Tamir Greenberg Poems

To you who sleep on street corners,
hugging a bottle of vodka and scratching in your bitterness,
tottering drunk at intersections, bumming a shekel, a cigarette or gum,
challenging an attaché case and an SUV,
...

For eighteen entire days
we abandoned our bodies to the joy of love
and suddenly you went away: forces stronger
than the warmth of my body summoned you.
...

You, pure wickedness, sublime perpetuum mobile of agony, destruction, and bereavement,
Have you blessed progress, which perfects your language to the level of art?
Bless, wickedness, the wonderful airplane, lump of black steel
Carried on delicate streams of air, its greased belly loaded
...

I ask nothing
that Nature, in its grace, can't
yield, and even in that,
I wish for a commonplace thing.
...

If a moth comes through the window of my room
and sheds from its wings yellow dust on my notebook -
is this a sign?
If I wake at night from a troubled sleep
...

1.

In John Donne's poem about
the second anniversary
...

Today my grandma Rachel turned fifteen
and the saliva drooling from her mouth
is but a wondrous, diaphanous thread,
a path of light, a boat for drunken angels
...

It was many and many a year ago
in a kingdom by a mountain
I loved there an innocent dark boy
but his beautiful name and his gentle body
...

I can't write about love.
I'll write words. Here, I've written:
'Love.' I could become absorbed describing the warmth
in the pores of the skin. In all of them. The pores
...