Showing Results 1 - 9 of 9
And in that drowning instant
as the water heightened over me
it suddenly did come to pass
my preterite eternity
the image of myself intent
on several freedoms
fading to
myself in yellowed Basle…
the poem is ugly & they make it uglier
wherein the power resides
that duncan did—or didn’t—understand
when listening that evening to the other poet read
he said “that was pure ugliness” & oh it was
i…
Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits…
When I was twelve, I read The Diary of Anne Frank.
I identified with her having to live
stories above a busy street
over a business, and having to keep quiet
for hours at a time.
I’d pad about on…
For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming.
Therefore I think the sun spot on my arm
is melanoma. Therefore I celebrate
New Year’s Eve by counting
my annual dead.
My mother, when she was dying…
The letters of the Jews as strict as flames
Or little terrible flowers lean
Stubbornly upwards through the perfect ages,
Singing through solid stone the sacred names.
The letters of the Jews are…
Father, adonoi, author of all things
of the three states,
the soft light on the barn at dawn,
a wind that sings
in the bracken, fire in iron gates,
the ram’s horn,
Furnisher, hinger of…
When I observe a toothless ex-violinist,
with more hair than face, sprawled like Karl Marx
on a park seat or slumped, dead or asleep,
in the central heat of a public library
I think of Uncle Isidore…
…I remember a woman
who sat on the pot where the apples cooked in the cold
basement, her face black from smoke. And here, near this brick
building with a red tile roof, is one of our family, Mausha
V…