More on: poetry

An oyster-white lily, inner walls of plaster, the stoma lit like an orange candle, the petals’ undersides like the satin trim on lingerie, or a corrugated fan. White as a cloud cornice, egg shell, whitish spiders just visible on petal-skin of nearly the same color— the description untenable, improbable to the eye, the stillness never…

My grandfather moonlighted as a rabbi on Friday evenings when he should have been praying in the Bronx one-room apartment with no electricity and the claw-foot tub used for distilling whisky— not walking down 143rd Street below the globed gaslights, along the trolley tracks, past shuttered tobacco shops and Coca-Cola signage, towards Yonkers and the…

I sing for fear I’ll hear the still small voice and not like what it says. I croon to make my skull full as a squat hive and the honey is my cracked song, my sting in the throat. O I know a bee is not a melody but I must come to terms with…

Because the crab apple tree is not incarnate, but a shape cut from sky, you simply pull its trunk a little wider and step through. Once on the other side, you turn, take stock, lean on a bough, and look back at it all. So strange to catch your own life unawares, to see your…

Stands me, though it could be any of us, sliced open, scalp to instep, en pointe in formaldehyde inside a glass case like some macabre Houdini stunt. This may be a fin-de-siècle end-of-pier show, a sicko’s private gallery, a future museum of mortality—I’d be the last to know: dutiful sentry in cross-section, everlasting witness to…

Please give me the watches, Mother. Engraved 11-6-46. A gold Gruen and bracelet Bulova retired to a worn reliquary, a remote shelf, hall closet ripe: serial cakes of soap, tissue boxes, toothpaste on sale in case of another Depression. I’m surprised there are no smokes in there though Dad dragged on his last too late…

Ezekiel 24:17 said the Lord, this sigh indiscernible, although the si– contained is louder than the second fiddle, second syllable that ebbs into its chopped-off sibilance. The first one lasts awhile, the way we wish that pleasure would endure, the vowel long. It’s hard to leave the bed it’s made, mouth wide until the utterance…

Mr. Moore, who drank; his oldest son paid the bill without looking at me. The apartment with the dog who ate two paperboys, leaving only their shoes. The Morrows who once paid me with a hundred-dollar bill, keep the change. The Sunderlands, who wanted the paper unfolded and laid flat under a stone, Which I…

Sleeping pill dependence may prompt referral to laboratory overnights (Polysomnography, would you look good on me, electrodes attached?) and wee-hour waking may be a sign of depression, it says, but what could depress when neither son of Zebedee needed hypnotics, white ones like these approved by the Air Force in support of mission readiness, to…

Your place, not mine. Vessels for water, of course. Maybe one for wine. Bread, smoked fish, honey in an earthen jar. Basins for ablutions. The bed you share with pleasure to ponder. And somewhere for prayer, rug, bench, stool, shelf beneath the shell collection, keepsake chips of Egyptian glass, Silk Road cloth, a dark blue…