Poetry

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…

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…