Poetry

Such accidents do happen dancing: she says I'm dancing beneath your loving blow so I stagger staggered, he says no: it wasn't a blow it was a brush—feather light; I fly round the world for your gold another time she tries so hard to make him well, it makes her sleepy. More lately they share…

from Ten Days in Russia Beneath you the road is smoke, the bridges thunder and everything is left far behind . . . Russia, where are you flying to? —Gogol, from Dead Souls You ancients out there, bulky, dark-coated women, you wait so patiently for a bus that never comes, as you must have waited…

At this point in the development of “When All the Walls Are Down,” the poem and I have brought each other as far as we can go. From now on, I suspect, revision will mainly involve aeration. Without it the poem would be, as my Eve says of Adam, “plunged into his talk's / spring-tide”…

There's nothing more seductive than the basement of this gated and clapboard building in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, on a Sunday afternoon when Sister Walker's got the turkey wings and the fried chicken and the baked macaroni and the green beans and candied yams simmering on every burner in the tiny kitchen while upstairs all the brothers…

My friend and I compare love-at-first-sights, seeing whose got there truly first because sight did it to them. I say it's only language. Without those words, that same order, no love that magnets onto the lover through just walking into a room and looking. All through our teens, getting ready for eyeball-to- eyeball link-ups, so…

This dictionary here calls scorpions “the first land animals,” coming forth after the largo collapsing of the Ordovician, etc., however I wonder how it knows, I mean you know, how? when into the vacuum created by my imbecile sublime curiousness comes something atavistic: along the right flank of Lawrence of Arabia on TV, a build-up…

I left the road where a stile entered the wood. Branches in their shadow everywhere, the trees standing close in their own flour. Face to face with a mouse body on a patch of bark—the shape small, the wings flat—inverted and staring. Meant to be half seen, quick in the last light: little leather angel…

As if some child, unwilling to shut even the figurative heart into pocket or lunch pail had carried it plate-like home in a downpour. It was a passionate migration—no matter its redundant shape and thirty others just as crude. The passage did it good, white lace bleeding, the stock message smudged out of language by…

“The Candle” is the most recent of my Holocaust poems. Eventually, I hope to revise and expand Erika (1984), which itself grew from The Swastika Poems (1977). I did not know that “The Candle” would come to do what it set out to deny. Its speaker, the jaded and cynical and frightened self I was…