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.
...

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
...

Having written so much poetry
I learn the true way of love,
in particular, all that concerns
white doors whose edges are gold, their weight ivory,
...