You do not seem to realise that beauty is a liability rather than
   an asset—that in view of the fact that spirit creates form we are justified in supposing
     that you must have brains. For you, a symbol of the unit, stiff and sharp,
   conscious of surpassing by dint of native superiority and liking for everything
self-dependent, anything an

ambitious civilisation might produce: for you, unaided to attempt through sheer
   reserve, to confute presumptions resulting from observation, is idle. You cannot make us
     think you a delightful happen-so. But rose, if you are brilliant, it
   is not because your petals are the without-which-nothing of pre-eminence. You would look, minus
thorns—like a what-is-this, a mere

peculiarity. They are not proof against a worm, the elements, or mildew
   but what about the predatory hand? What is brilliance without co-ordination? Guarding the
     infinitesimal pieces of your mind, compelling audience to
   the remark that it is better to be forgotten than to be remembered too violently,
your thorns are the best part of you.

I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.

   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in

   it after all, a place for the genuine.

      Hands that can grasp, eyes

      that can dilate, hair that can rise

         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are

   useful; when they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, the

   same thing may be said for all of us—that we

      do not admire what

      we cannot understand. The bat,

         holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under

   a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base—

   ball fan, the statistician—case after case

      could be cited did

      one wish it; nor is it valid

         to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction

   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,

   nor till the autocrats among us can be

     “literalists of

      the imagination”—above

         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have

   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance of their opinion—

   the raw material of poetry in

      all its rawness, and

      that which is on the other hand,

         genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

^{for Mahmoud Darwish}

I missed you by a few days. We moved to the city where you were scheduled to read. But your heart had its own timeline. All my life I have listened to your voice thunder and grieve. I have memorized your words. Unoriginal, I know, given their stature and my heritage, but it was an act of devotion to poetry. When so much of the music I loved I let go, yours stayed. It’s a song, it’s a song, I’d hum to myself, between wars. Lately, I walk around with a poem of yours I did not memorize in childhood coursing through my veins. No water, no sky, no medicine. No friends and no fortresses. No sail. The sail always catches in my throat. They say you drafted it on one of those boats carrying fighters into the unknown. The lore always imagines it heightens the tragedy. It’s good you are not here. So many of us have been whispering this bitterness to loved ones who passed before the genocide began. This time, we outdid ourselves, left our Romans in the dust. This time, there were no masks to fall.

I burned my life, that I might find 
A passion wholly of the mind, 
Thought divorced from eye and bone, 
Ecstasy come to breath alone. 
I broke my life, to seek relief 
From the flawed light of love and grief.

With mounting beat the utter fire 
Charred existence and desire. 
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I found unmysterious flesh—
Not the mind’s avid substance—still
Passionate beyond the will.

is up The Met’s stone steps,
so many that I have trouble collecting 
my girthy tourist’s breaths

and my palms, all sweaty, 
smeared with ink 
from his crinkled face,

wrinkled in the brochure, and
to think I’m too underdressed 
for a pocket square,

so up goes the tee’s hem
to blot my forehead dry
enough, when, of course,

there goes my furry gut’s apron
for everyone to see 
it unfurling like the carpet

Claudia Schiffer stomped
toward that one Lagerfeld photoshoot:
her mean mien

of a pouty puss made up 
to an almost-
black face, blond braided back

under a theoretical afro, 
an aphrodisiac, you know, 
what men want, a diasporic taste

in their ladies: hot 
enough to boil a stew pot, thin 
as ladle handles, good cooks

in the bedroom—yet 
still Lagerfeld wanted
supremacy’s payload, to not see

that which was too colored 
for his pleathered hands to hold 
not but to plunder, and so here we are

staring up at his sketched waifs,
craning our necks
to take in the niched wall,

each gown an upturned urn
shelved in its own alcove, 
dressed in nothing

but archive’s bleached light, 
the mannequins’ clean faces 
looking down on us—

crowded together 
like the staggered heads 
of snaggleteeth 
in his stitched mouth.

At the end

of the story,

we exchanged

hair. Two tiny

Ziploc bags,

little plastic

windows.

I sheared off

the tip 

of my braid,

candlewick

twist-tight.

Please

use these

dead cells

to make

new words.

We never

baked

the blueberry

crumble:

let the

mashed bowl

of indigo

fruit

on the

counter

be your ink.

Dip me

whole

into the

sweet

blood &

try to

write

about

cutting

hair &

a scissor’s

song,

its sound

akin to

a memory

holding its

own

breath.

I wear

your black

cursive

on my chin,

& imagine

being the

teenaged boy

that you will

raise

with a lover

that looks

like me.

I wrap

you around

my wedding

finger, pull

& watch

you snap back

until you yawn.

I dress

you in the

foam of

apricot shampoo,

spin you in

my palm

to wash out

time.

At midnight,

you lay me

at the nape

of your neck,

guarding

your spine,

in the blue violet                                                                                                                 

of dream’s

intermissions.

We are

climbing

strands

to each other’s

roots,

searching

for homes

that we

have

already

passed.

Behind

your head

& in my hands,

we are closer

than secret.

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?—

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

23–29 October 1962

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

I never felt at home below, 

And in the handsome skies

I shall not feel at home

I know,

I don’t like Paradise.

Because it’s Sunday all the time

And recess never comes,

And Eden’ll be so lonesome

Bright Wednesday afternoons.

If God could make a visit,

Or ever took a nap —

So not to see us — but they say

Himself a telescope

Perennial beholds us, —

Myself would run away

From Him and Holy Ghost and All —

But — there’s the Judgment Day!