Poetry

I live with my contradictions intact, seeking transcendence but loving bread. I shrug at both and from behind the summer screen I look out upon the dark, knowing death as one form of transcendence, but so is life.

Un tempo tenevo sott'occhio l'atlante degli uccelli scomparsi dalla faccia del mondo opera di un allievo di David ch'era fallito nel genere del quadro storico o in altre monumentali prosopopee pittoriche. Riflettevo su simili ipotetici atlanti di vite senza becco e senza piume da millenni irreperibili, insetti rettili pesci e anche perché no? l'uomo stesso…

Over the Museum of Deportation, six Young violinists and two cellists play A waltz of Strauss, while German tourists dance. Why not? It's fin de siècle France, And having grown middle-aged and tired, you Can live with their Jawohls! for, at least, tonight. Behind you, students lick colorful sorbets, Lovers dance drunkenly, stumble to the…

My friend April Fallon tells me that blood on the exterior of the brain is cooler than that in the interior and that it's in the cooler blood that dreams reside. What do you think? Do you love the head as much as I do? That calcareous shell, the stoniest part of the body. And…

Fra i miei ascendenti qualcuno lottò per l'Unità d'Italia, raggiunse alti gradi. portò la greca sul berretto, fu coinvolto in brogli elettorali. Non gl'importava forse nulla di nulla, non m'importa nulla di lui; il suo sepolcro rischia di essere scoperchiato per carenza di terra o marmi o altro. C'è una morte cronologica, una che è…

Since you read Stendhal, Flaubert, De Musset, Isola Bella seemed a hazy dream: Ramparts of gardens rising out of water, Water nymphs stunned into statuary, Grottos where walls of pebbles and mortar Formed sea shells and sea creatures, Rooms with mandolins and violas d'amores, Balustrades where assignations were made With a nod, a wink, the…

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…