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It was the summer of 1976 when I saw the moon fall down. It broke like a hen’s egg on the sidewalk. The garden roiled with weeds, hummed with gnats who settled clouds on my oblivious siblings. A great hunger insatiate to find / A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness blind. A gush of yolk and then darker. Somewhere a streetlamp disclosed the insides of a Chevy Impala—vinyl seats, the rear- view, headrests and you, your hand through your hair. An indistinguishable burning, failing bliss. Because the earth’s core was cooling, all animals felt the urge to wander. Wash down this whisper of you, the terrible must. Maybe the core wasn’t cooling, but I felt a coolness in my mother. That girl was shining me on. In blue crayon, the bug-bitten siblings printed lyrics on the walls of my room. I wrote the word LAVA on my jeans. It must be the Night Fever, I sang with the 8-track. But the moon had not broken on the sidewalk, the moon was hot, bright as a teakettle whistling outside my door, tied up in sorrow, lost in my song, if you don’t come back . . . and that serious night cooled, settling like sugar on our lawn. I wrote the word SUGAR on my palms. I shall say what inordinate love is. The moon rose itself up on its elbows and shook out its long hair.

The time is important here—not because this has been a long winter or because it is my first at home since childhood—but because there is so much else to be unsure of. We are on the brink of an invasion. At a time like this how is it that when I left only a week ago there was three feet of snow on the ground, and now there is none, not even a single patch on in the shadow of the fence-line. And to think I paid a cousin twenty dollars to shovel the walk. He and two of his buddies, still smelling of an all-nighter, arrived at 7 am to begin their work. When I left them a while later and noticed their ungloved hands, winter made me feel selfish and unsure. This ground seems unsure of itself for its own reasons and we do not gauge enough of our lives by changes in temperature. When I first began to write poems I was laying claim to battle. It started with a death that I tried to say was unjust, not because of the actual dying, but because of what was left. What time of year was that? I have still not yet learned to write of war. I have friends who speak out—as is necessary— with subtle and unsubtle force. But I am from this place and a great deal has been going wrong for some time now. The two young Indian boys who almost drowned last night in the fast-rising creek near school are casualties in any case. There have been too many just like them and I have no way to fix these things. A friend from Boston wrote something to me last week about not having the intelligence to take as subject for his poems anything other than his own life. For a while now I have sensed this in my own mood: This poem was never supposed to mention itself, other writers, or me. But I will not regret that those boys made it home, or that the cousins used the money at the bar. Still, there are no lights on this street. Still, there is so much mud outside that we carry it indoors with us.

I love these raw moist dawns with a thousand birds you hear but can't quite see in the mist. My old alien body is a foreigner struggling to get into another country. The loon call makes me shiver. Back at the cabin I see a book and am not quite sure what that is.

This is what our dying looks like. You believe in the sun. I believe I can't love you. Always be closing, Said our favorite professor before He let the gun go off in his mouth. I turned 29 the way any man turns In his sleep, unaware of the earth Moving beneath him, its plates in Their places, a dated disagreement. Let's fight it out, baby. You have Only so long left—a man turning In his sleep—so I take a picture. I won't look at it, of course. It's His bad side, his Mr. Hyde, the hole In a husband's head, the O Of his wife's mouth. Every night, I take a pill. Miss one, and I'm gone. Miss two, and we're through. Hotels Bore me, unless I get a mountain view, A room in which my cell won't work, And there's nothing to do but see The sun go down into the ground That cradles us as any coffin can.

Once you saw a drove of young pigs crossing the highway. One of them pulling his body by the front feet, the hind legs dragging flat. Without thinking, you called the Humane Society. They came with a net and went for him. They were matter of fact, uniformed; there were two of them, their truck ominous, with a cage. He was hiding in the weeds. It was then you saw his eyes. He understood. He was trembling. After they took him, you began to suffer regret. Years later, you remember his misfit body scrambling to reach the others. Even at this moment, your heart is going too fast; your hands sweat.

Here a little child I stand Heaving up my either hand; Cold as paddocks though they be, Here I lift them up to Thee, For a benison to fall On our meat, and on us all.Amen.

I. I watch them line up, ark-like, two by two, chatting quietly, and after the teacher passes, one pushes, and the one pushed begins the chase. This is how the orphans marched through Warsaw in '42, I tell the behaved ones: orderly and under orders. And I'm about to begin that horrific story, the one they don't yet know, when I pause to open the door for a little air. And there they are again, arms akimbo, like two stooges, the Angel of Death, and the Angel of Forgetfulness, those vaudeville comics, those incorrigible face-making kids, stuck forever—you first—no you—in the undersized doorframe of the museum I will, for lack of a better word, call childhood. II. Did I say Angels? Clearly, I meant my great-aunts whom you haven't yet met. My sister called them From-This-You-Shouldn't-Know and May-You-Never-Forget. I preferred Horseradish and Charoset, that bittersweet matzoh sandwich munched at Pesach between prayers. Everyone I knew was still alive, and no one cared that in Venice, that very summer, Ginsberg, in the name of the Jews, forgave Pound. Hadn't I'd forgone my own bar mitzvah for a weekend in Miami Beach where that borscht-belt-south social director and shuffleboard champ first shticked There's Noah business like Shoah business, soon after Lillian Hellman ushered her de-judaicized Anne Frank onto the stage. III. Are you writing another Holocaust poem? my son asks. He's gauging my anger at this interruption—a love sonnet, less so?—but it takes eight dollars of gas just to get to his summer job.To Hell with the poem, I need me some shekels, he sings, misquoting both Ravikovitch and Snoop Dogg. Poetry was nowhere in my father's house, or money either, our doorposts marked pass-over; although in a pinch Dad could recite Kipling's "Gunga Din." Make fun if you must, my mother says, but look in the mirror and I'm here to tell you that your father was a better man than all those anti-Semitic Pounds and Eliots rolled up into one. IV. That was twenty-three years ago, before my mother, cradling his neck and not yet crying, waited, while in East New York, the ambulance raced, and the Angel of Death loitered. Are you comfortable? she asks, adjusting my father's pillow, while he, ever the emcee, mimics Henny Youngman's I make a living. Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden might repeat, were he here, and what wouldn't I give, at this moment, for his stiff British upper lip. What's one more death in the family, Otto Frank argues, expunging not grief but sex from his daughter's diary, and what parent today would dare to play jury or judge. V. Are you writing another Holocaust poem? the Angel of Consciousness, who sits, while I muse, on my right shoulder and whom I often confuse with her errant two-headed twin, the Angel of Conscience, asks. And now I'm recalling my home office, the Akeidah above the desk, the knife blade drawn downward, that Angel, what's her name, restraining Abraham's implausibly blood-stained arm. And because I, exiled to the basement when my Isaac arrived, overlooked that drawing, it hung ten months above my newborn son's head. I feel wicked sleeping in this warm bed, my daughter proclaims, rehearsing her Anne Frank and pausing anxiously for applause. VI. Burn everything after I'm dead, Kafka said, poking his prewar Jewish head into yet one more of my poems. He's trying to explain the fatherland to the fatherless. No one reads poetry anymore, anyway, my mother, quoting from her own unpublished diary, writes.And who doesn't want to go on living even after death?

This was gruesome—fighting over a ham sandwich with one of the tiny cats of Rome, he leaped on my arm and half hung on to the food and half hung on my shirt and coat. I tore it apart and let him have his portion, I think I lifted him down, sandwich and all, on the sidewalk and sat with my own sandwich beside him, maybe I petted his bony head and felt him shiver. I have told this story over and over; some things root in the mind; his boldness, of course, was frightening and unexpected—his stubbornness—though hunger drove him mad. It was the breaking of boundaries, the sudden invasion, but not only that, it was the sharing of food and the sharing of space; he didn’t run into an alley or into a cellar, he sat beside me, eating, and I didn’t run into a trattoria, say, shaking, with food on my lips and blood on my cheek, sobbing; but not only that, I had gone there to eat and wait for someone. I had maybe an hour before she would come and I was full of hope and excitement. I have resisted for years interpreting this, but now I think I was given a clue, or I was giving myself a clue, across the street from the glass sandwich shop. That was my last night with her, the next day I would leave on the train for Paris and she would meet her husband. Thirty-five years ago I ate my sandwich and moaned in her arms, we were dying together; we never met again although she was pregnant when I left her—I have a daughter or son somewhere, darling grandchildren in Norwich, Connecticut, or Canton, Ohio. Every five years I think about her again and plan on looking her up. The last time I was sitting in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and heard that her husband was teaching at Princeton, if she was still married, or still alive, and tried calling. I went that far. We lived in Florence and Rome. We rowed in the bay of Naples and floated, naked, on the boards. I started to think of her again today. I still am horrified by that cat’s hunger. I still am puzzled by the connection. This is another insane devotion, there must be hundreds, although it isn’t just that, there is no pain, and the thought is fleeting and sweet. I think it’s my own dumb boyhood, walking around with Slavic cheeks and burning stupid eyes. I think I gave the cat half of my sandwich to buy my life, I think I broke it in half as a decent sacrifice. It was this I bought, the red coleus, the split rocking chair, the silk lampshade. Happiness. I watched him with pleasure. I bought memory. I could have lost it. How crazy it sounds. His face twisted with cunning. The wind blowing through his hair. His jaws working.

This was gruesome—fighting over a ham sandwich with one of the tiny cats of Rome, he leaped on my arm and half hung on to the food and half hung on to my shirt and coat. I tore it apart and let him have his portion, I think I lifted him down, sandwich and all, on the sidewalk and sat with my own sandwich beside him, maybe I petted his bony head and felt him shiver. I have told this story over and over; some things root in the mind; his boldness, of course, was frightening and unexpected—his stubbornness—though hunger drove him mad. It was the breaking of boundaries, the sudden invasion, but not only that it was the sharing of food and the sharing of space; he didn't run into an alley or into a cellar, he sat beside me, eating, and I didn't run into a trattoria, say, shaking, with food on my lips and blood on my cheek, sobbing; but not only that, I had gone there to eat and wait for someone. I had maybe an hour before she would come and I was full of hope and excitement. I have resisted for years interpreting this, but now I think I was given a clue, or I was giving myself a clue, across the street from the glass sandwich shop. That was my last night with her, the next day I would leave on the train for Paris and she would meet her husband. Thirty-five years ago I ate my sandwich and moaned in her arms, we were dying together; we never met again although she was pregnant when I left her—I have a daughter or son somewhere, darling grandchildren in Norwich, Connecticut, or Canton, Ohio. Every five years I think about her again and plan on looking her up. The last time I was sitting in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and heard that her husband was teaching at Princeton, if she was still married, or still alive, and tried calling. I went that far. We lived in Florence and Rome. We rowed in the bay of Naples and floated, naked, on the boards. I started to think of her again today. I still am horrified by the cat's hunger. I still am puzzled by the connection. This is another insane devotion, there must be hundreds, although it isn't just that, there is no pain, and the thought is fleeting and sweet. I think it's my own dumb boyhood, walking around with Slavic cheeks and burning stupid eyes. I think I gave the cat half of my sandwich to buy my life, I think I broke it in half as a decent sacrifice. It was this I bought, the red coleus, the split rocking chair, the silk lampshade. Happiness. I watched him with pleasure. I bought memory. I could have lost it. How crazy it sounds. His face twisted with cunning. The wind blowing through his hair. His jaw working.

There might be the quibble of birds and the swag Of a river and a distantly belled Altar of animals, softly spoken; Certainly cattail, sumac, and fern Would rise from the marshes nearby, revealed In forms too perfect to envy trees— Not trying for larger and larger keepsakes. Cryptic and subtle green, hedgerows Hiding mysterious deer, the start Of a rabbit, as if towers and clouds Had suddenly shadowed an open field— These would be the events of the day, Life having narrowed down to please Natural hungers and thirsts, the grass Thick at our feet, and, above our heads, The stars, their fireworks anemones. What shall I say of the house? Or you? Only industrious ghosts would know How lazily cropping up the view Would make the impossible possible; Nothing but weekdays would blankly graze On time’s oblivious pastures, free At last of motive and thought, and we, Becoming ourselves so naturally, Would never say, looking up at the sky, Another life is shining in the sky.