For him it is always a Shabbat
of words. Fire is forbidden:
even the memory of ashes.

Gunnery practise dubs the Judean hills.
Anna Ticho stopped painting for many years.
Her eyes a still small voice, eroded

“So this is it, experience,” I thought,
lugging tin buckets from the ice machines
to rooms of real adults, with cigarettes

Hudsons and Studebakers ruled the streets,
a crossing guard and teenagers the pavement
when I was eight. But that was an improvement

The panic grass is pushing up
serenity into an air
that has at last regained its pale.

A scattering of mind (like rain
flung out small and squalled
against the random panes

He who finds his business in the slow,
persistent study of one green stone,
even a plain one chosen, let us say,

It is gravitas, the gray of quarry stone, the burden
of the middle plane, the moving toward the heavy hour
the angels come, bearing grief whose name is benediction.

I think, sometimes, of how you blocked
The future, as if it were a scene, and wrote it
In a letter before you drove all night through snow.

Rome in November evening many thanks
the smooth marble reef the cold tile-faces
the spray of lights before the gate closes