What the earth can’t hold the river takes
And bears away in its black arms.
The trees bent under it, or broke
in numbers, severed at the nape,
and bore down on the street with broken joints…

I remember when we sat by the lake
in Georgia, stunned by light,
gorged on sun and wax-papered croquettes--and murmuring vignettes--
Like my mother, I whipped yolks into a froth,
and earnest as a cake-dish, I sat where the waves
lapped at the waves, sanguine,
and fed you from a deep tureen.

Now nothing is as it was,
Even the oaks turned out to grasp feebly
at the earth, and swooned on their bellies,
bled too black even to protest;
wind opens the doors of the old house
forcing a cry out;
turning the dishes up like silver crabs,
turning the kewpie dolls in solo waltz,
turning our letters loose into the air
like a set of dice that will never come down again.

I return to the house of my childhood and anger welters up to the seams of my body. I say: who are you, faded posters, to witness my body changing shape—getting bigger, looser? The same mother still offers her wallops upside the head, her Sabbath dishes scraping the roof of the oven’s mouth, but the elms are older, I am more dissolute, my bed is strange, the paintings I made at fifteen watch me with warped grins, my sisters are weary, my lover awaits me, the secret things and the colored glass I kept bundled in a cabinet are dusty; I see everything through my old glasses, they pinch at my ears, I seem to see my name written in a childish hand everywhere: on the windows, the doors, the belly of my sisters, there it is hidden in the hairs under the navel, five letters leering a half-moon leer on doorknobs, on forks, on the veins of the elm leaves.

I sit at my writing-desk like a dreamer who knows if he makes a sound he will wake, and is silent, content in a dreamed room filled with rain and red-beaked birds. Yesterday I tried to read the work of a famous poet aloud, but the meter barbed my mouth, piercing my tongue clean through. The words of the poet were composed at sea. At dusk, a diffuse and sluggish light, as if filtered through a heavy surf, settles over my desk. The willow branches that brush my window, my half-lit neighbor’s house, seem to me foreign, as if I stared out the window of an inn in Malaga, where drowsy rushroses drug the air. The last light hovers like a woman’s lip the clouds run their fingers over continually. I am caught between sleep and waking, as the window-pane is caught between the warm house, where children sleep, dreaming of cruelty and riches, and the rain that streams, dolorous, into tin gutters.

Ten years passed like the pith of a dream
that sits on my tongue at waking.
Like a strand that drifts
on the sea’s white lips.

We stopped up my uncle’s ashes
in a whiskey bottle, floated it to sea,
watched it tremble with light.
I am surprised by the day,
I get drunk and I hold my belly.
The sun has our blood on its hands
having given birth to us.
I will sit with the moon
until I am ‘glad and dead’
as a poet said.

poem for guillaume de machaut

I am a guest in my own life
a spacious house with many rooms
and though I have wandered it for years
I tread like a thief in dirty shoes

My mother undoes her apron
under the hanging garlic bulbs
My life is a ballade from Rheims
and I have forgotten the words

The river slugged-up with chill,
pitted slabs of ice that caught the crates
drifting on the melt like Baltic freights.

The ivy leaves drenched
to their hair in white light.
A big pipe belching its guts under the freeze.
The white ice seems to me pressed

air, the trees shafts of cork,
the tamped earth scoured grains of rock,
myself a pouch of pipes, my hand
warm as a sparrow, feathered net of veins.
Everything made by compression. In my mouth
the history of my people is pressed in poems,
dense words hung in my dense breath white
as I walk over asphalt
washed pale in winter light.

Today
Lenochka
Asked me what a pearl was made of

a grain of sand
and seven drops of sun

And today
Under the wicks of ice
under the stone flowers of my city
I grew older

Lenochka
the studded city
to you
is a golubtsy

and to me
a hound
how it bays
its poor face only a skull
sobaka
you and i know
our bones are only cups

Lenochka I adjure you
and I implore you
drink deeply

i've been reading garcia marquez, can you tell?

Rain visits the porches
where we’ve sat simmering for weeks.
Our hapless priest
hums old confessions
tunelessly through wet lips,
dragging his cassock in the street.
The rain beats time to this,
the wet myrrh, golden and sullen,
shake coins of water from their necks.

Inside, we strip to our waists,
Pablo who dreams of unborn planets
shows me dirty pictures stuffed in our old books--
faded breasts like round houses
with no one inside,
haunches, a red lip
cut off like the thick sound of noon bells in a storm
like my continual dream of the woman I was born to marry
who dies with her mouth open at the first instant of light
while the sogged orchids rot-hollowed and red
nod again in forced assent under my window
under the seibo tree
under the rain’s black arbor

'xander pope is kind of a douche

“Hope humbly then…” –Alexander Pope

Hope humbly and heap
sugar in the pot.
Fry it up and keep it hot.
In your mouth keep a lemon seed
curling your tongue. A bitter bead
is better than a word.

Humbler heaven sinks
its jaw into the hill.
Slick sod, each foot hooked in
with humble hobbling will.
Curl up in the clover
like a drought-wracked spit of land.
Don’t rise again, or lift your hand.
A hollow cypress at your head.
Rain to flood its mossy bed.

Our city swallows the sun, brick
by brick. Acres of coiled pipes. The carts of wares
gather dust longer each year.
Our fat house bare
And pale as wax under a moon drawn taut,
Laying out its nickel plate along the street.

A hoarse chorus of trains,
black teeth in each hood.
All night I chase a phantom of the good.
I twitch like a dog, crouch, grin.
When winter comes on like a flood
Even the staid rooks thin.

In my dream, it is always Saturday morning—
Always I still the engine.
Always the reeds nod and hum
all along the barrier of south Highway One.

101

The fish drain down the channels of the sea
like silver clots in innumerable veins,
down to the dark wells and cataracts
that open endlessly, like mourning mouths,
slight bellies doused
for a moment with sun, then gone,

as a bird-flock cleaves in two at sight of a hawk
and rejoins, a black mass like a grain-sack,
ripening under the hissing husks of wings.
Swift patterns that collect and die
seething with light.

Beside the cormorants drying
their wings at the riverbed
dusk carries me in like a paper fan.

CENTENARY

I have written one hundred poems
to Damocles, my brother,
to spikenard doused in dew.
To lintels, bones, and trophies.
The wind that slouches through.

I will write one hundred more.
I will hang them in the cellar.
I will pack them in with camphor.

I'll add another hundred
like the kisses of Catullus.
Deck the figures on the mantle.
I will gird their necks and ankles
like my heart, girded by Lowell
and Guillaume Apollinaire.
As dew sloughs off my garden
into the earth and air.

new hope avenue.

All the time we lived on New Hope Avenue
we watched winged shadows
through tinted windows.
The gourds we hung caved in
and showed their pale teeth.
Ripe as grenades, the spiked chestnuts - low.
The sage held on under mounds of snow.
You told me your dreams but I forgot them.
You handled me like an old gun.
It was right to—I spat fire,
grease. And you a yellow oilcloth
draped on the divan,
paper-thin man,
a hollow glass.
I wanted to drink you and break you
and swallow the shards.

All August my father held a flashlight in his mouth
like a bobbin or pearl, and gathered crabs with his hands,
the dark, mealy beach, frigid sand,
the serge waves lapping in the strait.
Father, with my hands I only write poems.
Out in the night the buds furl in
and the wind pitches fits against the roof.
The moon, a child with catarrh, wanes
plaintive and white.
I strip spruce canes
down to their split green hearts.
The black boxer pods furl
like so many skeins of film,
I want to remember everything I can.

notes from the jewish autonomous oblast

On the roof of our house
a shingle breaks like an old tooth.
I light up on the porch.
Wind knocks at the balustrade.
In the summer my father grows creepers here
the sun's bright hair.
This time last year
he buried an ear
of corn whole under ice.
My sister gets drunk
and carols to our snowman's homely ears.
When she slips
she puts a bruised hand to her hip
and her mouth lolls in a pink O of surprise.
I dipped my russet ears in the bath
to dim the shouts.
Dusk crouches like a beast
with our house in its mouth.

something a little different. thanks leelee!

The Tower of Babel rises
like a gold almond cake.
A little sun turns the mortar
to a confit of roses.
Jackdaws trill
beside sweat-slick backs.

The thirstiest tongue of lightning
turns the whole beach to glass.
Like a rain of yellow raisins
bricks scatter in dust.

Above this the head of cloud parts a little way.
The sun, pushed to its seam,
fills the air, a hot phial,
and the sea birds rise.

I go back.
A rusty sun pierces the bus
and it lunges on.
I go back.
Our drive veined with ice
between salt-gutted bricks.
The lamppost a cup of darkness.
Wind playing a rag on the holly
its berries heaped with snow.
We leaf through photos.
I was a kid once
wall-eyed, wild. Then I grew and went.
I lift a bruised gas-ripened peach
up to my teeth,
I go back.

newyorknewyork

I am coming out a train that hisses
and tips on its pneumatic ankles
the girl on the billboard greets me solemn
and deft in a little black muslin
the old man with a crown of pins
round his brimless hat says stop it charley stop it charley
pulling at his compendium of rags
stores full of smoke and rosewater
colored glass under my heels
that woman dark hair on her neck like a wimple
that rough cloud bushy with rain-stuff
and all over steam gusts out the pipe-hewn earth
over the walk perpetually grim
with settled smog, dark
gums, I am ready
for the two white thighs the columns that rise
in a humor of light high above the street