I could not help myself, I fell in love with the florist. Each day he handed me arrangements of flowers: lilies-of-the-valley, chrysanthemums and roses, exotic willows and violets.

I suppose you would have to call our apartment cozy. Two and a half rooms in a basement on Fourth Street, where the coats and the roaches mingle freely in the bathtub, the sink works often as not and the people wash their feet in the toilet. Cozy but not sanitary.

OK, it’s sunny, otherworldly, skintight, 
where we’re flabby and clouded over, pining away 
under layers of jealousy, detachment, the compost heap

 

In the old days there were characters
and settings: if you wrote snow,
you could see wetness and whiteness

It's all talk isn't it, emblem
and suggestion, it's either tremulous stutter
or taunting display: flashy but fleshless, a con man

I support the animals’ urge to survive.
So much for opinions. Slithering, writhing,
nosing my way through dirt, I can identify
with that. I joke to keep the system going.

The lighthouse as an image
of loneliness has its limits.

For as we stand on the shore

 

My thesis concerns the quantification of desire: what constitutes a unit of passion, what represents a significant change in body heat? Think of all the love given out without counting: to the mistress of a man who sleeps in a bed separate from his wife, whose business interests weigh heavily upon him.

Imagine a town where no one walks the streets. Where the side walks are swept clean as ceilings and the barber pole stands still as a corpse. There is no wind. The windows on the brick buildings are boarded up with doors, and a single light shines in the all-night diner while the rest of the town sits in its shadow.

This is the year of the suicide.
The year the grass dies
and does not rise again. The year

Ira Sadoff’s poem “February: Pemaquid Point” appeared in our Winter–Spring 1980 issue. His most recent collection is True Faith (2012). The lighthouse as an image
of loneliness has its limits.For as we stand on the shore
of this ocean, crusted snowOn t…