For Efraim
Night leaves me as goy as the
smell of unclean livestock. I
hold in my left hand the part

of me that excites you. In the
right I hold our year-old debate:
Are we a connection or a juxta-

position? Is the sad force that
lured you here the force that
launched your odyssey among

Grecian Isles with a middle-
class Onassis; that fueled
your summer labor at Kibbutz

Lavi and sent you tripping
after Grateful Dead tours? I
claim that reaching right and

reaching left are the same;
reaching is not offended though
it should be. A storm too shy to

climax, rumbling in the next
county, nudges a warm front
over the bedroom sill. We

wait for fresh mistakes. You
find each “Sweet Jesus, beware
of sinners” irresistible. Almost.

For Ernie’s Eyes
She christened him Ernie the second
she pulled him from his breathing box and held him jello-like
way up
shaking him a little
a cap of bells
then bringing him down
into what you would call a kiss
which                    actually                    was
the licking of her face                  indiscriminate                   with a tongue of ecstasy,

she

giggling “Ernie, Ernie!”
because he was devastating like Ernie in “My Three Sons”       her favorite TV show.

That Opening Sequence.                       Yes, it’s a genuine memory.

Three pairs of spindly adolescent legs the middle pair in jeans is
framed on both sides by longer limbs in suede.                    The suede legs wear leather loafers.
The jeans culminate in white sneakers.

We see these legs from the knees down. My childish mind thinks they stem from a single torso a human insect          this impression reinforced for
only one pair of arms descends into the frame — to do the Charleston?
No, only one of the loafers taps.

These hands of an adolescent Insect God
create identities          names          in accordion form.

“It was the dark spots        one around each eye        that made me think of Ernie’s glasses.”

My father was the eldest of Three Sons.       Their similar faces are the foundation of my sense
that there is a foundation that lies beyond and backlights our senses

and the unquestioned conviction that photographs from the past
are the actual steps that lead from the age of the radio, the Korean War, The House Un-American Activities Committee, Vietnam and the pearly necklace of assassinations that our country went diving for

into red waters

and those black and white faces on Grandma’s walls
are not precursors but are identical with the face that I see across the table,
in the bathtub, in the mirror       with my eyes        brown as Ernie’s
burnt as the eyes of the squirrel he treed and Uncle shot
and when I was commanded to go and pluck it from
its cushion of crackling leaves
gripping it at the root of its tail
they looked up at me in outrage.         Their hard-won lifelessness
bored through my own outraged irises.

I who had not fired the gun fired my eyes into the eyes of the one who had done it.
Why must I fetch you your murder trophy?
Why not my brother who was also present          already bloodthirsty?

Was it precisely because he had already been brutalized
and I had not?

I would not climb the hill when Ernie’s enfeebled eyes           clouded over
a sky                         overripe with storm.                     I would not
train my eyes on the sight of the gun.

I would only imagine the spectacular liberation of those eyes
when love and pity lodged a bullet in him.            Thank God he couldn’t know
since he was only a             dog that she who had christened him
had given her thighs to a wolf-man who gambled on dogfights
and bought her drugs with the blood money
and carved a brief shelter in her womb for a two-legged brown-eyed bitch.

I Imagine a Womb
My husband is either
sleeping or
thinking about math

in the dark.
His dark is bigger
than the main dark

which for a long
minute welcomes the
buzz of a motor-

cycle like a chain-
saw enjoying itself
more than is decent.