Looking for Angels in New York    

From All this travelling around and I’ve learned
Nothing less obvious than this: that each
Piece of the world has something missing.

Ponar

In the world to come the forests won’t have secrets.
Leaves will fall on soil made of leaves,
Stem, mud, sand, the usual substances

Somebody Ought to Write a Poem for Ptolemy

Somebody ought to write a poem for Ptolemy,
So ingenious in being wrong, he was almost a poet.
Can anyone follow his configurations?

Ch’vil Schreiben a Poem auf Yiddish

I want to write a poem in Yiddish
and not any poem, but the poem
I am longing to write,

At the Wailing Wall   

I figure I have to come here with my kids,
though I’m always ill at ease in holy places—
the wars, for one thing—and it’s the substanceless

Paestum Thunderstorm, Twenty Years On

It was otherworldly. You’d have been rapturous
lightning over the temples \ wine-dark sky—
no one in that drenched expanse but us

Golden Oldie

Even now, I can’t hear the organ intro
to Percy Sledge’s sultry when a man
loves a woman
without that afternoon

Counting My Losses

One by fire,
four at will
(one who’d hang,

XI. Shanghai Taxi

Somebody ought to write a poem for Ptolemy,
So ingenious in being wrong, he was almost a poet.
Can anyone follow his configurations?

Annunciation with Clothesline

No dove, just bedclothes waving in the air
between Mary and her announcing angel.
(She now has a married woman’s hair,

Leaving the Chapel, Fifth Night

Tonight, I walk out just as a bright half-moon,
outsize, appears low on the horizon
delaying darkness for a minute or two