Outside, the traffic stutters, some drivers blow
their horns and the impulse bolts in dendrite-leaps

from car to car. I’d like to think it’s the bellow
of my stiff-necked Hebrews, shofars raised to lips,

razing, man to man, the walls of Jericho
to its stony knees. But it’s how a monkey lopes -

branch to branch, screeching, pointing low,
scaring monkeys from their monkey sleeps

who scare the other monkeys who….The echo
of this rings on and I hear it at times, lamps

turned dim, the outlined trees beyond the window
leaning to the gray light while the day unclasps

its hold and I listen there for a come and go
of breath, my daughter’s, and wait for its eclipse

of sound, its fine white noise, for the flow
of traffic to stop and cries at the wall’s collapse

to come distantly like waves of radio
coming off the stars. Stars wheel their laps

above the trees now, the birds all diminuendo,
the day itself all diminuendo and lapse.

Sophie rolls her head across her pillow
and I’m here, watching past the trees as she lisps

something in sleep. Each tail-light’s fisted glow
relents and – watch with me – each pilgrim limps

toward the city just beyond this meadow,
recalled a lifetime after but a glimpse.

first published in Image

Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean water broken
Before God’s last put out the light was spoken.
“Once by the Pacific” – Robert Frost

As though the stars were edible
or subject to our praise….

Sleek of leaf and vegetable,
we stretched our length and raised

voices almost never heard
among our human counterparts.

They’d tilt their heads to parse our words,
they’d root about our hearts

and, squint-eyed, search our ranks – hart,
and bear, emu, dove – for untoward

sentiment, some ramparts
they must charge and hurdle.

Yet Sky charged down on us, and their razed
towns beneath the water-table

swayed, and we, the last of a line, précis
of the Word, were audible

to ourselves alone – our doubled
bleats, our howls and brays

were tittles on our shoreless tabula
rasa. Keen-eyed sharks and rays

coasted by like seraphim. Hurried
by an angry goad, Leopard

gained on Unicorn as all of Heaven whirred
like fire broken from its hearth.

And we bobbed, a cork above the Hartz
and Pyrenees – the startled wards

of a panicked state, begging pardon
for what we were not sure, a herd

of Eves and Adams, sires of our race,
in broken waters, pissed-on vetch and bales.

Sail on, sail on as though all rage, après
le déluge, weren’t bottomless and oedipal.

first published in The Yale Review

Soon, soon enough, all of this,
this lived life, this navy blue couch,
your confetti-splashed, yellow-striped skirt
spread across it, your lovely legs beneath
the skirt, the joyous aroma of toast in the toaster,
a ball bouncing and the cry of boys, all of it
will assume the stilted look
of my childhood photographs. 1958,
’59. My brother and I on a couch, a small box
unwrapped in his lap, both of us gray,
couch and carpet gray, the day beyond the open window
gray and its curtain pulled outside for the moment
by a puff of wind. Hold up, again, delighted,
to the photographer, mom or dad,
your first watch, hanging from your hand
like a caught fish, its darting eye grown dull
in a blink.

first published in Image