Poetry

Like rivers, my thoughts flow south,
for no particular reason.
Must be the full moon
That floods the sky, and makes the night wakeful
and full of remorse.

Nothing to hosanna,
you will be buried

Cold. Only the living
go on living.

His face coming briefly into view

As the crowd pushes

Toward the subway entrance.

In its frame of light it faintly glows,
like a projection screen […]

Whose name will be inscribed in the book
                                                                 just before mine?

His hair declared him his own bohemian, a middle-class free spirit
with a mortgage to pay down, a racing bike, a subscription to Netflix,
and a frau as deceptively frail as Hans Memling’s palest Madonna.

The shadows creep across the lawn

In the silence of the afternoon.

A tiny wood raft was afloat
on the cold gray sea
of the cellar floor […]

The trick was breathing in, you claimed, as if that was all they gathered to watch as you milked the crowd in your matador sash, rum-slurring some speech no one could hear above the river’s thunder.

I can barely remember your face

After more than sixty years.