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Credo in a kind of
American jewish Hamlet-like
bagel, too round for action
yet leavened enough by contact
with the near-dead past—you call it
landscape, I call it history—to provide
a layered vantage…
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…
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People’d call, say, “Beware doll, you’re bound to fall”
You thought they were all kiddin’ you
You used to…
He turned walking on water into a kind of art. Rarely
getting himself wet. He left the ancient harbor at different hours of the day. At times
before sunrise. Sometimes he’d return minutes later…
Oh, Father of great mercy
In sunset’s flame there fades
My cradle land
That was once nearer to me than my salt-crusted shirt
Where with my brother Russian
I shared more than once
A measly bite of…
How many know
the number of creatures is endless?
So many know,
only a gasp in their questions is possible.
All that fullness—
of wounds that won’t scar over.
pain’s grillework
persisting in…
If it forms the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones,
Are constantly homesick for, this is chiefly
Because it dissolves in water.
—Auden, “In Praise of Limestone”
If beauty and truth were to…
Zion my innocent one, Zion my desired,
To thee my soul yearns from far away;
May I forget my right hand should I forget thee, my beauty,
Until my grave is sealed upon me . . .
May my tongue cleave…
We left slowly. The night was pale.
In the distance the lights flickered.
And you were all loveliness like your two eyes
With tears cupped in them.
The jackal howled as you went to the vineyard
You…
Can you imagine the air filled with smoke?
It was. The city was vanishing before noon
or was it earlier than that? I can’t say because
the light came from nowhere and went nowhere.
This was years…