I close my eyes david ignatow biography

I stopped to pick up the bagel
rolling away in the wind,
annoyed with myself
for having dropped it
...

I close my eyes like a good little boy at night in bed,
as I was told to do by my mother when she lived,
...

Whatever we do, whether we light
strangers’ cigarettes—it may turn out
to be a detective wanting to know who is free
...

I am looking for a past
I can rely on
in order to look to death
with equanimity.
...

This tree has two million and seventy-five thousand leaves.
Perhaps I missed a leaf or two but I do feel triumphant
...

You wept in your mother's arms
and I knew that from then on
I was to forget myself.
...

As I enter the theatre the play is going on.
I hear the father say to the son on stage,
You’ve taken the motor apart.
...

I am leaving earth with little knowledge of it,
without having visited its great cities and lands
I was here for a moment, it seems, to praise,
and now that I am leaving I am astounded
...

Here in bed behind a brick wall
I can make order and meaning,
but how do I begin? How do I
emerge without panic
...

She was saying mad things:
'To hell with the world!
Love is all you need! Go on
and get it! What are you
...

I'm very pleased to be a body. Can there be someone without a body?
As you hold mine I feel firmly assured that bodies are the right thing
and I think all life is a body. I'm happy about trees, grass and water,
especially with the sun shining on it. I slip into it, a summer pleasure.
...

I dream I am lying in the mud on my back and staring up into the sky.
Which do I prefer, since I have the power to fly into the blue slate of
air? It is summer. I decide quickly that by lying face up I have a view
of the sky I could not get by flying in it, while I'd be missing the mud.
...

Without sexual attraction, there is
the brutal movement of the sea.
The face peers out of its skeletal frame
and hands reach like bone.
...

We drop in the evening like dew
upon the ground and the living
feel it on their faces. Death
soft, moist everywhere upon us,
...

It is heart-rending to know a kiss
cannot cure the world of its illnesses,
nor can your happiness, nor your tragedy
of being a discrete person, for the bodies
...

If we could be brought to the surface
like a gleaming fish and served for supper,
if we could eat and swallow our own life
to make a good meal, if we could go fishing
...