I could not help myself, I fell in love with the florist. Each day he handed me arrangements of flowers: lilies-of-the-valley, chrysanthemums and roses, exotic willows and violets.

I suppose you would have to call our apartment cozy. Two and a half rooms in a basement on Fourth Street, where the coats and the roaches mingle freely in the bathtub, the sink works often as not and the people wash their feet in the toilet. Cozy but not sanitary.

OK, it’s sunny, otherworldly, skintight, 
where we’re flabby and clouded over, pining away 
under layers of jealousy, detachment, the compost heap

 

In the old days there were characters
and settings: if you wrote snow,
you could see wetness and whiteness

It's all talk isn't it, emblem
and suggestion, it's either tremulous stutter
or taunting display: flashy but fleshless, a con man

I support the animals’ urge to survive.
So much for opinions. Slithering, writhing,
nosing my way through dirt, I can identify
with that. I joke to keep the system going.

The lighthouse as an image
of loneliness has its limits.

For as we stand on the shore

 

My thesis concerns the quantification of desire: what constitutes a unit of passion, what represents a significant change in body heat? Think of all the love given out without counting: to the mistress of a man who sleeps in a bed separate from his wife, whose business interests weigh heavily upon him.

In the diner the busboy counts the empty stools and looks at his reflection in the coffee urns. On the radio the announcer says the allies have won another victory. There have been few casualties.

The sun is very hot. Why is it no one complains of the heat in France?

All night you talked about your work, how the market would go up and up, how there was nothing to lose no matter how great the risk. The women loved you for that. A strong wind blew in from the bay, but it did not so much as ruffle your hair. The wheels of the Chrysler spun freely in a ditch.

What is so strange about Desnos is that he says he is not afraid of going crazy, of dying, or even of the Nazis who are always watching him.

When the czar arrives the audience is still, as though he still had the power to become flesh. This is a silent film, so when the czar speaks a card covers the screen. It says, “I decree the death of one hundred, no, two hundred workers.” The workers put their hands in front of their faces; this is the film-maker's image of fear, his idea of a dog with his tail between his legs, of the hiss of the cat.

This year the arsonist burns his own room.
If the lilac blooms, it has its reasons.

When you unzip your dress
a thousand insects run for cover,

I must confess to everything.

Ira Sadoff’s poem “February: Pemaquid Point” appeared in our Winter–Spring 1980 issue. His most recent collection is True Faith (2012). The lighthouse as an image
of loneliness has its limits.For as we stand on the shore
of this ocean, crusted snowOn t…