Poetry

Commuters

It’s that vague feeling of panic That sweeps over you Stepping out of the #7 train At dusk, thinking, This isn’t me Crossing a platform with the other Commuters in the sad half-light Of evening, that must be Someone else with a newspaper Rolled tightly under his arm Crossing the stiff, iron tracks Behind the…

Love Gets Ornery

I called her my untamable cupcake, she was a humanoid in jodhpurs, a jigsaw on the stage of the ballet. We met in a tourist cabin near a famous crater. Macaroni in leotards, I noted in my notebook. She could prattle until the floodlights goo-ed her lollipop. A sarcasm, fervent and amplified, that could stop…

The Czar’s Proclamation

The slow light coming on, And sudden wind, dry heat And no dove song. I look up From whatever I have been All night thoughtfully reading, From the dim abstractions That crowd a table at dawn, And I hear my named called — A low, insistent sound — Though no one is here. All night…

Paradigm of Seasons

Each year is like a snake that swallows its tail. How long since we have learned, of seasons, the paradigm? We know how cloud- scud and scut, north-bred, come      scouting The land out for winter, its waiting bulk. Come      skirmishing, flanking. Then red leaf, gold leaf, the winter's choked road. Spring Brings hope, even if…

A Beer Ain’t Got No Bone

I can’t pick up the vacuum cleaner without remembering our most subtle and tender moments, shooing the sniper from the playground, then picking watermelons. For the past few months my life has read like canned food labels caked with panic. I don’t know if she’s still in Tokyo or on her way to Zanzibar. I…

Led by the Hebrew School Rabbi

Those good students who only loved working through pages of exercises, but were too good to object to the philanthropy of physical recreation took a bus to the Grand Concourse and another one down it, modelled after the Champs Elysees in Paris France, to the aging YMHA by Yankee Stadium. We stumbled on the basketball…

Sunset

Clouds clamber, turgid, the mountain, peakward And pine-pierced, toward the Vulgar and flaming apocalypse of day, In which our errors are consumed Like fire in a lint-house — not repetitious But different each day, for day to day nothing Is identical to eye or soul. At night, at a late hour, I Have asked stars…

Air Guitar

Is it me there in the young clerk at the Circle-K, holding the neck of an invisible guitar, whose rock music rises above the explosions of a Star Wars game? Or am I standing, years before, stoned in front of a band, working frets, revving strings? Something flashes in the cash register’s bluish green digits,…