“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?

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

I  

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

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

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. 

Father, the bird writing writes bird’s nest soup —
a frail, disciplined structure, spun from its spittle
with bits of straw and dirt, then boiled with beaten eggs . . .

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