I Imagine the Gods

I imagine the gods saying, We will

make it up to you. We will give you

three wishes, they say. Let me see

the squirrels again, I tell them.

Let me eat some of the great hog

stuffed and roasted on its giant spit

and put out, steaming, into the winter

of my neighborhood when I was usually

too broke to afford even the hundred grams

I ate so happily walking up the cobbles,

past the Street of the Moon

and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,

the Street of Silence and the Street

of the Little Pissing. We can give you

wisdom, they say in their rich voices.

Let me go at last to Hugette, I say,

the Algerian student with her huge eyes

who timidly invited me to her room

when I was too young and bewildered

that first year in Paris.

Let me at least fail at my life.

Think, they say patiently, we could

make you famous again. Let me fall

in love one last time, I beg them.

Teach me mortality, frighten me

into the present. Help me to find

the heft of these days. That the nights

will be full enough and my heart feral.

About Friends

The good thing about friends


is not having to finish sentences.


I sat a whole summer afternoon with my friend once

on a river bank, bashing heels on the baked mud

and watching the small chunks slide into the water

and listening to them - plop plop plop.

He said, 'I like the twigs when they...you know...

like that.' I said, 'There's that branch...'

We both said, 'Mmmm'. The river flowed and flowed

and there were lots of butterflies, that afternoon.


I first thought there was a sad thing about friends

when we met twenty years later.

We both talked hundreds of sentences,

taking care to finish all we said,

and explain it all very carefully,

as if we'd been discovered in places

we should not be, and were somehow ashamed.


I understood then what the river meant by flowing.

White Apples

when my father had been dead a week

I woke

with his voice in my ear

I sat up in bed



and held my breath

and stared at the pale closed door



white apples and the taste of stone



if he called again

I would put on my coat and galoshes