Bluebird

Interestingly, as much as I was into poetry, I never got that much into Bukowski’s poems – I gravitated more to his fiction. And also read a lot of John Fante, as a result.
Interestingly, as much as I was into poetry, I never got that much into Bukowski’s poems – I gravitated more to his fiction. And also read a lot of John Fante, as a result.
by Yehuda Amichai On a roof in the Old City laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight: the white sheet of a woman who is my enemy, the towel of a man who is my enemy, to wipe off the sweat of his brow. In the sky of the Old City a kite. At the other end of the string,…
“This person would be an animal.
This animal would be large, at least as large
as a workhorse. It would chew cud, like cows,
having several stomachs.”
“Magpie being the only creature rumored to have
refused the ark, preferring to perch high on the mast
& curse the rain.”
“We do this, they do that.
They peel the larynx from one of our brothers’ throats.
We devein one of their sisters.
The quicksand pits they built were good.
Our amputation teams were better.”
“In this century, chatbots write poems
where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick clouds of a storm.”
“A city boy, I always wanted to go fishing. The DiFilippo brothers brought me
to a secret lake where we cast our lines into the dark, the barbed lures
spinning.”
“I have not disappeared.
The boulevard is full of my steps. The sky is
full of my thinking. An archbishop
prays for my soul, even though
we met only once, and even then, he was
busy waving at a congregation.”
“It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher”
“Strephon kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.”
“Out of every hundred people
those who always know better:
fifty-two.
Unsure of every step:
almost all the rest.”
“As the tide rises, the closed mollusc
Opens a fraction to the ocean’s food,
Bathed in its riches. Do not ask
What force would do, or if force could.”
“A shadow in the shape of a house
slides out of a house
and loses its shape on the lawn.”
“I listened as he taught me to relax the hand just enough.
They can smell, he said, the oils our pores release
when we tense to catch. You have to believe it,
he said. You don’t mean any harm.”
“Now dusk. Now fear. We pencil what we owe
on this short form, our numbers good enough.”