Poetry

The poem that argues successfully against death
finds its place in the book you can buy
in stores that do not sell poetry.

The poems of air are slowly dying;
too light for the page, too faint, too far away,
the ones we’ve called The Moon, The Stars, The Sun,
sink into the sea or slide behind the cooling trees
at the field’s edge. The grave of light is...

The park benches, of course, are ex-Nazis.
They supported the ass of the SS
without questioning; the old stamp “Juden Verboten”
has been painted out.

absence is a margin of strongholds. I go out
and I go out. Love is sequence and
condition: one of the few winter nights