Poetry

Matins

In a little casket, a garden begins to grow: wild roses pink as the mouths of house cats, daisies going to pieces in a loves me, loves me not lullaby, the white light of calla lilies flooding the vault's wall. Is there a baby in the casket? Yes, the blue kingdom inhabited by you, my…

Running Out

Not much time left      here      in the other Brooklin      overlooking      Herrick Bay driven like an anchor into the town's center it is as though all of the animals had come out of the woods      to speak      now      in that instant      when the season      flees and leaves its shards in the middens the black bear, the…

The Mechanics of Repair

for Andy and Gail How did I spend my evening? By coming home in rain that slowly translated itself into curtain after curtain of oriental beads that I brushed through cold and very tired. All winter the repairman has come dressed in sweaters, never coats, crouched in darkness at the heart of things, trying to…

The Light That Stops Us

The morning a wind was up but I stopped to look anyway, bent barefoot to a net of flashing crystals, grass tips had picked their green way into a spider's threaded fan spread on the lawn last night— and standing, I saw the bone from inside the raspberry still hung on the stem, that white…

The Long March

The Rabbi saw a Torah-scroll surrounded by a fence with one picket missing. . .The iron points glowed, and the gap was like a missing tooth in the face of God. So Talmud was written. I let the book slide to the floor, and shred puckers on the pink chenille bedspread. This is my new…

Menasha

It was Menasha, the name in the middle — not Murray — which my Grandmother thought more “American” — in reality Irish, like the ones who left their homes to them. Menasha or Manasseh, the half tribe, brother to Ephraim, son of Joseph- Israel-Jacob's son who blessed not him the elder, but Ephraim, his younger…

Open Casket

In the pink light of the funeral parlor they spread her out, the arc of a lamp overseeing the calm colors of her folded hands. How far away from us she lies in the big, serious casket like a creche, holding as it does her babied corpse. Visitors in clumps of twos and threes sway…

Beautiful is Hard

To be a boy meant it was only easier to pee in the woods or from a rowboat easier to fit into tight jeans the crooks of trees except for some fat boys and some flat-bellied flat-buttocked girls. To be a boy meant it was always harder to have a beautiful anything: like eyes, handwriting,…

Cumana In August

Cumana in August is not so bad. True, it's winter and the days get shorter. But not because the sun does. Because the rain comes earlier and earlier until one is almost back in his home by noon. The mountains are worse. Invierno: winter wet, summer hot. The rivers swell, creciente; from upriver down, dark…