Poetry

What It Would Be Like

this is the woman sons look for when they leave their wives —Leslie Ullman Husband Again tonight he sees her eyes burning in the common flame. Windows, too, give him her image at strange times. He begins to breathe like the first daffodils punctuating the April grass. The miles to work he dreams: she rides…

Morning Exercise

Distance doesn't matter. Not dreams of home or morning filtered through a darker pane or the timbre of his voice in every room or blaming every cruelty on the place or letters no longer expected, unreceived or pigeons streaming bloodless through the sky. Only this wafer of unbending light redeemed a song by all the…

from Crime Against Nature

1. The upraised arm, first clenched, ready to hit, fist clenched and cocked, ready to throw a brick, a rock, a Coke bottle. When you see this on TV, robbers and cops, or people in some foreign alley, is the rock in your hand? Do you shift and dodge? Do you watch the story twitch…

Lover

She carries the garden tools to the hill And starts to beat a hole She finds a garland of roses Full of ears and salvage A shield bush A crown of peas and a glass of juice She has to drink that first Crown the girl! Crown the two of us      heart and right arm…

A Modern Midrash

Have we grown old before our time folding our hands without a smile or a piece of bread like monkeys, our faces unrecognizably human? We jump and clap to be cursed and mocked. And when we speak no one pays attention. And when we sleep even a bird can wake us. Israel, 1989

Monkey Boy

I lift my hands to my face      my hand's the biggest thing around and filled with rivers      it has stems I can see through to the dark fuzzy air I hold my hand to my face and down below I feel my legs curl up to my chest I look out at the door of…

Choose

Wanting, the enemy cast off, wades in a dark pool outside. Wanting, the oppressor, grows anklets and beads in a wet heat. Charity, the curse in love with patriots, gives all her possessions to the night, takes off her robes and waits on the narrow bed for ruin. The slightest cusp of wind disturbing both…

Twenty-One Turkeys

Twenty-one turkeys amaze our eyes, come traveling north from the Berkshire Museum (Art and Natural History). It says there boa constrictors do not harm humans. False Laocoön! not to mention Eden.      On Route 7 nobody stops; but if they had a gun (or a camera in Yellowstone) they'd stop to shoot the hideous buffalo. Turkeys…