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Selected Poems

Curtains

My mother once told me that, during her labor with me in the living room of her Brooklyn apartment, she’d tugged on the long white drapes in her pain. The image of her on her knees, dark hair neatly tied back, mouth open, remains vivid to me.

Reprieve At Six A.M.

A Finger On The Page

Everyone washes too much in this country. They wash their babies too much, as well. The babies don’t smell of milk and waste but perfume and powder. At the day-care center where I work, some parents back away from me because I smell like a real person.

The Mayfly Glimmer Before Last Call

Jackie was nineteen, a cocktail waitress in Niagara Falls, New York. She worked in a bar on the other side of town and would come into our place with the other waitresses after her shift was up. Jackie was something else, the way she shook her hair.

Grave Matters

Two weeks ago I turned forty-six. Four lovers and numerous friends and family have so far died before me. By most estimates I am closer to my death than to my birth.

Dream Of The Common Life

I have had the most wonderful dream. / My neighbor is playing a flute in the back yard. / I don’t even like my neighbor. / You wouldn’t either if you knew him.

Of Sorcery And Dreams

An Encounter With Carlos Castaneda

Death is the one inexorable fact in our transitory lives. Perhaps I will die a doddering old fool; perhaps I will die before the sun sets tonight. But I will die — that much is certain. In the meantime, what remains within my control is the groove of my life, the track upon which I choose to walk between the exclamation of my coming and the ellipsis of my going. At its purest, this track is trackless, like a path covered by freshly fallen snow. And trodding such virgin paths is the most enduring image of my adolescent dreams. By speaking directly to that memory, Castaneda has reawakened it within my heart. Given the perilously low ebb I have reached in life, I can only describe this feat as a genuine act of sorcery.

Sunbeams

Ideologies . . . have no heart of their own. They’re the whores and angels of our striving selves.

John Le Carre

What Can Happen When You’re Stranded