Poetry

Peeking for hours into the fire, I find the faces staring back— marching cities rise and fall. Still as stone I sit, practicing death. My machine of flesh hangs lightly. Our body’s noise keeps us sleeping. Later we arise into dreams, and awake to Jacob’s ladder. At death we graduate. There the slow-mo stomp of…

When I think of you, you disappear in stages, As if I were paralyzed below my heart And wore, like a blanket, a thousand pages Of you on my lap, who come apart In the slightest wind, and disperse Like leaves. I trade you for the universe, Which holds me back When I lean over…

Coach looks at the scoreboard, tries again to press another loss in the backcourt of his brain. The players feel their blood quiet, return to its common wander. The fans shake their heads like tired dogs, put on their coats, hats, gloves, leave the bleachers, head back to what’s always there. The cops shrug, step…

The train departs at dusk from New York the neon signs begin to bleed their letters the light goes into the buildings that pass like so much else that I notice and forget and don't notice and remember like the specific places where litter ends up and the last patches of snow and the iron…

for Stanley Kunitz Poem is difficult when it's still dark, lying in bed without sleep. Poem is difficult entering the kitchen, another working day. The poem I once loved made breakfast, while I wrote down my dreams. I remember the first poem, brown hair piled high above a never-to-be Nordic smile, a crown of lit…

Eight or nine cars, lights off, motors running, in the dark school parking lot waiting for an overdue bus. Each unexpectedly alone with the undersides of the day's thoughts, and the long shadows cast by words; intruding upon them one thought, unwelcome, insistent, cyclical as the flashing numerals on the dashboard clock, which keeps returning…

Someone like The Past walks in, sits down beside me. The moon blazes slowly, a burning ship in its last hour. I try to talk to the woman inside me who will not let me sleep. There is a glass in my hand. My reflection in the windowpane is small. My face is the face…

It keeps getting darker back there. They are playing catch with a luminous ball, shooting baskets by sound. The edges of the playground close in until it is just the size of this room grown suddenly cold and quiet enough to overhear them walking home, their plans future secrets, buried in silence at the corner…

Just as the car hits the fire hydrant the water, smearing its bright load, blinding the oncoming drivers who crouch in fear behind their wheels, a young boy is working the lock of the glass door of KAPLAN'S JEWELRY STORE with a penknife. A Spanish woman, hiking up the sleeves of her T-shirt, is speaking…