English

There is no noisier place than the suburbs,
someone once said to me
as we were walking along a fairway,
and every day is delighted to offer fresh evidence:

the chainsaw, the leaf-blower blowing
one leaf around an enormous house with columns,
on Mondays and Thursdays the garbage truck
equipped with air brakes, reverse beeper, and merciless grinder.

There"s dogs, hammers, backhoes
or serious earthmovers if today is not your day.
How can the birds get a peep
or a chirp in edgewise, I would like to know?

When the Amish girl gets off the bus
she walks over and stomps
her small black boot into a drift
in front of McDonald"s.
She is maybe new to winter
this far north and wants to know
its depth. Its give. Oh,
be careful. It already has you
by the night of your dress,
violet-black with white-dotted print.

Once there was a woman who laughed for years uncontrollably after a stroke.

Once there was a child who woke after surgery to find his parents were impostors.

These seagulls above the parking lot today, made of hurricane and ether, they

have flown directly out of the brain wearing little blue-gray masks, like strangers" faces, full

of winged mania, like television in waiting rooms. Entertainment. Pain. The rage

of fruit trees in April, and your car, which I parked in a shadow before you died, decorated now with feathers,

When History turns soldiers into battles, you turn them into grass.
Basho, Sweet, is it honorable? But for these men who died with grunts
and clangs in their ears, for their horses with snapped legs, I haven"t got
the art to make them into anything. I fold the grass in the shape
of a man, very literal, very primitive and leave it on
the field and say, " Forgive me valorous men for my ineptitude. "
Just then, the little man falls down in the wind and — huh! — there is art.

The first year, I grated potatoes, chopped onions
& watched. The second year, I fed all but the eggs

into the machine & said I"ll do the latkes & did,
my pile of crisp delights borne to the feast by the wife

who baffled me, our books closed, banter hushed,
money useless in the apartment — house , my in-laws called it,

new-wave thump at one end, ganja reek at the other —
in which she"d knelt to tell the no one who listened

no more no no more no a three-year-old mouthing

Tell the bees. They require news of the house;
they must know, lest they sicken
from the gap between their ignorance and our grief.
Speak in a whisper. Tie a black swatch
to a stick and attach the stick to their hive.
From the fortress of casseroles and desserts
built in the kitchen these past few weeks
as though hunger were the enemy, remove
a slice of cake and lay it where they can
slowly draw it in, making a mournful sound.

And tell the fly that has knocked on the window all day.

The one sincere
crocodile has
gone dry eyed
for years. Why
bother crying
crocodile tears.

What appear to be
peach-white, over-washed pajamas

in the washed-out newspaper photo

on one side droop
like a monk"s hood,

the upper half of that leg
raised with the other, whole one
and the hands

they"re there!

and the less washed-out
pink balloon above them that they reach for or have
just let go

— the latter probably as one hand, palm up,
is wide of it,

two-thirds of a laughing mouth

visible, the wheelchair in this case,
its sparkle stark against

Mornings, the body"s old
winter monochrome gives
its image of extraordinary cold
to a million hives —

I could imagine a lanthorn
as it swallows its strange light and gleams
from within as if reborn
when the bees come.

With coals of juniper, Lord, with ripped willow clumps,
with lodge-pole pine and fir, with wind-wrack and slash,
I kindle an all-night fire to mirror You.
No longer waning, no longer falsifying chimes.
No longer smoking out rot, or eclipsing Yeshiva scholars.
No Lord I know what is within magnified.
Stars will just have to wait to eddy through gates of night.
Little swirl, mimicking nebulae, mimicking galaxies, which turns
for no apparent reason other than to cast and recast the whole
as it whirs and whirls, knocks and ticks at three AM