Poetry

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

All night
 I float
   in the shallow ponds
    while the moon wanders

burning,
 bone white,
   among the milky stems.

Afterwards
the cheerful birds
still woke me—bands
of crows blaring,

and the darling sparrows
chirping for their lives.
Somebody had died.

The three fates in dark
skirts and starched shirtwaists
bend over their work,