Glowworm
By Poetry Issue 90
I am the whisper matches rattle in their cold and boxy hovels. I’m desire gone to ground. I am efficient, almost secret; you can read in me such scripture of the most compacted and contented red-light district. Impish sample seraph, humblest in lust, I am the apocryphalest rumor waiting just around the corner. See me…
Read MoreSome Small Bone
By Poetry Issue 90
Some small bone in your foot is longing for heaven —Robert Bly This twinge at first stir too modest for throb, more diffident than tug, not an itch, not the most incurious twitch of a hook, not a jerk, but the tease…
Read MoreField
By Poetry Issue 90
Heaven is a field I am driving an old truck across in the only dream I have on the subject. The sky over that pasture is so blue I know it will burst if it doesn’t turn twenty different reds at evening. The truck is my granddad’s ’72 Ford, still smelling of oilfield and aftershave.…
Read MoreAfter Hearing That a Friend Visiting Israel for the First Time Asked Her Private Tour Guide, “Where Is the Garden of Eden?”
By Poetry Issue 90
Where is the Garden of Eden? Can I see it from the hotel, east-facing room on the eighteenth floor? Does the 18 bus stop there? My children, I think, they must have grown up in the Garden of Eden while I was away with work, eighteen-hour nights and days. Look—their radiant faces! Listen—their voices, sweet…
Read Moreare you my god
By Poetry Issue 90
in every generation, each person must regard himself or herself as if he or she were the one liberated, on the very night of Passover, from Egypt adapted from the Passover Haggadah This won’t do, the Seder your grandmother cooked and indexed on cards to leap down the generations; this won’t do, the Seder…
Read MoreProdigal
By Poetry Issue 90
My aged father and I enjoy the silence between us as we sit in the Adirondacks, watching the children playing tag on the lawn and running in circles, happy to be it or not to be it, happy just to be, though I know they give no thought to being. My father leans toward me…
Read MorePont des Arts
By Poetry Issue 90
The pain passes, ——but the beauty remains. —Renoir Wandering the Musée de l’Orangerie with my sister, we find a bouquet of roses painted in 1878 by Auguste Renoir, voluptuous white roses placed in a red velvet chair. My sister says Renoir’s last word was “flowers” and that toward the end of his life he…
Read MoreThe Assumption of Miriam from a Winter Street, 1942
By Poetry Issue 90
incalculable snow was coming down heaven in tatters was slipping down thus she was ascending passing motionlessly white after white a mild height after height in the Elijah’s chariot of her humiliation above the fallen angels of snowflakes into the zenith of frost higher and higher hosanna raised to the lowest Translated from the…
Read MorePrayer to the Holy Louse
By Poetry Issue 90
It was in the spring of 1944, during the delousing of the Gypsy barracks in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp skirts scarves withered in the delousing room all in protective colors in poppies in buttercups in daisies in case of a meadow that wasn’t going to appear a Gypsy in the bathhouse of birkenau stripped of colors…
Read More[Honey lives only]
By Poetry Issue 90
Eat honey, my son, for it is good, and the honeycomb, which is sweet to thy taste. ———–—Proverbs 24:13 Honey lives only in hexagons because they ensure a balance of sweetness their shape is a star’s design six implied triangles drinking from the center’s source shrouded in the most frugally abundant capacity in order not…
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