In Far Rockaway Shortly before my tenth birthday, we moved from Bell Park Manor-Terrace and that childhood bedroom to an apartment building on Beach Channel Drive in Far Rockaway, also in Queens. Far Rockaway was a tougher and more heterogeneous neighborhood than the predominately white and Jewish Queens Village, and I was confronted with some […]
Blink
In My Bedroom One of my early childhood memories – I might have been four or six or eight, I don’t know, but certainly no older than eight; I think younger – is of lying in bed, alone in the dark, thinking about death. (I was a scream at the birthday parties.) I say alone […]
Ocean Poem II
The Shores of the World Where the seam of the sky and the open sea meet the mind’s long gaze, and the tide tugs all along the earth’s vast sands – the edge of the world held out into space like a gift on a palm – the weight of the infinite day rests on […]
Ocean Poem
Ocean’s End Along the coastal Atlantic at summer’s end the Caribbean’s hurricane mood looms over the waters north to New York, the Cape and beyond. The season’s swells deliver you from the human traffic toward the sun while the locals remain to neighbor their brooding god. In fishing villages, the perennial change in weather forces […]
Bordello Rooms
The way I do it is I stand in the middle. I’m in the desert this time, gazing at the landscape as the dogs chase rabbits and roadrunners around me. My back is turned to Highway 80, to RVs and the other signs of post-nineteenth-century life, though they aren’t that plentiful. Before me, almost all […]