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The Bugs Of Childhood

Don’t you remember them, the furred legs / of a caterpillar moving along your arm, each follicle / prickling beneath their touch?

No Day At The Beach

It’s no day at the beach / being me, I said. / It’s no walk / in the park. / I can see that, / she said.

A Brief For The Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies / are not starving someplace, they are starving / somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. / But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. / Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not / be made so fine.

— from “A Brief for the Defense”

At The Request Of The Organization For Jewish Prisoners

Three bearded rabbinical students in a rented car, / trunk filled with menorah kits and grape-juice bottles, / we pulled away from the all-male yeshiva in New Jersey / and headed west, into the heart of Pennsylvania, to celebrate / Chanukah with the Jewish inmates of Allenwood’s many prisons.

Elegy

We walked the city after dark, talking / about the things that mattered to us then: / the most vivid ways to live, how to keep the fire / ablaze inside; the girls we’d loved, the women / we’d meet someday.

What I Didn’t Do

I never called her back, the woman / with the two babies born just like mine: / girls who couldn’t crawl or talk, / could barely smile, who lay there, / bundled in flowered dresses, staring / at the ceiling.

Heat Of Departure

Ninety degrees of thick, rude heat — a summer guest / we can’t get rid of — hovering over our city, / our brick house. Yet our son, who’s leaving home / tomorrow, we wish would stay.

A Neighbor

When he noticed four teenage kids from the Mission School / lugging boxes out of her house, he phoned her / — his neighbor just up the road — & she told him / that escrow had closed a week early: she’d be gone / by late afternoon.

The God Of Numbers and Eve, After

— from “Eve, After” | Did she know / there was more to life / than lions licking the furred / ears of lambs, / fruit trees dropping / their fat bounty, / the years droning on / without argument?

I had been sad for so long that it shocked me,

the enormous yellow moon / balanced like a honeydew / on the hill’s knife-edge, / fat and implacable.