Blossom Road

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I don’t know why I pulled over, idling, right before Christmas, two months of snow and
salt
plowed onto the shoulder, each squat rambler aglow, a life-size baby Jesus reborn in the
DiPasquale’s front yard,
why everything looked different, the way the woods you got lost in as a kid seem small
and disappointing when you return to them older,
because I hadn’t been out of there that long, less than a year, and as far as I could tell in
the December blur,
beyond the slight expansion of the motherhouse infirmary, where the sick nuns, most of
them retired teachers,
convalesced or passed, where I’d volunteered during study hall changing bed pans and
pouring Hawaiian Punch into paper cups,
they hadn’t renovated the spired building I’d entered day after day, my plaid jumper
becoming more ironic with each curve. How selfish it is after you leave a place to doubt that it could function without you.

Articles

Songs for the End of the World

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On the other side of praise / it’s time to chop down the tall tree in the ear— / enough enough with the starlit promontories—/ a nervous condition traces itself/ in lightning in the clouds, / a little requiem rattles among Coke cans / and old vegetable tins

Fiction & Poetry Articles

Empty Air

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“Here in this empty air we reckon ink, / Color and volume as a way of life, / Leibnitz’s chain across the galaxy, / A string and a spiral.” A Poem by Kenneth Fields.

Articles

Hartford

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City of gun shots, where Hartford Hospital on Jefferson Street employed my mother, a nurse, dressed in her white uniform with pearl buttons, and now employs me, forty five years later, a chaplain with a black shirt and a white clerical collar. Some nights when I sleep in the on-call room, I think I hear them page my mother’s elegant name, Loretta. “Trouble,” a nurse says, “Why is the city so troubled?”

2013

Morning Blessings

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For Rabbi Burt Jacobson

Blessed is the dog’s tongue
Shamanic prayer flag
Binder of vapor
Harbinger of light’s arrival. Blessed is the brain stem
That battled entropy
All night on my behalf. Blessed are my nether, pleasure parts
That double as effluent outlets. Blessed are you, Ya, granter of civility,
In whose name the trash trucks
Are held in abeyance until the sunlight
Girds the plum trees. Blessed are the medicines,
Polyglot organic molecules,
That soothe or jumpstart
My various organs, that find
My son at sea and return him
Safely to port.

2012

Above the Roofs of the Jewish Village

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I and my imaginary lover hover
above the roofs of the Jewish village. Above the courtyards, dairy barns, animal pens. Above the awnings of the chicken coops. Amid smells and clucking, cold air and wind
muss her imaginary hair, soft, colorful, flapping like cards. My love is not Jewish, she’s an urban girl, from the city of Tel Aviv,
giggling a pleasant and liberating laugh.

Articles

Ruins

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The city as a shifting ruin / Particularly though not exclusively / As an American phenomenon / Most of my lived life / Haunts me, blocks knocked / Down in “urban renewal” now blank…

2012

Night Stop

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“He has only his open hand and his sweetly accusatory Bless you. We have only to turn our heads and he’s gone….”

2012

Poetry in the Age of Mass Incarceration

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As a result of the transformation of America into an incarceration nation, the now-bursting prisons have become hotbeds of testimony, poetry, art-making, and speechifying. The books of Reginald Dwanye Betts, which are part of this flood of prison-based testimony, recount the tale of a young man who entered prison as a confused sixteen-year-old but who now, more than a decade later, has embarked on a career as a writer.

Articles

Feral

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Climbing the tree had not been a thoughtless or impetuous action. The girl had taken a Jew’s harp, a handful of dried cranberries, a scrap of blue leather, feathers, a vial of silver and turquoise beads, a needle, some thread, other secret objects, some sacred, all carefully balanced in the lap of an oversized T-shirt that the girl turned alternately into a desk, a knapsack, a handkerchief for blowing her nose, while another T-shirt became a bandanna, a snood, and a white banner that declared most adamantly: “I will not surrender.”

Articles

Lamenter-in-Chief

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Let us hope that Pinsky’s new Selected Poems will help to dispel the more jaded views of his accomplishments. For Pinsky is an important figure. He is also, as Tony Hoagland has rightly observed, “a much stranger poet than is generally acknowledged.”