Bert Meyers

1

A suburb of coffee cups;
napkins, those crumpled hills;
silverware, freeways
spotted with grease, with flesh...

and the ash-tray,
a ghetto full of charred men
with grizzled heads

Birds drip from the trees.
The moon's a little goat
over there on the hill;
dawn, as blue as her milk,
fills the sky's tin pail.

The air's so cold a gas station
glitters in an ice-cube.
The freeway hums like a pipe

Rabbi of condiments,
whose breath is a verb,
wearing a thin beard
and a white robe;
you who are pale and small
and shaped like a fist,
a synagogue,
bless our bitterness,

for Odette I

Bales of hay—cartons

1963,
Cuban missile crisis Go to sleep my daughter
go to sleep my son

I'm still here, in a skin
thinner than a dybbuk's raincoat;
strange as the birds who scrounge,
those stubborn pumps
that bring up nothing...

Maddened by you
for whom the cash register,
with its clerical bells,