I'd seen him scuttling under a parked car
In the oil-stained side street near the auto shop,
Or peering from beneath the juniper bush

While we were waiting for the movie to begin,
my wife caught up with her old friend Maryann,
and because I could only make out every
third or fourth word, my attention fluttered off
in search of something else and landed on
the thirty-five-ish couple sitting three rows
in front of us—the backs of their heads

We’d sentenced everything that had become our lives
to a year’s confinement in a small dark cell,

How stupid Penelope's suitors must have been,
Each morning as they elbowed for a place
Near her, and cocked their wits, eyeing each other,

In 1834, when Alexander Kinglake
stood by the banks of the Sava River,
at the frontier of the Ottoman Empire,

Leona heard the engines again, the great
cranes outside her window breaking up the old history,
the bulldozers striking layers of rock that ran

Paddles sloshing in tunnel.

Volume: all thumbs.

Dis-ser-vice? Naaa...

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

The air is measurable. Clocks
bell, publishing hour on hour
each other’s truth, one two, three four:

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