Poetry

why she had six children,
your mother’s mother
who liked math and science,

When he was small,
I rented a little studio 
in a building on Ninety-Fifth Street so I could have a room 
of my own to write. The studio was the size of a bathroom.

Now that I’m dead too, just like the living dead on TV, 
fat chance that the merely living will be saved 
by doing what they did when I was merely living— 
nailing their doors shut against me, 
hurricane-proofing the windows, 
positioning...

A March sky pinned with stars—
purple, almost, and a blue mist in the wheat stubble.
Under the laburnum, we waited—
the chains of leaf, its cascades of gold flower
gone, and the whole tree drooping

Let us remember liberty was not popular,
six years it took Laboulaye to convince
Bartholdi a gigantic statue was 
what New York harbor needed. Eleven
years later

 Take today. I want there

            to be less
of everything—wind

& worry, of leaves
            littering the ground
& love letters, addressee

Only a torso now, the head
long severed from the neck, pelvis
twisted off like a stubborn root.

I wish we were living
a story of desire, but
I don’t feel Odysseus 
beating out his tale
of longing at the oars

Forever you find

              your father
in other faces—

a balding head
              or beard enough
to send you following

A stifling heat—the air heavy—
and all around the loud, wet forest 
knotting the gaps in its own sound.

A peace long earned, then broken;