The Floating Bridge: Prose Poems

Contents

C O N T E N T S Far Villages Mannequins, 3 Kafka, 4 The Next Village, 5 Big Brother Loses His Virginity, 6 Fresh Fish, 7 Pulling a Rabbit Out of a Hat, 8 Don Quixote, 9 Metaphors, 10 Translating a Poem, 11 The Overwhelming Sadness of the Earth, 12 Plum, 13 Wisdom, 14 The Orange Flags of Babylon The Orange Flags of Babylon, 17 Learning to Eat a Pomegranate, 18 The Yellow Bird, 19 Picasso, 20 The Headless Saints, 21 The Amateur Zen Master, 22 Trapped Inside a Haiku Poem, 23 The Island of Nirvana, 24 Rain, 25 The Dreams of Children, 26 Trains, 27 The Long Road, 28 The Bible Belt The Bible Belt, 31 The Gods, 32 The Ladders of Purgatory, 33 Drawing Jesus, 34 Jesus’s IQ, 35 Seduction, 36 The Jewish Ghetto, 37 Boarding the Bus to Gomorrah, 38 Om, 39 Zero, 40 Halo, 41 The House of Death, 42 Paris The Bedouins of Paris, 45 Spring in Paris, 46 Lucifer, 47 The Kissing Institute, 48 Pornography, 49 French Foreign Legion, 50 Gertrude Stein’s Gardener, 51 Dying Park, 52 The Gates of Paris, 53 An American in Paris, 54 Paris, USA, 55 viii The Floating Bridge The Floating Bridge, 59 Making a Forest, 60 A Visit with Dalí, 61 North Wind, 62 Children’s Book Illustrations, circa 1890, 63 Learning Italian Slowly, 64 A Poem I Wrote Thirty Years Ago, 65 Chinese Restaurant, 66 Welcome Home, Children, 67 The History of the Umbrella, 68 While I Sleep, 69 The Fish, 70 Acknowledgments, 73 ix ...