cancer spread from his liver to his brain.
She tries to tell him all the latest news,
mentions I’m in flight, and that my brother
and sisters are beside his bed. They smother
him with their grief. My brother offers booze.
But papa calls out to his long dead father,
points to his own bare feet with his cane,
and asks them to take off his heavy shoes.
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Last night I talked to God.
I said: ‘Father, I’m afflicted;my spine and every bonein my body hurts.My feet are swollen,my tongue is dry.Please, please free mefrom this heavy burden.’He said: ‘No, I’ll decide.’But ‘I am unworthy,fat, old and ugly.I have no purpose here.’‘You are my messenger,touching the browsof the innocent and young.’
A mackerel sky, a blood-orange sun,
and thieving magpies, hell-mirroring rooks,behind an old woman’s whispers and sighs—sooty bricks with barbs around her heartas she limps by, and I stop to jot it down.
Look from the bridge down into the black waters
A riddled sapper never set the charges:the cry of birches is a wife’s or daughter’s.Ilya Ehrenburg had opened the locksin January nineteen-forty-five.Mute as the dead are the raped left alive.Now only splendid architecture talks.The skeletons of quays rust in the spring,their wooden floor beds long since warped and rotten.Thorn and thistle prosper on the shore.The…
Ten thousand cuckolds in Iceland
Merkel lifts her heavy hand,lecturing on conscience, wedsit with betrayal, giving a shoveto Deutschland’s honest working poor,demanding, in the name of love,that Poland and Hungary take more.Sobieski turns inside his grave:“There will be no Europe to save.”
I turn the stony corner
Today I am a mourner.Crows circle garbage binsbeyond the iron gate;two magpies poach hairpins;a sparrow comes too late,then flees the treasure chest.I move on, and I wait.It is here she will restbeneath the silt and sand,her headstone facing west.And still, I can’t withstandthe power of my grief.A tree can’t understandthe falling of its leaf.
When Mary washed his feet he didn’t stare
blazed in his eyes, although her milky bust,thighs and neck were there for him. Her hairbrushed his calves, her hands reached past his knees.She was just doing what she’d always done.It was still early. Her lips had just begun.Her earthly thoughts commingled with the breeze.He focused on what was to come: his trial,his torture and…