Poetry

I am not old but old enough to believe
I know what Jimmy Stevens wants
when he invites my sister
into his Model-A. And because

Business never slows for the air’s ubiquitous
morticians, their spiraling so effortless

we might admit its beauty, if we didn’t know
how eagerly, in those ridiculous black boas,

The stones are grown over with moss,
canker-eaten, illegible even to the sun

There drifts the sky again,
Here, a single thought crawls slow as a flea.

There was a burst
of static
on radios
all over the city

My mother died on Shavuot, at the end of
the Counting of the Omer.
Her oldest brother died in 1916; he fell in the war.

In the night shop’s Gothic theater,
where unstrung carcasses of violins
and cellos are laid out on tables