Poetry

Between two worlds life hovers like a star. —Byron for Tomaz It is not so easy to live on the earth as an angel, to imitate the insects that dance around the moon, to return what air we borrow every few seconds. I am going to enter the hour when wind dreamt of a light…

     I've believed from the beginning, when I was just a kid writer, that part of the poet's task was to break the rules of language, to free it from the burdens of its history, thus acknowledging that history and revivifying it. It's some such sense that underpins the poem “These Days.” Cross from the Race…

You want me to know I'm keeping memories so you unlatch a few. The future's in there too but badly restrained like an actress so intently fastened on her cue: “pocketknife”—that she stumbles out on “doctor's wife” and has to be mistaken for the maid, then chased out so as not to interrupt the kiss….

I'd even given you part of my shared fear: This personal responsibility For a whole world's disease that is our nightmare. —Sidney Keyes About the hearts of dusk that could make pets of dogs the Nazis abandoned as they fled. About turning to answer the dust devil scuffed up by the wind, thinking I heard…

The month is August, but the day is October, and under the overhang of this expensive house, the windsock's rainbow- colored tentacles dawdle like a cuttle- fish's in the bright, dry breeze. A boy I've never seen before, whose mother loves him too well for his sweet, uncomplicated face; the new, warm smell of his…

I run the comb through his lush hair. letting it think into my wrist the way the wrist whispers to the cards with punctuation and savvy in a game of solitaire. So much not to be said the scissors are saying in the hasp and sheer of the morning. Eleven years I've cut his hair…

He was struck by the pure unstinting radiance, the light blazing so fiercely on the iron railings he had to shield his eyes, the sky above the Hudson hard and clear: the skyline, pink at the edges, gouged out with a knife. And the light was everywhere. It blazed in the window of the barbershop…

     It must have happened like this: *     *     * My mother went to the hospital with a lump in her breast. The doctor did a biopsy. It wasn't malignant. They were trying to protect me so nobody said anything. *     *     * Sometime not too long after that a lady came to the door with the seven danger signs….

During the blizzard we pulled off the road for a bite to eat. We could see the word FOOD in the neon haze from the highway. As we approached, it became clear the place was no truck stop, as it was tastefully decorated with artificial palms gently swaying, & Latin rhythms punched through the crystal…