“You must speak not only of great devastation
but of women kissing in the yellow grass!”
I heard this not from a great philosopher
but from my brother Tony
who could do four haircuts in thirteen minutes,
his eyes closed, reciting our National Anthem to the mirror.
“You must drink cucumber vodka and naked sing all night
Unite women and boys of the Earth!”
He played the accordion out of tune in a country
where the only musical instrument is the door.
I remember Tony arguing in front of his mirrors, the soldiers
were painting the trees, Tony sat
on the floor of white hair, and all the trees were
painted white. And he spat at Alfonso’ s irony, but when
they played accordion, the fourth among us had no name.
“I am not sleeping with Tony! He simply cuts my hair!”
— but our dinner is a tiny blue fish and, with my lean brother-in-law,
we are playing cards. I pull spade after spade after spade but
Love cities, this is what my brother taught me
as he cut soldiers’ hair, then tidied tomatoes
watching Sonya and I dance on a soapy floor —
I open the window, say in a low voice, my brother.
The voice I do not hear when I speak to myself is the clearest voice.
But the sky was all around us once.
We played chess with empty matchboxes,
he wrote love letters to my wife
and ran outside and ran back, yelling to her, “You! Mail has arrived!”
Brother of a waltzing husband, barber of a waltzing wife
I watch loud animal bones in their faces & I can smell the earth.
Our boys want a public killing in a sunlit piazza
They drag a young policeman, a sign in his arms swaying
“I arrested the girls of Vasenka”
For the boys have no idea how to kill a man.
The bald man in a barbershop whispers, I will kill him for
a box of oranges.
On a lucid morning they pay a box of oranges.
The bald man arrives with white towels and a soap and a bottle
A kiss on the forehead — erases misery.
I kiss your forehead.
A kiss on the eyes — lifts sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.
A kiss on the lips — is a drink of water.
I kiss your lips.
A kiss on the forehead — erases memory.
1917
I am happy living simply:
like a clock, or a calendar.
Worldly pilgrim, thin,
wise — as any creature. To know
the spirit is my beloved. To come to things — swift
as a ray of light, or a look.
To live as I write: spare — the way
God asks me — and friends do not.
1919
Where does such tenderness come from?
These aren’ t the first curls
I’ ve wound around my finger —
I’ ve kissed lips darker than yours.
The sky is washed and dark
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
Other eyes have known
and shifted away from my eyes.
But I’ ve never heard words like this
in the night
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
with my head on your chest, rest.
In the beginning, a word, move;
then a plan and then the reasons,
which I do not remember exactly.
I remember clearly only the clothes
we were given for the journey
and the last, silent meal we ate.
We left the place as lightly as we
had come, so many years before.
And at the picnic table under the ancient elms,
one of my parents turned to me and said:
“We hope you end up here,”
where the shade relieves the light, where we sit
in some beneficence — and I felt the shape of the finite
after my ether life: the ratio, in all dappling,
of dark to bright; and yet how brief my stay would be
under the trees, because the voice I’ d heard
could not cradle me, could no longer keep me
in greenery; and I would have to say good-bye
again, make my way across the white
I wait for my shadow to forget me,
to take that one phantom step that I keep
from taking. I wait for the simple flash
of a dancer's spat upon this one moon
of stage-light, the mind's lonely oval
illuminated on the surface of some
windless pond or slew. And the old soft-shoe
practices to get it right, husha-husha-hush
in its constant audition of sawdust.
Even this choreography of useless
wishing is not enough to keep tonight
from becoming nothing more than some floor's
forgotten routine where faded, numbered
