The sculptures in this gallery have been
carefully treated with a protective wax
so that visitors may touch them.
— exhibitions, the art institute
of chicago
Stone soldier, it's okay now.
I've removed my rings, my watch, my bracelets.
I'm allowed, brave girl,
to touch you here, where the mail covers your throat,
your full neck, down your shoulders
to here, where raised unlatchable buckles
mock-fasten your plated armor.
Nothing peels from you.
Warsaw, October: rose-madder by four,
the soldierly grey boulevards slippery
with tickets to winter. After forty years rebuilding,
the Old Town is like this beautiful girl I knew
whose face was wheel-broken in a crash,
and remade so well it was hard to say how
she looked wrong. I’ d brought two questions here —
holding them as if they might slip: who were
my mother’ s people? Where did they die?
In an attic-archive — deep card indexes, ink turned lilac
I will teach you my townspeople
how to perform a funeral —
for you have it over a troop
of artists —
unless one should scour the world —
you have the ground sense necessary.
I
The chemist creates
the brazen
approximation:
Life
Thy will be done
Sun
II
Time to garden
before I
die —
to meet
my compost maker
the caretaker
of the cemetery
Melt the fat around the heart;
Leave only muscle.
For us
Spectators
Leave
Only muscle;
Only trim the fat
To depth.
And, even if you
Nick the heart,
If you tear it
Or scratch it,
If you slice a petal off it,
Don’ t sweat it.
Be mindful only
That you leave the muscle
Clean,
Sheared of fat.
Or you can
Char the heart,
Melt down the fat,
Then eat it
With fucking
Fava beans.
Whatever you do,
Be sure
I want to reach you —
in that city where the snow
only shimmers silver
for a few hours. It has taken
seventeen years. This trip,
these characters patterned
in black ink, curves catching
on the page like hinges,
this weave of letters fraying
like the lines on my palm,
all broken paths. Outside,
no snow. Just the slow pull
of brown on the hills, umber
dulling to a bruise until the city
is just a memory of stained teeth,
the burn of white marble
I am not asleep, but I see
a limb, the fingers of death, the ghost
of an anonymous painter
leaving the prints of death
on the wall; the bright feathers
of soft birds blowing
away in the forest;
the bones of fish and
the white backs of strange women;
your breathing
like the slow thunder
on the other side of some river
as you sleep beside me; old
dancing teachers weeping in their offices;
toads with bellies as quiet
as girls asleep in mansions, dreaming
of saddles and pulling the sheets
You have a strange pet —
one eye is a cat’ s, the other a sheep’ s.
Yet, it won’ t socialize with felines,
will attack any flock.
On moonlit nights,
it wanders on the roof.
When you’ re alone
it will lie in your lap
preoccupied, slowly studying you
until — on its face — a challenge.
Translated from the Chinese
We thought nothing of it, he says,
though some came so close to where we slept.
I try to see him as a boy,
back in the Philippines, waking
to the sound of machine guns.
His family would spend their morning
spreading a paste over the sores
of the house’ s thick walls.
He tells how he touched
points where bullets entered,
his fingers, he says, disappeared into the holes,
as if inside there existed a space
where everything from this world could vanish.
Pigfoot (with Aces Under) Passes
The heat’ s on the hooker.
Drop’ s on the lam.
Cops got Booker.
Who give a damn?
The Kid’ s been had
But not me yet.
Dad’ s in his pad.
No sweat.
Margaret Are You Drug
Cool it Mag.
Sure it’ s a drag
With all that green flaked out.
Next thing you know they’ ll be changing the color of bread.
