Poem of My Naming, Poem of My Facelessness

As I walked up from the train on Friday night (shabbos for some, not for me) the Brooklyn storefronts, housefronts, nineteenth century stoops and shutters, seen at a certain angle (regular stamp of brick beneath a still, cold sky that, darkening, exhaled its breath of light, relieved, released from duty) recalled to me a picture from a book, some half-starved, stoic, winter-buckled town locked down in the drifted silence of the plains in the stolid fastness of last century (here, a mile or two from Ellis Island, its silting of other legends) Winter, winter

Art · Literature · Poetry · Race, History, and American Society