English Poems

The Poet:

Fugitive lung, prodigal intestine —
where’ s the pink crimp in my side
where they took you out?

The Octopus:

Another dead mare waits
in the shoals of some body
of water, waits to be burden,
borne into a foaming ocean,
where it might become food
for whales, or, simply empty
signifier — hair latched to the sea’ s undulation
like Absalom’ s beauty
caught in the playful branches

Surely there are teeth so small.
I have listened for their turning,
this frail swell and fall

like old blood yearning
upwards through the skin of days.
Slowly, I am learning

their count, though numbers fray
in me, and the loaded instants
graft, coming always

All winter we sat blind, I next to the girl
who loved her scabs, the blood shields
her head gave up, her face a sun of blank
amazement. She drew. This means love:
a circle with a line through it. More work:
a cross. More crosses. Ice sloughed
through fields. Ice river, the pages

A yarn ball and a hill
maintain an equipoise until
their neatness starts to bore the gods
of potential and energy
who hedge bets, reckoning the odds
of when the rest will be

If you sleep the night inside someone, her cells,
saltwater-stained, fuse with yours like the blood of twins.

Apes in Mauritania grow stronger, Galileo tells us,
influenced by the sphere of angels.

Here, then — thumbnail sketches
for zoning changes along the riparian bank

of the species boundary, for a chimera.
Like fiber optics, human nerves

lay along glassy bone & spinal veins of a fetal mouse
that will be drowned before ever waking.

I

Each man has a quiet that revolves
around him as he beats his head against the earth. But I am laughing

hard and furious. I pour a glass of pepper vodka
and toast the gray wall. I say we were

never silent. We read each other’ s lips and said
one word four times. And laughed four times

in loving repetition. We read each other’ s lips to uncover
the poverty of laughter. Touch the asphalt with fingers to hear the cool earth of Vasenka

Deposit ears into the raindrops on a fisherman’ s tobacco hair.
And whoever listens to me: being

Motionless forgetful music of women and men
touching each forehead, breathing a soul into each immeasurable other,
on earth where we are, stranger, through madness unattainable
or grace, in difficult traffic reaching for each immeasurable other:

no one on earth (O bitterness, O desire, — who commands the ships? —
or, who — ) touching the Lord’ s shoulder, and breathing a soul, has measured

this motionless forgetful music of women and men. Thus
I (behind the eye what sleeps?) must from the blind borrow this light.

Don’ t forget this: Men who live in this time remember the price of each bottle of vodka. Sunlight on the canal outside the train-station. With the neighbor’ s ladder, my brother Tony “Mosquito” and I climb the poplar in the public garden with one and a half bottles of vodka and we drink there all night. Sunlight on a young girl’ s face, asleep on the church steps. Tony recites poems, forgets I cannot hear. I watch the sunlight in the rearview mirror of trolleys as they pass.