I was born in Shanghai, China, the son of Holocaust survivors, and grew up in New York City. While I value my anonymity, I have had several brushes with famous people. My father was a classmate of the great logician, Einstein’s Princeton friend Kurt Godel, and I met him once, long ago, when I was little. All I remember is that it was July, but he was wearing a winter coat. I was schoolmates at Stephen A. Halsey Jr. High in Queens with Tommy Erdelyi, who became Tommy Ramone of, well, The Ramones. Another Jr. High classmate, who also went to Stuyvesant High School with me, was Walter Becker, co-founder of Steely Dan. We rode the subway together most mornings from 71st and Continental Avenue on our long journey to 14th Street in Manhattan. Now I live in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, where I taught in the English Department at Saint Cloud State University for thirty-one years, and I can attest to the fact that all the children in the Lake Wobegon area are, indeed, above average.
​

​Another Day in America


You’re on a street where panic plumes, red stain billowing above cars and traffic lights, scramble of legs, a siren’s Doppler wail. A body lies twisted, harsh angle, blood-soaked blouse, just at the base of a bay tree. Every eye has shriveled, every mouth torn into gaps of flesh. Now your city is a crime scene; yellow and black tape winds around the park. 
Paramedics whisk your neighbors away on stretchers, swaddled in white blankets. 
The air is filled with smoke. Police shouting, pushing people back, cameras everywhere. 
You can neither stammer nor cry in this public din. Still, you’re whole enough, if slightly 
deafened, one of the lucky ones. And though you won’t sleep tonight, you’ll rise from your bed, stiff, aching and bleary-eyed, having survived another day in America.




Behind the Wall 
Binghamton, April 3, 2009

That’s where the eye waits, bloodshot
and blind with the rage of bridges and rot.

Metallic lust, the long barrel of his gun:
wrong time, wrong place
and the coughing of red mouths.
Cover your eyes
in this trembling noonday light…

Impossible
yet we believe images familiar now, two 
stars intertwined
by the grip of terrible gravity

Seen only in the tug of their longing: 
velocity, targets, impact where lines converge.





What the Bullets Sang 
In memory of the Charlie Hebdo murders, 1/7/15

Today bullets sing the praises of flesh.
How soft it feels, how fragile the bones

beneath, how red and copious the blood.
Someone barks at the sky, and the moon

appears, swathed in an ocean of clouds.
Offended, he fires off a thousand rounds

and the moon bleeds and disappears. 
All night, pens draw their own form of 

blood. In the morning it is calm and silent 
and cold. Later, snow begins to fall and bare 

oaks scratch quietly at the gray-white sky. 
Somewhere the rage grows again, heated

ball pulsing at its swelling core. Someone
nails the only face of god to a dying tree

face without mercy, a human face frozen
in adamantine certainty. A crow screeches

and the echo bounces back across the snow,
falling to earth among trees and fields and tears.

First published in Beakful



Newsflash


So little at stake in this cold room, 
with my eye at the level of grass. 

Such an illusion of safety in oaks 
gently waving, and a glimpse 

of my neighbor’s roof covered 
with branches and twigs. Already 

there are many dead, the newsflash says, 
another flood of bullets and bombs. 

Angry red men are waving their fists, 
experts talk and talk, drones circle 

distant battlefields, a new kind of Valkyrie 
gathering souls with unblinking, mechanical eyes.





In September
“…the house returns
to the peace of the pines and the sand”
                                                -Neruda

Gray morning. September, 
and summer refuses 
to die. My neighbor jogs 
by, waves, already sweating 
in humid air. His daughter 
rides her bike to pace him 
as he goes.  Near the river 
they disappear into mist. 
Around my house, fat 
hydrangeas rust. Already 
a few leaves begin to blaze 
on maples. Weary oaks bend 
closer to earth. I’m waiting 
for something here, a promise 
someone made or a workman
not yet come or the buzzing
phone, but it’s lost on the other 
side of time. My calendar 
comes up blank, even dates 
gone missing, as if the solid 
walls we’ve built so carefully, 
foundations of concrete block, 
gravel and asphalt streets 
could liquefy and drain off into sand.