Poems

North Star

Look,
my father murmurs, how
my hand shimmers.

Palsy drew light to him
until it filled his body,
illuminating the long bones
curving around his heart and breath,
drawing shadow limbs
to radiant joints,
until he limned for all the world
some constellation,
my father
telling the dark between stars.

                      ~O~

Almost six feet tall, 129 pounds, my father
may remind you of certain haunting photographs,
Jews stumbling from the gauntlet
of bloodthirst and indifference,
wandering among the skeletal remains
of their lives.

My father is worn to the bone,
one full year
grinding another,
the flesh of his belly collapsing on old scars.

Breath drawn in their wake stars

From:

A moon circles an earth circling a sun–
their orbits snag for a moment in time,
their planes and fields of gravity align.

In her darkening garden a woman stands,
now, slowly turns in her garden darkened,
returns to herself, moonlit, incanting

Xique-xique, Ita, Penha, Itjai–
one Brazilian town named for flowers,
three small cities named for birds–all extinct.

She will not she will not forget their splash
of red cascading, flash of feathers calling
Hear me Here I Where are you, darling flesh?

Woman watching a lunar eclipse rose
the morning after to tell the dark.