Waiting for the Light [1 ed.] 9780822982470, 9780822964520

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WAITING FOR THE

LIGHT

ED OCHESTER, EDITOR

WAITING FOR THE

LIGHT Alicia Suskin Ostriker

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2017, Alicia Suskin Ostriker All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6452-0 ISBN 10: 0-8229-6452-X Cover photo by Yu-Chan Chen, licensed under CC0, public domain Cover design by Melissa Dias-Mandoly

for JPO & la vita nuova

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold, Death’s great black wing scrapes the air, Misery gnaws to the bone. Why then do we not despair? —Anna Akhmatova Better this immersion than to live untouched —Lynda Hull

CONTENTS ONE August Morning, Upper Broadway    5 The Light   6 How Fortunate the Boy    7 Q&A: Red Red Rose    9 Manahatta   11 The First Snowfall   12 The Glory of Cities    13 Bangladesh: The Driver   14 Guyana: So Nice   16 Times Square   18 Dry Hours: A Golden Shovel Exercise    19

TWO The City Crocuses   23 Cinco de Mayo   24 Biking to the George Washington Bridge    25 Ghazal: The Minimum Wage, 2014    26 Dark Matter and Dark Energy    27 Ghazal: O Clear Night    28 Four Men around a Card Table, Columbus & 97th    30 A Walker in the City    31 Acrostic: All You Need Is Love    32 Waiting for the Light    34 For Once, Then, Something    36

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THREE Ghazal: America   39 Afghanistan: The Raped Girl    41 White Morning   43 Ghazal: Not Even There    44 Q&A: Insurance   46 Making a Meal of Them    48 The World According to Capa    50 Are You My Cousin    52 The Battlefield: A Lyric    53 Children’s Blood   54 Temblor   56

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FOUR Alphabetical Flash   61 The Liberal Arts   66 The Common Crow Fibonacci    68 The Redeemed World   69 To Charlie, on His Poetry    70 China in the Twenty-First Century    73 Underground   74 Ghazal: America the Beautiful    76 Q&A: Reality   78 Notes   81 Acknowledgments   83

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WAITING FOR THE

LIGHT

ONE City which not to look upon would be like death. —E. B. White

AUGUST MORNING, UPPER BROADWAY

As the body of the beloved is a window through which we behold the blackness and vastness of space pulsing with stars, and as the man on the corner with his fruit stand is a window, and the cherries, blackberries, raspberries avocados and carrots are a rose window like the one in Chartres, yes, or the one in Paris through which light floods from the other world, the pure one stabbing tourists with malicious abundant joy though the man is tired in the summer heat and reads his newspaper listlessly, without passion and people pass his stand buying nothing let us call this scene a window looking out not at a paradise but as a paradise might be, if we had eyes to see the women in their swaying dresses, the season’s fruit the babies in their strollers infinitely soft: clear window after clear window

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THE LIGHT

What is the birthplace of the light that stabs me with joy and what is the difference between avocados sold on the street by a young man conceived in Delhi and avocados sold in the West Side Market by cornrow girls, I am anyhow afloat in tides of Puerto Rican, Cuban, Mexican, West Indian Spanish, wavelets of Urdu swelling like oceans, sweating like jackhammers, rasping like crows, calling out in the West Side Market, the Rite Aid, and every other shop on the street Porque no comprendes, you don’t own this city anymore the city belongs and has always belonged to its shoals of exiles crashing ashore in foaming salty droplets, como no, gringita— with their dances and their grandmothers, with their drinking and their violence and their burning yearning for dignity, and smelling money, what, what is the joy is it those lamps of light those babies in their strollers those avocados with their dark-green pebbled rinds, shining from inside two for four dollars in the West Side Market, and three for four dollars from the cart joy like white light between the dollar bills, is it these volleys of light fired by ancestors who remember tenements, the sweatshops, the war who supposed their children’s children would be rich and free?

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HOW FORTUNATE THE BOY

How fortunate the boy holding his father’s hand crossing the street coming home from a movie they let him stay up late to see in the night and the rain the taxi making a left pulling him under its wheels injuring the father instantly almost painlessly killing the boy so that he will never suffer the disappointment of being a man lucky boy child of our neighborhood vigil mourned by candlelight and news cameras hero of our petition to the mayor about this bad intersection but the father is unfortunate

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whose screams my neighbor says curdled her blood and the taxi driver is unfortunate a man who will go on living making his living driving

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Q&A: RED RED ROSE

When you take off your mask, what is your true address If you had a choice, which tree would you like to be Which Beethoven symphony What is the color of Robert Burns’s red red rose Which is the most difficult of the Ten Commandments Who is the one who hurt you the very most was this in grade school was it at home in the kitchen in the forest glade of bottles of beer Why did they hurt you Why could you never prevent them hurting you you in your jacket of anger, your unlaced shoes of loss And whom did you hurt the very most while considering yourself the innocent victim And when you are furious does it help to bite your nails Do you honestly still shoplift Do you want your children to spend an average three hours a day tethered to the tube through which an entire culture feeds them lies

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When you were alive did you like having money Did you like sex Well, did you like it anyway Which train are we on is there a quiet car for weapons for widows

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is there a car for weepers

MANAHATTA

I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city, says Walt, lover of crowds, praiser of trades and occupations, celebrant of the daily tide of immigrants, and I too seek the perfect image of you— you mothering harbor, you royal sewer, you finger inside the sky, you dangling dream deferred, you queer hideout, you incubator of Jewish jazz, you who exist as a landing field for helicopters, you whose laughter is heartless, you digest dudes who crave to be big shots, celebrities, hedge fund managers, who like to show off and be bad, who get a kick from champagne. I am looking for a toaster in the hardware store, and here two women stand behind a counter minding their cash registers in their red apron uniforms. A points to B and says You know what she did Saturday? She went skinny-dipping. I have to wonder where. B looks pleased with herself. The Harlem River. Really? It’s where showoff boys used to dive and we giggling girls used to watch those bad boys. Times do change. B says, I have to let my bad girl out sometimes.

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THE FIRST SNOWFALL

The first snowfall begins to turn grey. A homeless guy lies across the freezing sidewalk, hands shaking while the young cop gently asks if he’s sick. He says he is, and the cop asks does he want to go to the hospital. The guy’s whole body has the shakes, a freezing night is falling, they are waiting for an ambulance and the men working at a parking garage down the block lean on a Toyota, curious, watching, respectful. Poor naked wretches, cries Shakespeare’s Lear In the voice of a man insane with grief and indignation. Having grown up in the city, I always thought it was poor homeless wretches. Imagine rags as well as homelessness on Shakespeare’s streets as the snow pelted down and began to turn grey, like here, but with the filth of horses, no streetlights, probably the watchman kicking you in the balls. Nobody believes in the kindness of New Yorkers, but I saw the drunk stretched boldly across the width of sidewalk, the policeman being gentle to him, the ER squad hoisting him into the van being gentle, the men down the street not laughing. Snow turning ashen. Nobody laughing. 12

THE GLORY OF CITIES

Let us now praise famous cities, our human fists against heaven, let us praise their devotion to wealth and power and art, goals toward which we swim ferociously upstream, tearing ourselves apart, to lay our eggs and die along with swarms and herds of our brothers and sisters, let me especially praise the cities of the Northeast Corridor from Boston to the District of Columbia, birth-lips of trade and industry, thumbs of unbeatable deals, their mayors and their mistresses, their Chinese and Korean neighborhoods their Pakistani taxis, their Afro-American subway systems igniting their steel drum arpeggios, moonwalks, laden shopping bags, all superb for staring at people while sinking into invisibility. Oh divine hot women, cool men, high school anarchists, weary waitresses and nurses, hardhats off-shift, I follow underground boots to street, I watch this boy, he is off the boat, he is thinking food and freedom, he is sending the money order back home, it is so easy, there is a bank on every corner of the Upper West Side, he is a little high, so when the officer detains him, he is slow producing his ID. Fuck. Fuck. Watch his hands. Now watch the cop’s fast hands.

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BANGLADESH: THE DRIVER

It is where the driver was born and still has family, eighteen people to support. I have thanked him for the Bollywood music on his radio, and he sighs, a long elegiac sigh, like a man who secretly knows how soon the world will be under water but does not wish to discuss it. Everything is in the hands of the Gods. Nonetheless he wishes to speak, to explain his life to me, to say in fifteen years he has had only one accident, which was not at all his fault, the other guy in the Lincoln actually ran the light, but the police always think the taxi driver is the guilty one. It cost him four thousand dollars. Now he is more cautious about everything, like a turtle, he says, turning his head sharply. In Bangladesh they drive even worse. The death rate is terrible, but what are you going to do? He gets out to open my door, a courtesy unasked. His bald dome shines like brass in the June sunset that tenderly strokes it reaching across the Hudson its cashless compensation.

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He then undertakes a complicated mix of bowing, smiling, and sighing, all at once, but he is awkward. When I mirror his motion, while handing over the two tens and three singles, I too am awkward. .

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GUYANA: SO NICE for Savitri Her visit home was so nice, except the tenant had chopped down her fruit trees and flowering trees and coconut trees, to make a car lot for his failing car sales business—you know those trees back home you can pay somebody to climb them and bring coconuts right into your hands with their sweet milk no he never asked her permission but she felt so sorry for him you know when he sold a car two men followed him took his money, beat him up threw him in their car trunk then left him for dead in a ditch, but rain woke him he crawled to the road and a taxi took him to the hospital never the same after that the poor man returned to life but never well he knows the names of the criminals the whole neighborhood knows of course

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the criminals pay the police this is why so much crime occurs everyone is afraid but seeing family back home, yes, it is nice to visit back home sometimes.

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TIMES SQUARE

Great white way when I was a tender ten first time downtown agape at cheerful billboard smoke rings every four seconds puffed from the painted lips of a man who would walk a mile for a Camel then sordid shabby & sleazy, risky & stinky & low digital Godzillas catapulted from manhole now crazy clean your Disney scene warrior girl in heels, boy with banana sky-high waxed torsos & the crawl at the bottom to let us know how the Dow is doing this very minute selling everything in the world—luxury limos, lattes fashion entertainment & sport—your neon fire forever changing forever displaying the same intolerable unquenchable human desire

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DRY HOURS: A GOLDEN SHOVEL EXERCISE We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan. Greyed in and grey. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong Like feeding a husband, satisfying a man. —Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwen, you are from Chicago and my family isn’t, we are from New York but all of us are familiar with depression. Remember the things Roosevelt did for the country during the Great Depression of the 1930s? The first hundred days in office was the dry run for the New Deal. The Brain Trust spent eight hours every day drafting policy. Relief, recovery, and reform: Glass-Steagall for the arrogant banks, jobs for the jobless. Including artists. Later an involuntary draft, when it came to war against Nazis, was the plan. It worked, we won. The greyedout newsreels of the forties, the blackouts in our cities, who can forget? And you already were turning grey, like Whitman after the Civil War wondering if the “dream” was going to come true, or if capitalism makes every dream finally turn rancid, not to mention a continuing harvest of strange fruit, packs of wolves giddy with the power of death. No sound from the beaten bodies and not a sound from the strong oak limbs where the bodies hung like hams in a butcher shop. What was feeding on those sights? Gwen, was there a rush of sexual excitement a husband felt? Was watching a lynching satisfying to a woman like to a man? 19

TWO The sun is hot but the Cabs stir up the air —Frank O’Hara

THE CITY CROCUSES

Up they come—the yellow ones fierce as fighters and the purples shy and tender wind funneling up from the river blasts me in face and throat, winter gone, and there’s more, the walk to the subway today made me smile because others were smiling secretly to themselves, a few caught my eye and said something grateful about winter being over— soon along Riverside Drive daffodils lilacs cherry but for now the tiny snowdrops alyssum crocus decide to stop waiting they flex their little legs, they push and divide the dirt and up they swim

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CINCO DE MAYO

What’s that mob in the playground where I meant to sit in sunshine read my book what’s that uproar P.S. 371 annual party a line for food a dozen miniature soccer games around the pool no rules backpacks of every hue parked on benches does nobody fear theirs will be stolen? Are we really in the city or am I dreaming three pretty mariachis singing “Cielito Lindo” and making the children and their mamacitas, brown and beige, sing along, everybody knows the words, indeed it is New York City Upper West Side Cinco de Mayo, querida they teach the children to dance “La cucaracha,” kick and shake and shriek, for it is Mexican Independence Day let the city employee hugging clipboard shake her hair loose and if two days ago I was shopping for ant traps and if three days ago I was fighting rush hour traffic, let there be traffic traffic in another world for here it is spring if we are ants crazy ants as I sometimes think see we are musical ants we are dancing ants

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BIKING TO THE GEORGE WASHINGTON BRIDGE

It sweeps away depression and today you can’t tell the heaped pin-white cherry blossoms abloom along Riverside Drive from the clouds above it is all kerfuffle, all moisture and light and so into the wind I go past Riverside Church and the Fairway Market, past the water treatment plant and in the dusky triangle below a hulk of rusted railroad bed a single hooded boy is shooting hoops It’s ten minutes from here to the giant bridge men’s engineering astride the sky heroic an animal roar of motors on it the little red lighthouse at its foot big brother befriending little brother in the famous children’s story eight minutes back with the wind behind me passing the boy there alone shooting his hoops in the gloom A neighborhood committee must have said that space should be used for something recreational a mayor’s aide must have said okay so they put up basketball and handball courts and if it were a painting or a photo you would call it American loneliness

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GHAZAL: THE MINIMUM WAGE, 2014

Having dinner before the president’s State of the Union address my husband produces a rant on the topic of raising the minimum wage. He fumes as he has fumed on more than one occasion it would be fucking good for the economy, raising the minimum wage. He does not commonly use this language. We are microwaving the wild rice. What would reduce income disparity, aid consumption? He shouts: a higher wage. We are finishing the Thai spicy beef dish our granddaughter made when she stayed over with us last weekend, cooking for no wage but our love. We are eating spinach cooked with onions, coriander, cardamom and butter. We agree that raising the minimum wage has been shown by studies not to increase unemployment. We fiercely interrupt each other to announce this, which is the wage of marriage. Would Congress approve a bill requiring companies like Walmart and Target that employ more than x thousand people at minimum wage to keep y percent as full-time employees getting health benefits along with their minimum starvation wage? Not a chance, says my husband, not this broken Congress, we pour another glass of Argentinian Malbec, we drop the topic of the minimum wage, I have a cookie with walnuts in it, the kind my granddaughter adores. Soon we will see what the president says about the minimum wage.

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DARK MATTER AND DARK ENERGY

My husband says dark matter is a reality not just a theory invented by adolescent computers he can prove dark matter exists and is everywhere forming invisible haloes around everything and somehow because of gravity holding everything loosely together the way a child wants to escape its parents and doesn’t want to—what’s that— we don’t know what it is but we know it is real the way our mothers and fathers fondly angrily followed a fixed orbit around each other like mice on a track the way every human and every atom rushes through space wrapped in its invisible halo, this big shadow—that’s dark dark matter sweetheart, while the galaxies in the wealth of their ferocious protective bubbles stare at each other unable to cease proudly receding

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GHAZAL: O CLEAR NIGHT

O clear night, O cool morning, it feels good, old woman grass coming up from the dirt, from the dead, said the old woman I am walking leisurely around the block breathing green a dog behind a fence barks fiercely, said the old woman an angry dog, perhaps someone’s been beating him, perhaps he’s been left alone and he’s hungry, said the old woman remembering the dogs in her life and conscious that a dog needs to be fed, the old woman considers ringing the neighbor’s doorbell and mentioning casually that a dog needs to be fed. Sweetness, said the old woman attempting to emulate the Yiddish-flavored insouciance of Grace Paley, another lefty-bred old woman, just as a lawn needs to be mown, a driveway to be repaired, a house, even a mansion, needs fresh paint or it is dead, said the old woman in terms of what you can get for it, even if real estate prices are soaring, even if the Chinese are buying, said the old woman who on a good day a fair morning like this, summons her courage: I open the gate, stride up the driveway, the dog (said the old woman)

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the dog is barking louder but now he’s in the house so it is I who must feed him, I suppose, said the old woman either you feed me or I kill you, said the dog you sound like a human being, said the old woman

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FOUR MEN AROUND A CARD TABLE, COLUMBUS & 97 TH

Clacking dominoes strike the table, the four men celebrate manhood

Long-legged redheaded girl toting cello sniffs and avoids them

Priest waiting to cross checks his wristwatch, maybe late for suicide watch

Hunky guy pushing tiny pink child in stroller adjusts his earbuds

You, wherever on the planet your mothers packed dresses and trusted . . .

You are here because this land shot a hole in time we all whip through it

like blown newspaper . . . so many unread stories featuring mangoes, 30

kimchi and okra, pickles, potatoes, photos of murdered brothers . . .

A WALKER IN THE CITY And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood. —Federico García Lorca, Poet in New York

I could walk Broadway like bitter William Blake wandering up and down Cheapside, like furious Lorca in Harlem like Leroy Jones at Columbia a Jonah angry enough to die another poet disconsolate scowling enraged at body politic lamenting the rich and the poor we always have with us rich and poor whores, rich and poor slaves the concrete marble and steel architecture glazed by human tears the subway tunnel thick with rats the halls of power also numberless black men beaten strangled shot, castrated odor of banks, briny fragrance of cash demon sashaying with demon, garbage made visible then sky over the river tangerine a warm evening the Nigerian trumpeter on the corner in his yellow and red superman t-shirt, on his folding chair, no boom box, is cheerfully playing standards, here’s “How High the Moon,” not heard in fifty years, a cute Jewish blue-eyed brunette-with-stroller stops to let her baby listen, the curly-haired baby is into this music, his mouth open and drooling his eyes wide, the woman and the musician chat— the disconsolate walker is somewhat appeased by that.

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ACROSTIC: ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE

Ask and it shall be given you. Seek and you shall find. Knock and it shall be opened. Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment. Love is all you need. Obviously, since you already have a roof over your head, bread and wine on the table, stocks and bonds in the bank, Guccis in the closet, Maseratis in the garage, senators in your pocket. Where is the love? Hiding, terrified. Yes I said yes I said yes I said Yes. One and one is one, like the stand of aspen we were shown in Southern Utah whose root system was said to be eighty thousand years old, whose twirling yellow leaves in September twittered the beatitude of being a single organism, or like Romeo and Juliet or any rosy coupling teenagers, and unlike the more ordinary pairings of Us and Them. I’m Nobody who are you here comes Everybody here comes the bride the bride wore a simple satin A-line Eeny meeny miney mo, catch the monkey by his toe, it had been an extended battle but ultimately the offensive n— word was replaced by “monkey,” another giant step for mankind Dear heart, how like you this? If I am not for myself who is for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when? Show me the way to go home

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Lately my friend, though still only in the early stage of the disease, is being erased before my eyes. Alert and relaxed if I don’t look at the fingers of her right hand digging into her left palm, she sits prettily across the table with the shells the bowl of daffodils the guacamole and corn chips and lemonade, mostly mute while her partner chats to camouflage the plenitude of her emptiness, although at pauses between his remarks, while we are thinking what to say, she becomes her old hostess self, smiles prettily, announces I absolutely agree. O wild west wind, Over the rainbow, O how lovely is the evening, is the evening, when the bells are sweetly ringing, sweetly ringing, ding dong, ding dong, Our father which art in heaven, Only the lonely, Once in a lifetime Vanity, vanity, all is vanity Excepting the pure soul which shall stand one day exalted, and for now dreams on.

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WAITING FOR THE LIGHT for Frank O’Hara Frank, we have become an urban species at this moment many millions of humans are standing on some corner waiting like me for a signal permitting us to go, a signal depicting a small pale pedestrian to be followed by a sea-green light we do not use this opportunity to tune in to eternity we bounce upon our toes impatiently It is a Thursday morning, Frank, and I feel rather acutely alive but I need a thing of beauty or a theory of beauty to reconcile me to the lumps of garbage I cannot love enclosed in these tough shiny black plastic bags heaped along the curb of 97th Street, my street— like a hideous reminder of the fate we all expect letting the bulky slimy truth of waste attack our aesthetic sense and joie de vivre reliably every Thursday. Let me scan the handsome amber columned and corniced dwellings reflected in rear windows of parked cars, let me wish

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luck to their hives of intimacies, people in kitchens finishing a morning coffee saying see you later to the ones they live with Let me raise my eyes to the blue veil adrift between and above the artifice of buildings and at last I am slipping through a flaw in time where the string of white headlights approaching, the string of red taillights departing, seem as if they carry some kind of message perhaps the message is that one block west Riverside Park extends its length at the edge of Manhattan like the downy arm of a tender, amusing, beautiful lover, and after that is the deathless river but waiting for the light feels like forever 

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FOR ONCE, THEN, SOMETHING

When we came up out of the subway it was snowing and dark and the silhouettes of shoppers moved to and fro festively among the blurred lights the trucks and buses like slow undersea creatures carried snow on their backs underfoot it was turning to slush we were not defeated we rejoiced in the snow the cold dreamy vastness of air a crowd was exiting a church they too were happy and a man walking alone said “wow” to himself

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THREE The war works hard. —Dunya Mikhail

GHAZAL: AMERICA

My grandfather’s pipe tobacco fragrance, moss-green cardigan, his Yiddish lullaby when I woke crying: three of my earliest memories in America Arriving on time for the first big war, remaining for the second, sad grandpa who walked across Europe to get to America When the babies starved, when the village burned, when you were flogged log out, ship out, there was a dream, the green breast of America My grandfather said no President including Roosevelt would save the Jews in Europe he drew out an ample handkerchief and wiped away the weeping of America One thing that makes me happy about my country is that Allen Ginsberg could fearlessly write the comic poem “America” Route 66 entices me westward toward dreaming California I adore superhighways but money is the route of all evil in America Let miners curse mines let workers curse bosses let football curse management Let me curse the makers of bombs over Baghdad here in America When I video your rivers your painterly meadows your public sculpture Rockies, when I walk in your crooked cities I love you so much I bless you so much America People people look there: grandpa please look: Liberty the Shekhina herself welcoming you like a queen, like a goddess, to America Take the flute player from his mesa, take the raven from his tree now that the buffalo is gone from America

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White man, the blacks are snarling, the yellows swarming, the umber terrorists are tunneling through and breathing your air of fear in America If you will it, it is no dream, somebody admonished my grandfather he surmised they meant survival in America

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AFGHANISTAN: THE RAPED GIRL

Because the mullah raped her, she cannot be allowed to live her brothers will kill her, it is a question of honor she is ten years of age and does not yet menstruate but bleeds like a stream in the hospital The doctor finds the girl’s mother holding her hand both weeping, the mother saying my daughter, may dust and soil protect you now we will make you a bed of dust and soil we will send you to the cemetery where you will be safe The brothers have spoken to the police who command the women’s shelter where she now is staying to release her to them they have promised not to harm her but everyone understands lying is not a sin when one’s honor is at stake Even the mother understands this even the child understands only Dr. Sarwari, director of the shelter, is furious she shouts at the police like a grey old crow and the journalist who is doing his job getting the story may climb inside the bottle tonight

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And I who read the story will summon my mother, wherever she is in the next world, perhaps in the paradise she didn’t believe existed, she for whom honor was not a concept, she from whom I learned liberty and fury, our weapons in this world —New York Times, July 19, 2014

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WHITE MORNING

High white morning, Fez market, donkeys crowd the lanes, dear life in a grain of sand, intense as a tongue of salt. Maimonides studied here. Gorgeous calligraphy. Limping, impeccable, the guide to the mosque demonstrates to your children how Muslims perform the ritual washing, explains the prayers, how and why a Muslim performs them. Walks you past worshipers to the exit. They say the Americans staged nine-one-one, he murmurs politely. We cannot believe the images on television, you are American, what do you think? He brushes his silver beard. You cannot tell if he is smiling or not, but you believed the crashes like a tearful boy slamming fist into wall, flames like a giant marigold blooming, black seeds descending, the towers coming down, and smoke and ash, and metal twisted like a killer’s nerve cells, and what followed, the rockets’ red glare, our flag here, there, and everywhere bombs bursting, hooded prisoners, grinning soldiers, overthrown statues —the overthrow staged for CNN—white phosphorus— wailing mothers, brothers, cousins. Crazed chickens rushing around a barnyard pecking each other, drawing chicken blood that splashes, splashes, and rapidly sinks in sand. You believe it all. Outside the mosque your children collapse into giggles because the rows of men with backsides sticking up were really funny. 43

GHAZAL: NOT EVEN THERE for Meira Warshauer, and for Jack and others Jack Burkheimer (at left) has become a poetic spokesperson for the homeless community in Columbia. His poem, “Figment,” eloquently portrays his experience living on the street, and routinely being ignored by passersby, as if he were not even there. —Online ad for a concert to benefit the homeless in Columbia, S.C.

Wrapped in a sleeping bag. Running shoes. Sweaters. Possessions in a shopping cart next to him there in the subway. In the park. On the church steps. Under a bridge. Over a steam grate, quietly leaning against a wall or wherever suddenly there might be relative freedom from fear. It is true that pigeons and passersby routinely ignore him, though his icy eyes are those of a king, but we also routinely ignore each other on the street, on escalators, in restaurants and theaters, as if obedient to rule, as if outside our four bellicose walls suddenly there is a strict injunction to pretend other people do not exist, because we need to protect ourselves from the air-battery of angry spirits that flock like fallen angels, and I can’t move easily in that armor, I can’t show Jack, or the woman lying nearby him, the woman wrapped in scarves, that I know they are suddenly there, but I do, I do know, and I give them maybe a little money, to show I see they are like fallen angels, or dropped blossoms, and I could be them—a little money and maybe a blessing, and they maybe give me one and if I pause suddenly there

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for a fraction of a second, the pigeons whirling by, the cars and buses moving and stopping, the lights changing as everything changes, as atoms whirl, if I kneel suddenly there on the street, Jack, do you want me to see you, do you want to be seen? I see you as a fallen king. I see us all wrapped in our sleeping bags, and woman, in your raggy blankets I see you as queen, exiled, for one moment suddenly there.

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Q&A: INSURANCE

If time is an arrow, what is its target If a Flexible Flyer is the sled I had as a child, when may I become a child again Do you need help digging the potatoes out of your garden of insults Do you plan to vote in the next election Is our country headed in the right direction or the wrong direction and what did the bulldozer tell the yellow helmet’s ear Which part of your body is like biting into a ripe peach which part shames you like a rotten banana Would you like to find out how to lower your interest rate When you go to heaven how old will you choose to be will you have cocktails on the well-watered lawn where Bach conducts Bach Will you still chase after the Grateful Dead Is your life like air leaking out of a balloon, or like rain falling on a pond dot dot dot dear pocks pocking the surface dot dot dot Can it be like snow falling on the ocean Can desire drown you like syrup over pancakes

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When an ambulance siren wakes you at 3 a.m. do you feel relieved not to be strapped to that stretcher speeding toward the grim unknown do you then snuggle next to someone Are you satisfied with your detergent Can you name a more perfect irony than the new world trade center, sacred icon of capitalism, revered lingam of profit, soaring above the memorial pools of people killed when the first towers fell Can you describe the scent of dried blood What about the smell of iron chains in your cell can you sing the threnody of the maggots When I removed my mask did I frighten you like a drone crossing your sky Are you satisfied with your auto insurance When ecstasy approaches why do you resist What are you afraid of Can you please unbutton your shirt now

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MAKING A MEAL OF THEM for Dunya Mikhail The air remains full of sunlight —Jean Follain, “The Art of War”

Because we love what makes us feel alive what makes us feel something instead of nothing be it a dimpled infant or a snowy January sunrise be it a mine disaster or a flood or a roadkill deer today I will make a meal of several wars we enjoy watch me swallow down the six million plus gypsies homosexuals the feeble plus the sixty million and more mentioned by Morrison in the dedication to Beloved for there are things we eat to live and things we eat for entertainment for the tang of poison, the sugar of cruelty, like cupcake icing the tongue appreciates plus why not while we are here together Vilna Dresden Nanjing Nagasaki Palestine Baghdad the Congo The former Yugoslavia plus

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the other Americas, United Fruit smiling La Virgen weeping Los Indios bleeding (It is more than a meal, it is a banquet it is almost staggering) And here I am sucking that blood in the land of the free in the land of the free and the drugged in the country of credit all of us vampires and voters, all of us sports fans all of us readers and writers of righteous tweets all of us shoppers all of us holy innocents sucking it up brushing our capital teeth

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THE WORLD ACCORDING TO CAPA

In Robert Capa’s photographs of the first half of the twentieth century people are emphatically generic boys in shorts play marbles politicians in wool suits embrace like tough kids sizing each other up on an Andalucian hillside a man falls diagonally dropping his rifle GI’s have a smoke in the shade of a jeep fellowship steams from the page like heat from a summer sidewalk my husband and I on the living room couch are halfway through this book of photographs I have given him it puts its arms around our shoulders like an overfamiliar uncle we turn the page to where the long curve of Omaha Beach emerges from a background of fishing boats some drowned soldiers and wooden debris

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are gazed at by a Frenchman and his son standing on the sand in 1944 where Capa must have told them to stand and gazed at by my husband and me in the twenty-first century seeing what Capa needed us to see

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ARE YOU MY COUSIN for Afaa Weaver, and for Frances Payne Adler, who made the video A wall is a symbol of safety that never works, it didn’t keep the Mongols out, it tightens the fear inside you like a buckle. We reach the Ramallah checkpoint at 5 a.m. The video camera scans a large barred cage. The crowd inside is a mass of noisy animals, a child is crying Papa, I have to pee. The dark-eyed Israeli soldier perhaps first time in life away from mama doesn’t look, doesn’t listen learns to transform the mirror of his soul, those fathomless brown eyes, into a wall. We know what fear is crushing souls on both sides of the wall and from these grapes we know what wine will flow.

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THE BATTLEFIELD: A LYRIC

Busy at the kitchen sink I missed the 7:30 a.m. bus to the battlefield so I went to check the foundations of the bridge. When I returned I thought there was plenty of time but the vast waiting room was almost empty. There was the clock with its giant white face. Did I miss the 8:30 a.m. bus to the battlefield? The tall man, hands in his pockets, nodded. Damn! How stupid of me! How irritating! I ought to be with everyone at the battlefield! Now remember, the tall man admonished the boy squatting in front of the tv set, at the battlefield it’s different from this, it’s bombs and guns, it’s dead bodies, torn bodies, bleeding and stinking red flesh at the battlefield. The boy nods, continues to stare at the screen, he is only a bored little boy, in a cotton t-shirt, but where is my son, my own little son, and why am I not at the battlefield? It’s getting really late in the morning now. The streets are packed with automobiles, the stores alive with people shopping. There has to be another bus for the battlefield.

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CHILDREN’S BLOOD And through the streets the blood of children Ran simply, like children’s blood —Pablo Neruda

And through the streets the dollars flowed Flowed simply, like dollars flowing upward from the poor to the rich And through the streets the bullets flew Flew joyously, like bullets flying straight toward living flesh And through the skies the drones navigated smoothly, like drones dreaming in the next life they will be chickadees And at his console the lieutenant touched a button patriotically, like a lieutenant who will soon be promoted to captain And in the classroom some boys joked about death like boys who never guess beforehand how death will pant hotly in their faces And in the war room before their meeting the generals chatted genially, like generals who pretty much know each others’ secrets And in her bedroom the girl wrapped in chenille pretended to be a princess in disguise going about the city doing good to her subjects

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And to her mirror the girl’s grandmother made eyes and made smiles, made her face the face of a charming woman And around the skirt of the house under the shingles termites were building mud towns And through the streets the blood of children ran simply, like children’s blood century after stupid century.

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TEMBLOR The earth snapped . . . —Kathryn Schulz, The New Yorker

At the edge of the world California has all one needs, unlimited sea and sand mountains and sky above, canyons, vineyards, and the fault zone— moonrise over dunes, long shadows, dry heat departing, and in her room a woman leans toward a screen learning about some beheadings performed by men who have surrendered to a god with a sword because surrender to a god is like the swoon of a girl the pain of living becomes so sweet and if there is a sword all the better get your hands on an uzi you will show those infidels what faith is the woman is trying to understand their frenzy a crack in earth a crust then a body dragged beneath it * Decades since the bus from Boston to Alabama, a summer of love of justice, discipline and fear, the toilet smell of the sheriff’s breath scent of magnolia and honeybaby sweat, kids chanting Hell no, we won’t go peace signs like an encoded seraphic message everyone got, and now only the impulse to hurl things at the screen when the talking heads come on saying nuke ’em, they spread their thick owl wings, they twitch

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their coyote noses, she is a rabbit in the harsh grass paralyzed and she knows that in less than three seconds there will be a commercial for cars, then one for a cosmetic product, then one for a congressman while the wars cough up dictionaries of amnesia crack in her mind unrelenting pressure beneath it * To the naked eye the motions of earth are imperceptible the plates sliding north at the rate her fingernails grow from the air no hint of violence, rather a long wrinkled scar, looking old and harmless, like herself, but where the fault bends the grinding proceeds she wonders why she imagines killing the killers when her deep heart’s core wants peace and linnet’s wings not owls’ yet she sometimes pictures driving her car into a wall, or into a crowd and she likes the fun of throwing glass things, wine bottles, into the yellow recycle pail to hear them crash, she likes tugging weeds up by muddy roots dear aged lady whose garbage will be “picked up” for a monthly fee sorted and buried or burnt far away *

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Against havoc, to join committees, to march, to sing, slowly to come to understand, to write, to raise your voice against the compulsive lie, do these slight geological tremors satisfy your craving to change the laws of history, to speak the unspoken, do they pacify your stifled impulse to murder the secretary of defense the moon still rises with the serenity of a duchess the coyotes still trot through the sagebrush in that eerie light their eyes penetrate shadows, they lift their voices in an ancient song the wind blows wherever it wants to, the television confidently sneers the sea is never full, back and forth it daily slides, sandpipers dancing at its edge and your poetry also makes nothing happen except among the synapses that are whispering only connect to each other and the desperate force inside each crying break

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FOUR From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we— I mean all human beings—are connected with this. —Virginia Woolf

ALPHABETICAL FLASH

A “violent coronal ejection” occurs. “Impact!” “Geomagnetic storm!” “Satellites crippled!” Red-yellow blobs fill our screen, northern lights shriek and moan. Awesome, as adolescents say and all the animators agree. Absolute anarchy. B speculates that this is something cooked up by the Republican Party to frighten people. Badminton on her campus is played mostly by Asians. Certain times of the week, their nets are strung up on the gymnasium floor, and Chinese and Filipino and Vietnamese pairs of students, playing skillfully and enjoying themselves, whack a birdie back and forth. California dreaming fragrant sex. Connecticut dreaming ghostly Pequots. Chinese dreaming money, power, status. Some pursue the fantasy of freedom, the fantasy of justice, wispy clouds collecting in heaven. Cruising over mountains and rivers. Don’t, please don’t, bomb Iran, she said. Don’t let Israel bomb Iran.By the time this poem is published we will know whether the jackals had their way. The jackals usually have their way. Not always, dammit. Elbows are excellent for navigating crowds. She considers her New York elbows an asset at the theater, at an airport, just as she considers her New York impatience at red lights an asset. Did she cross on the red in Cleveland? She did. She’s a city girl. Find another woman if you want to, honey babe, but you will never find another one like me. So do not shake my tree. And down at the Saint James Infirmary, she was stretched out on a long white table. So let her go, let her go, God bless her, wherever.

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Gang up. Mean girls gang up. The impact of their ridicule is immeasurable. Do horses sneer, or dogs or cats? Cats can look bored but they do not sneer. Do bonobos sneer? We do not know, but bonobo females will gang up on an offensive male and wreck him. Help me if you can, kill me if you must, you and I, my dear are dust I is the inevitable unenviable first person. There is no other first person but she who is I. I am quite weary of her tedious self-examinations. She too is weary. What an absurd baby a “self” is. Always crying for milk that won’t come. Managing to suffer. J wants to bring her children to Israel, she wants them to trek that arrogant landscape, she’d like to show them what a cistern is—like a mineshaft, deep, narrow, ladderless —no way for Joseph the dreamer to climb out when his brothers threw him in. Kick (v.) Kick (n.) Kick the can. Kick back (v). Kickback (n.). A kick out of you. A kind of running shoe. Kickstart (v). Kickstart (n). Kick it down the block, similar to pass the buck. Kick ass (v). Kickass (adj). Drop-kick, penalty-kick. Kick the habit, stop. Love you forever, lay you down beside me, hold your face tenderly, start to stroke your body. Bury my nose in your neck, breathing quietly. When you shift to face me, roll onto my back. Pull off my cotton nightgown. Pull off your silk pajamas.

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My grandfather was a precision tool-and-die maker and a machinist, she said. A Shoah survivor. Very quiet; we didn’t have all that much to talk about. But when I started working with metal and brought him things I was making, he started giving me his tools. Napoleon’s white tights: silly but you sense his energy, body type like a magic mushroom, my husband has that body type, it’s a high-octane engine, it’s the third rail, it dares not look back, something may be gaining, it never touches the brake. Once I had discovered what an orgasm was, I had to try to boast. I told a girl in my Pioneer Youth Camp bunk, the Rabbit Cabin, that I had experienced something beginning with O. She looked puzzled and guessed, “Ovaries?” That is the kind of camp it was. P lectured magnificently on conjunctions. My favorites were “if” and “as if.” If I should die think only this of me. As if immortality awaited him. If my grandmother were made of potatoes she’d be a knish. She always speaks as if she had a mouthful of knishes. Quiet is what we desperately long for, but existence pulses. Every single atom in the universe whirls unstoppably. Black holes annihilate what crosses their path. Dark matter detonates along with the baryons. Dark energy steps on the accelerator. Oh God. R visits San Francisco with his lover, to see his grandson who is now two and talkative. The boy wants to use a knife. The mother says: you can’t use that yet, you’ll have to wait till you’re older. The boy takes a few sips of milk and says: Mum, now I’m older.

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Step outside at night earth under feet sky all broken glass Tibetans are being squeezed from their land by the Han, like toothpaste from little tubes. Slowly, slowly, the Tibetan diaspora fans out over rivers and mountains, bearing trunkloads of Buddhas, backpacks of holy language, duffel bags of ancestors. Ultra-orthodox Jews, fundamentalist Christians, Jihadist Muslims: a hall of screaming cracked mirrors. Ulster, Ireland: those devils of passionate intensity. USA: A tower men built to penetrate heaven and make money. Under all their shadows, sad children. Very quietly now, just let go, close your eyes, sit back and imagine that you are in a dark wood in the middle of your life. The sun is setting and you are beginning to be afraid. Out of the wood comes an animal. It speaks to you. When I taught creative writing in the youth correctional facility, most of the guys were both good-looking and smart. They wrote love poems. When one read something the others liked, they would yell, “Word!” raising their hands in a two-finger salute.

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X-Factor superstar, mezzo-soprano Leona Lewis reportedly rejects a sevenfigure offer from Harrods on the grounds that Harrods sells clothing made from animal fur. Lewis, a vegetarian since age ten, is releasing her own perfume line, called Leona Lewis. You go to my head. You, you are the one. You are the promised breath of springtime. Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? Du, du, du bist mein herzen. You must change your life. You can’t get a man with a gun. You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone. Zebra herds roam Chobe, their thick-coat stripes mahogany. They browse with dignity, accompanied by elephant, hyena, cheetah, antelope, monkey, and other species. If they can, cannot we? Disturbed by our jeep and our cameras, they float away.

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THE LIBERAL ARTS

In mathematics they say the most beautiful solution is the correct one In physics they say everything that can happen must happen In history they say the more it changes the more it is the same In astrophysics you take the long view In chemistry you explode and blend, it is a bit like freestyle cooking, the Yiddish term would be: you potschke In biology you smell the flowers, the enticing flowers, and you play with mice, and you write grant proposals In jurisprudence they say there is no justice In philosophy they say there is no truth In literary studies they say everybody come along be ironic now Business school we systematize the competitive strategies we learned in the sandbox Engineering moves us firmly into manhood, we grip the material world in our fists Computer science assists us toward the goal of replacing our species with a new, improved, more efficient form of life, based in electronics instead of carbon— many of us are rushing to transform ourselves as quickly as possible Religion is still hot People keep plunging passionately into and out of it at the usual brisk rate Geography suggests the future dominance of North America by Spanishspeaking people but it does not say when; geology looks stony, takes the long view

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Music bridges mathematics, the soul of the universe, and my personal soul Visual art is the bridge between my bag of body and bones and stuff in the painterly universe Drama crosses this bridge on foot In the novel they say omit nothing, harvest the entire goddamn world In memoir they say the self is silently weeping, give it a tissue In poetry they say the arrow may be blown off course by storm and returned by miracle

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THE COMMON CROW FIBONACCI

Imprinting takes several weeks. A murder of crows = a group or flock or gathering. Mobbing: several families may answer a distress call; mobbing = attacking enemy in large numbers. Ted Hughes got it wrong: they are supremely social: a young crow who leaves the family cluster may return years later to be taken in as a brother. They eat bugs, worms, roadkill, mice, berries, corn, and whatever they can find in dumpsters. From time to time they mob my cowardly cat. The incredible ruckus they make on my street at dawn assembling like a congressional caucus planning their day then dispersing leaving the street empty and suburban: I have to love them. Their cleverness endears and irritates. If one could create a brushstroke that moved across paper as a crow flies across air one would be a great artist one would go on admiring crows.

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THE REDEEMED WORLD for Maxine Kumin, 1925–2014 In the unredeemed world the poet hangs on a thread like a spider, busy, and the words crowd around like children pulling at a teacher’s skirt, or like strawberries whose juice bruises fingers and mouth. Your horses lip your hand when they take the carrot, you let your palm caress their velvet muzzles— velvet but with wiry hairs—in the unredeemed world you have a handsome husband, two daughters, one son, a grandson. But in the redeemed world you will have all this, plus your energy, plus the pond where you will swim again. In the redeemed world there will be intelligence enough not to tempt a bear in March with birdseed, there will be no beetles on the peapods, the Red Sox will always win. In the redeemed world you put on peace every day like pulling on a pair of pants. Your dogs will be there, lifted from the highway into your motherly arms, and Anne will be there in her sexy red dress setting up the phone line setting down a green sack filled with squirming words somebody wanted to drown like kittens, and the two of you will rescue them. 69

TO CHARLIE, ON HIS POETRY for C. K. Williams, 1936–2015 Confession implies shame you had none of that you did those c-scans of your own mind shamelessly, following every fold, penetrating every layer: the mind looking at itself, the mind examining itself—Guilt yes, bitter anger yes, obstinate lust yes, like a carnival ride, the lacquered car careening all over the area, zipping, bumping, to a viewer it might seem out of control but no, it was only passionately honest. The zoom of your poem would often pull far out from the scene you were capturing, then you would nail it, down to the last pixel of the truth. The truth was not inscrutable but it resisted, it wanted to wrestle. Fear yes, doubt absolutely, and don’t forget sweet love, breaching like a dolphin

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above its salty element in the little book of tender funny love poems to Catherine who is a real person in them, no puppet. A glad splashing in that book a sinking afterward the body in terror turning to words remembering perhaps the physicist John Wheeler in a lecture explaining that the universe exists in order to be perceived, observed, seen by consciousness that it’s a kind of evolving uroboros your task was to do some of that seeing— as much as time would allow— no matter how crazy it seemed. I will miss those gritty poems in your sandy voice. I mention all this to you who didn’t believe in an afterlife because you may have been mistaken about that, and wherever you are

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whatever form you occupy next should remember how strong and accurate your seeing was, and be a little bit happy about it.

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CHINA IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

In the twentieth century we Americans saved the world The curtain goes up on the twenty-first century their turn they’re taking a hundred million people each decade moving them from the farms to the cities creating a middle class ready or not— remember the fifties? It’s like that— My salary is three times what it was ten years ago says the student who meets my husband at the alarmingly futuristic airport my parents are farmers they raise pigs we ate meat once a month when I was a boy now I eat what I want soon I will be a professor of physics Beijing airport dwarfs all others their acrobats are dragons but you cannot easily breathe in Beijing human rights is not a priority free speech is not a priority China is deplorable, all our media agree, ah but Remember the fifties? Were you Black in the fifties? Were you Native American? Were you a Communist sympathizer? Were you a woman?

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UNDERGROUND

Meandering through libraries as I like to do, among books, those doomed artifacts, I run across by accident or by virtue of good karma in a previous life a book of photographs of the Underground Railroad done cleverly movingly as collages incorporating nineteenth-century contexts and today’s as well the rivers the woods the barns the farmhouses the churches the mansions, the trapdoors the tunnels the attics the classified advertisements seeking to sell slaves in lots of four or forty or more offering rewards for the escaped ones—no ideology but business the farmer who faced down the sheriff regarding the slaves he was hiding by pointing to the upstairs windows at which his four sons stood holding rifles the freed blacks of the North with their white colleagues John Brown’s grave a photo of Tubman a white scarf at her neck the Quaker Levi Coffin the handsome Frederick Douglas the handsome underground stationmaster William Still saving and saving the opposite of wounding and wounding. The book claims the Underground Railroad was integrated and was the first example of true integration in American history. It is a black man claiming this, oh I cannot

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say how cheered I am at any moment to be reminded human decency and courage exist like fierce white blood cells in our organism for it is difficult to find words of hope regarding decency and courage while words of the unhealed wound are everywhere while bodies continue bleeding, officials continue denying, op-eds continue decrying because the language of hope is underground

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GHAZAL: AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL

Do you remember our earnestness our sincerity in first grade when we learned to sing “America The Beautiful” along with “The Star-Spangled Banner” and say the Pledge of Allegiance to America We put our hands over our first grade hearts we felt proud to be citizens of America I said One Nation Invisible until corrected maybe I was right about America School days school days dear old Golden Rule Days when we learned how to behave in America What to wear, how to smoke, how to despise our parents who didn’t understand us or America Only later learning the Banner and the Beautiful live on opposite sides of the street in America Only later discovering the Nation is divisible by money by power by color by gender by sex America We comprehend it now this land is two lands one triumphant bully one still hopeful America

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Imagining amber waves of grain blowing in the wind purple mountains and no homeless in America Sometimes I still put my hand tenderly on my heart somehow or other still carried away by America

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Q&A: REALITY

Did Max Planck really say “I regard matter as derivative from consciousness” Did Sir James Jeans, pioneering physicist, really say “the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine” Was that you I saw smiling with perfect teeth in the ad for spring travel wear, seated on the hull of a sailboat with a companion whose teeth surpassed perfection, he leaning on right elbow and you with left hand resting on that glossy hull, its mango-tinted lacquer the item that really catches one’s eye, shining and hard Was your parka in the ad really that yellow or was it enhanced by Photoshop When we have finished describing the elephant, will we have an elephant Would you be willing to participate in a survey Can you make galactic mid-air swirls like kids on skateboards Do you understand that your consent to things as they are has been manufactured by history and film, and that there is no blue guitar because all guitars, even those made hard and shining by layers of lacquer, are cherrybrown, and they fuck you up, your mom and dad Does this enrage you Do you think it is a matter of indifference, in other words do you consent Did you once wonder how a huge contraption of metal could ever take flight

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Did you once mistake causality for casualty Why do you guess the admen included an American flag in the picture of the shiny yacht’s hull, along with you in the yellow parka, your companion in subdued nautical rainwear, both of you with strangely white teeth Do you remember the name of the congressman who said, “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down,” meaning that a raped woman will not conceive a child, and so there is no need for abortion, and did he really say that at a prayer breakfast Do you agree that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice Why would you think that Was Nicola Tesla influenced by Vedic philosophy Is it true that what the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth whether it existed before or not Is it true that looking for consciousness in the brain is like looking in the radio for the announcer Is it true that when election results are accepted by the populace and the media, that means the election was honest (or we do not care if it is honest or not) Do you remember what you wrote in my high school yearbook

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If we dove into a cosmic wormhole could we choose to emerge in the Eisenhower years when the world was all before us, expanding, and we too were expanding, like light!, right there along with it, ballgame after ballgame, and we were indisputably the good ones Did the Stone Age end because of a lack of stones

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NOTES

“Dry Hours: A Golden Shovel Exercise”—Terence Hayes invented the poetic form of the Golden Shovel, based on Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “The Pool Players: Seven at the Golden Shovel.” The rules are: use each word in the line (or lines) of a base poem as the end word in the new poem, retaining the order of the original words. “Cinco de Mayo” commemorates the Mexican victory over French forces at the Battle of Puebla in 1862, and is commonly taken in the United States to be Mexican Independence Day, although in Mexico this most important holiday is celebrated on September 16. “Ghazal: The Minimum Wage”—In his 2014 State of the Union Address, the president did in fact urge businesses and states to raise the minimum wage and announced a forthcoming executive order requiring contractors to pay a higher minimum wage for federally funded employees. “Afghanistan: The Raped Girl”—New York Times, July 19, 2014. The italicized lines are from the New York Times story published in HEArt Online, October 2014. “Are You My Cousin”—Dare I Call You Cousin is an exhibit combining photography, video, and poetry, based on interviews of Jews and Palestinians in Israel,

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by poet Frances Payne Adler, photographer Michal Fattal,, and videographer Yossi Yacov. The Qalandiya checkpoint divides Ramallah in the occupied West Bank from East Jerusalem. “Temblor”—Kathryn Schulz, “The Big One,” The New Yorker, July 20, 2015. “Alphabetical Flash”—“St. James Infirmary Blues,” most famously performed by Louis Armstrong. “My grandfather” quotes the San Francisco metalsmith jeweler Aimee Golant, interviewed after making crowns for the first known Torah scribed and ornamented by women.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some of these poems have appeared in the following journals, some in earlier versions or with different titles: American Poetry Review: “To Charlie, on His Poetry,” “Snowfall”; The Atlantic: “Ghazal: America the Beautiful”; Fence: “Alphabetical Flash”; Great River: “Dry Hours; A Golden Shovel Exercise,” “A Walker in the City,” “Acrostic: All You Need Is Love,” “Making a Meal of Them,” “The Common Crow Fibonacci”; Harvard Review: “The Battlefield,” “Children’s Blood,” “Waiting for the Light”; Massachusetts Review: “Cinco de Mayo”; Plume: “The Light,” “Q&A: Red Red Rose,” “The World According to Capa,” “Afghanistan”; Poetry: “Q&A: Insurance”; Poetry Daily: “Dark Matter and Dark Energy”; Prairie Schooner: “Times Square,” “Ghazal: O Clear Night,” “Four Men around a Card Table,” “The Liberal Arts”; The Progressive: “The Glory of Cities”; Rattle: “Ghazal: America”; Tupelo: “August Morning, Upper Broadway,” “How Fortunate the Boy,” “The First Snowfall,”; Wide Shore: “For Once, Then, Something,” “Manahatta,” “The Glory of Cities.” Deep gratitude to Ann Fisher-Wirth, Pat Fargnoli, Penelope Scambly Schott, Louisa Howerow, Wendy Carlyle, Barbara Taylor, Marilyn Hacker, Marilyn Krysl, Rebecca Howell, Judith Vollmer, Peter Pitzele, and Tony Hoagland, for critiques and support. And thanks to C. K. Williams, who traded poems with me during his last years.

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