They come to me often,
Approach me (more truly said),
That girl in the garden, the Jewish
Boys who could glimpse her
Through cracks in the fence.
By customs restricted, their lives

Most often have seemed suspended
And small. Ugly, fat or wizened or quaint
Most of the Jews were ugly, and gentiles
Were few and far in Zamoscz.
By custom and codes for the doing
Of most things, or not, they were netted,

And the sight of the gentile girl
Who was a little hunchback
Was also forbidden – discovered
Hanging about for a glimpse of her
Through a crack in the fence,
The boys would be whipped.

Who told of her (nobody else did)
Came soon to be perplexed, even tormented
About life and reasons for it, purposes,
And about reasons for death.
The Enlighteners did not prevail.
Enlightenments only told you the coat to wear.

But long, long after
A glimpse, one only perhaps,
For I cannot recall precisely,
She still dwelled on his mind
And haunted the stories he wrote,
And the garden grew in his mind.

Look this up in a memoir of his:
We would sneak up to the fence
For a glimpse of her.
She might have been picking flowers,
A little gentile hunchback girl,
She might be reading a book.

In good faith, hump, garden and all,
Memory found her a living soul.
Soon with a slaughter machine
Others tore us apart. How should memory match
Evil organized with chimneys?
The singular
Bygone denied, slaughterers walk away.

of tuneless anti-notes

these braided harps have strung

from post to post to post,

dividing fenced-in dogs

from lucky ones on walks

and Barbie-trapping bogs

of grass from sidewalks.

And when stray branches beckon

like wishbones from a shrub

I wish for one good weapon

and break off a billy club

with which I investigate

a picket fence’s gaps;

with which I decapitate

the weed between each slat.

And when the fence is iron

I clang my club across

its bars the way a warden

patrols his problem blocks.

But when these fences give

way to boundless lawns

my hand becomes the sieve

that can’t contain my yawns.

Only Sunday strollers and bicycle riders will notice

the strange facility concealed among vines and fields —

a long barracks surrounded by barbed wire, a guard stationed

at the electric gate.

It’s late.  The second night watch.

The villagers sleep. Only a few small foxes

and nocturnal birds to witness the sight.

The lord of the eggs rechecks the voltage

in the electrified fence.

He directs the trucks filled with cages,

hurrying the Thai workers

discharged to load the sick and the old

squeezed to lay all they can.

Hard to say when they become fowl.

This poem is not about chickens

pecking in the troughs, coxcombs trembling in light

which is neither day nor night

or birds piled one on top of another, their necks

twisting through the bars

to gasp the feathery sparks

in egg-white moonlight.

And even if it is, it doesn’t fly in the face

of the people who pass through the gate

to the factory store in the morning

under the cheery ‘Hatchery House’ sign

with the drawing of a plump brooder,

buying extra large eggs

nicely arranged in a carton.

on the trees

leaking their slow

reds and golds

the workers

sluggish in the fields

who are you

that I don’t know

how to look away

don’t want to    your eyes

entering mine

the day is short

the night

long the Master near

seek in the body what does not live in the body.

is to love. Such love is not enough! –

the heart needs a little foolishness!
So I fold the newspaper, make a hat.Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

as if to puzzle undercurrently,
as if in their vacuity to upbraid
your long incessant milkings of the shade
which was their hovel, from which they have flown.
Some distance was met, unknown and unsaid.

This was the one then who you vilified
in the dark temper of your deepest days,
making each substitution carefully
as though a puzzle were revealed to you,
glad of the chance to put across your word.
What is that you tell us that you see
but other people’s words your words surpass?
We see the surface of the chartered sea
that goes its own way, the freight in the ports,
trading hours ahead of the newspapers.