Poetry

(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…

So this is the day the fat boy learns to take the jokes by donning funny hats, my Amaryllis, my buffoon of a flower, your four white bullhorn blossoms like the sirens in a stadium through which the dictator announces he's in love. Then he sends out across the land a proclamation— there must be…

He hates to wake up in the morning alone, What it's like to squeeze juice for one, To stumble around in only pajama bottoms With no one to admire his recent tan Or explicate his significant dreams. Sure, he's glad not to be scolded for stuff In his eye or the place he missed shaving….

Up there my father marches off into Guadalcanal, Guam, his face      numb from lying in the green tub to break the 105-degree malarial      fever. My brother is there, too, Mae Westing over      Okinawa until they gather him up and place him in the nineteenth bunk, tenth      floor of the Albany Veterans' Hospital. Behind them a…

I pull the bed slowly open, I open the lips of the bed, get the stack of fresh underpants out of the suitcase—peach, white, cherry, quince, pussy willow, I choose a color and put them on, I travel with the stack for the stack's caress, dry and soft. I enter the soft birth-lips of the…

When I walk home with groceries, the child shifts back against my belly, moving with the eggs in their twelve jiggling sockets. I try to have a sense of beauty. This is my true voice I want moving among others                 and yet it has a rhythm of its own, the possible, the cries of…

Afternoon light like pollen. This is my language, not the one I learned. We hungry generations with our question Of shapes and changes: Did you think we wanted To be like you? I flicker and for a second I'm picking through rubbish To salvage your half-eaten muffin, one hand At my ear to finger a…