Poetry

Sweeping from the shrouded mouths of volcanoes, in gusts, in feathers, coaxing the trembling leaves to fly from their anxieties, covering the pathways with sweat, bathing the sanctuaries in encrustations of uncivil marrow— hesitating, plunging, crazy with romance— this heat is totally absorbing, busy, irresistible, and it has caused many marriages and children, and one…

A man wakens at 4 A.M. from a dream of ground round on a piece of rye toast. Having gone to college, he wonders what can it mean. He sits on the bed rubbing the yellowed soles of his feet, but it brings no spiritual comfort, so he rises to dress. He chooses black designer…

You and he and all your friends being herded among wheat-tawny sheep down a country lane waves of ferns topping embankments of gold dirt hooves and heels raising a wafer-scented dustglow to the air hard breath like butter gilding mouths joining voices bleating like a choir it's mid-morning the boys rising free into true blond-tenor…

Love & fresh water—on the tongue of Romance, Gallic insouciance or Socrates' truth this world would break to break you for your bread. In its freedom we shine repugnant as slugs, water's simplest flesh. Having ascended the luminous steps that lead through Plato's Phaedo out of the body, remote above its joys and misery like…

Sixteen years ago, in the high meadows on the French side of the mountains, a clear April late morning, a warm wind slowing through the young grains and grasses, the sun touching everything with yellow light. I called to my son Teddy, then fifteen, to come see, and he left the car to stand beside…

My father the mouse, small, brown,      drinks quietly from his bottle cap of      Schaefer's, jerking his head up now and then to the dim kitchen light, his mouse      whiskers trembling, his mouse feet tucked under the table      where they tap into the night. Look at him nibbling      his one piece of bread, his one slice…

(Fragment: Dichterberuf) Nascitur arabiis ingens in collibus infans Et dixit levis aura: “Nepos est ille Jugurtae.” On Arabian hills a monstrous child is conceived, And the winds say, “It is the grandson of Jugurta.” —Rimbaud —The night awakens images. Day sleeps In the high bed of music. The century Is ending and the Millennium. Now…

Wherever I go I am a tourist but it is always worse to be alone in Paris where the museum guards are dreaming of the chests of starlets and the chests that lie beneath their beds contain photographs, bits of cloth, satchels full of Vichy francs. Wherever I go I am a Jew but it…

Looking up,            I see they have nailed my father to the great blue spruce, his bottles      of Schaefer's clacking in the wind, his bread man's purse hanging stiffly in these below-      zero degrees. And behind him, on the white pine, my mother in her blue bathrobe, her      arms spread wide as though embracing the…