“An education ought to be useless, or at least have a component of uselessness.”

I dropped my new shoes in the stream, thinking perhaps
They would get there before me, like two drowned Jews
Trundling along the seabed to Jerusalem. My immigrant parents lost patience and thrashed me.

Heavy, and now grizzled (pro tem) and generally high colored.
The voice light, tripping over itself, setting off at an angle
into the thickets of vocabulary. It’s gone; let it go.

Acacias. Acacias and rain make May here, the way
lindens and rain make July. Layers of complication and sorrow, 
which precipitate as opinion. Brusque. Off-kilter. Uncalled-for.

“What changed? Same maisonette in West London,
the straight shot of Talbot Road, held onto in spite of everything—
one’s original intended went away, someone else eventuated—

You have a raspberry silk suit.
May I fuck you in it?

I  

Things you said in drugstores 
when buying painkillers 
or at your tailor’s 

Rowans—not yet fully rowan red 
not yet in that tone they take on later 
of ember, berry, October, and death. 

Never lonelier than in August: 
hour of plenitude—in the country 
the red and golden tassels, 

I  

O that we might be our ancestors’ ancestors. 
A clump of slime in a warm bog. 
Life and death, fertilizing and parturition 

The solitary molar of a streetwalker 
whose body had gone unclaimed 
had a gold filling. 

Who else understood? Your edgy, defeated laugh?
The modest, unhopeful evangelism of your final appeal

I could only guess that the blade leapt out
to protect them, like a strong father his family.

I picked up just enough politics to frighten my mother,
and the slick, witless phrases I used about girls
were a mixture of my father’s and those I remembered

The population kept changing downstairs: single women,
unmarried mothers, whole families of petty criminals…

At the end of my feeding-tube, I didn’t realize
that to stay anywhere on the earth’s surface is to bleed:

Wolfgang Koeppen’s ‘Pigeons on the Grass’ is one of the most poetically satisfying reckonings in fiction with the postwar state of the world.