Poetry

My mother died on Shavuot, at the end of
the Counting of the Omer.
Her oldest brother died in 1916; he fell in the war.

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

I didn't make present
those days he didn't complain
but I knew he was sick, felt
sick, and a look would pass between us,
a doomed look that nonetheless

There is a Florida beyond the stars.
It is the same state I find waking here,
alone with my aloneness in the dark,
all things now possible because my own.