We were smoking some of this knock… Operation Memory was announced. T… Each soldier went, counting backwa… With a needle in his arm. And the… Of a recession, in the middle of a…

It’s my birtday I’ve got an empty stomach and the desire to be lazy in the hammock and maybe go for a cool swim on a hot day with the trombone in Sinatra’s

This bed thy center is, these wall… The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful ol… Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye,… That never touch with inarticulate… Those dying generations-at their s…

What is it about the Abyss that tempts the young poet to kiss the air and head for the nearest c… unreasonable attachment to the bli… of falling—what accounts for it? U…

What I propose is not Marxism, which is not dead yet in the English department, Not maximalism, which was

The bloom was off the economic rec… “I just want to know one thing,” s… What was that one thing? He’ll ne… Because at just that moment he hea… Of broken glass in the bathroom, a…

It’s the day of the ram and the head of the year Rosh Ha’Shanah at services I sat next to Mel Torme who outshone

Christmas defeated Chanukah once again last night by a margin of three billion dolla… or so, but every time I hear a Yiddish word like bupkes

The woman said yes she would go to… Unless he heard wrong and she said… Where they could learn the tango a… Of Nazi war criminals unrepentant… But no, she said Australia. She’d…

Some people find out they are Jew… They can’t believe it. Thy had always hated Jews. As children they had roamed in gan… neighborhood, looking for Jews.

His first infidelity was a mistake… As her false pregnancy. Later, th… He was born three months earlier t… On his birth certificate, which ha… A marriage license in his hands.…

The grapefruit in the Florida orc… has ripened into a globe in Hartfo… for him to look at, not to eat. If he had a tin can he would beat it as a drummer in a band beats

There comes a time in every man’s… when he thinks: I have never had a… original thought in my life including this one & therefore… eliminate all ideas from my poems

for J.A., December 3, 1975 Ashes that survive the aftermath o… Bury the past bravely, retaining Only those messages that are least… And therefore most desirable

The happiest moment in a woman’s l… Is when she hears the turn of her… In the lock, and pretends to be as… When he enters the room, trying to… Quiet but clumsy, bumping into thi…