More on: poetry

In fields where the late light lingers I can just see the last wild roses spangling the vetch and Johnson grass. Is someone walking there, bending to take in their lightest breath? Is it a girl in a blue-white dress? Even now the moon is rising like a blade above the hills. Sharp cries of…

Nevertheless, the rain continued. In dark doorways and under loading docks men slept with cardboard and cold. I said, “My heart is full with praising your justice.” Still, the sniper drew in a long terrible breath—or so I understand. I said I was lonely for my old body and my body became older still. I…

Like one nation divided, the older—by three minutes—bragged: We had a race, and I won. The younger would respond: We had a fight. I kicked him out. Impossible to tell them apart— in photos, in home movies— hairy and smooth in equal measures, matching clothes, thin bodies, freckled, blue eyes behind black-framed glasses— as babies,…

At the Synagogue Rummage Sale during Holocaust Remembrance Day Basement, Butler, Pennsylvania, the gentiles bargaining for old tallises, worn yarmulkes, a torn challah cover, a stained torah, a hundred thumbed copies of Anne Frank— I walk out and past a circle of bat mitzvah-aged girls and our rabbi, who stops me and asks if I’ll…

Knowing life grinds us, And dust Is what we’ll become. Sensing, likewise, That the moral Of our story Has to do With being mortal. Yet love grounds us. And the beloved Grows in us: We are her slow cocoon. And the poem is a door; The song, a little window. § Bowed by a ceaseless…

i In the eyes of Dürer’s Saint Jerome, desert inhabits the dark flecks of his downward gaze. It harrowed him. He came back clean as picked bone. Chalcis of sunlight, and sand— only in the eyes can days be counted, days of muscle wasting, in which desire dwindled to the body’s dry growl. He’s written…

Stirring among the pines. The sapling’s leaves like oval wings tremble. Between the whoofs of startled deer, echoing, an echoing clear creed of some unvanquished mystery— night-rising crows humbling their caws below the oaky whoo of the boreal owl. Below that, what? Threads of wood, a bed of pine, the needles strewn in love beside…

After love discovers it, the little burn or birthmark in some odd spot he can neither see nor reach; after the internist’s downturned mouth, specialists leaning over him like diviners, machines reading his billion cells; after the onslaught of insight, cures crawling through him like infestations, so many surgeries a wrong move leaves him leaking…

The light falling on the steps of city hall this late afternoon infuses the whole sky and bathes these poor little trees of heaven stuck in concrete. Flooding down from all sides, light slants across ruddy storefront brick, streaks along cables, glitters up from the bay, and now, as I turn west toward the hospital,…

I was stopped on the sidewalk by pears glowing on their tree like antique ornaments with flaking paint, a green metallic shimmer, hinting at yellow, mottled with a few flecks of red. As light flickered over them, they seemed to flutter like candles in the leaves. But no—they were pears, and probably hard, I told…