies                Rebecca                        Who outwits men…

  • Physics

    after Stephen Hawking Jimmy Alvarez and Emilio Sanchez and his brother are absent forever, each shot in the head in the park, and so their membership has lapsed with the Latin Kings. Slumped in their car seats, they look as if they drank too much except that their lips are frosted white over pearl and…

  • The Weight of Memory

    When they were still young and love was not yet their protection, he fell, though only once, into what he called another woman’s arms. But she understood him, and speaking the language of betrayal, she understood him to mean another woman’s legs, and it was this understanding she was trying to swallow.            If I…

  • Astrophysics

    “Can’t go on,” sighed the heart taking leave of its mind and throwing itself at the sun. Ninety-three million miles in no time. Past the mad gas of the solar corona shot that hunk of red meat meteoric—straight through the sun’s bubble to the wild interior, the fusion place. Its molecules spat up their ghosts….