Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.
they thought the field was wasting
and so they gathered the marker rocks and stones and
piled them into a barn they say that the rocks were shaped
some of them scratched with triangles and other forms they
must have been trying to invent some new language they say
the rocks went to build that wall there guarding the manor and
some few were used for the state house
crops refused to grow
i say the stones marked an old tongue and it was called eternity
for the eyes of the children,
the last to melt,
the last to vaporize,
for the lingering
eyes of the children, staring,
the eyes of the children of
buchenwald,
of viet nam and johannesburg,
for the eyes of the children
of nagasaki,
for the eyes of the children
of middle passage,
for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes,
russian eyes, american eyes,
for all that remains of the children,
their eyes,
staring at us, amazed to see
the extraordinary evil in
The whole world was there, plucking their linen,
half-bald, mumbling, sucking on their moustache tips.
Broadway was still in business and they asked no favors.
All the cracked ribs of Fredericksburg,
the boys who held their tongues at Chancellorsville
as the bandages, mule shit, skin and shot
overran the Rappahannock’ s banks
and poured it in our mouths
that summer.
Use me
Abuse me
Turn wheels of fire
on manhole hotheads
Sing me
Sour me
Secrete dark matter’ s sheen
on our smarting skin
Rise and shine
In puddle shallows
under every Meryl Cheryl Caleb Syd
somnambulists and sleepyheads
The way we lay
we mimed a body
of water. It was
this or that way
with
the dead and we
were them. No
one
worried which...
Millet beer made
our legs go weak,
loosed
our tongues. “The dead,”
we
said, “are drowning
of thirst,” gruff
summons we muttered
out loud in our
sleep...
For Russians the stars are always incontinent, ejaculatory
smears across the squalor of a boundlessly
unhygienic sky. You’ d scoff, Marina, at how I go at them
with a tiny plastic shovel and my litter box
technique, scooping up the sidereal splooge while trying
to wipe down the universe. You’ d say
I tug at God’ s Old Testament beard, praying the prayers
of a coward. You’ d confide to your diary my eyelashes
don’ t bat sootily enough. Such a lummox
In a famous painting of a founding father
and the back end of a horse
it’ s the horse butt that’ s properly lit
groomed out smooth an immortal peach
Who can say what it means about revolution
that the horse’ s tail emerges as though it had no bones in it
no chunky mechanics of the living
And the horse is not well muscled
but has been living in the rich grass
swollen like a birthday balloon
How is it satisfied
I asked clapping my hands violently
and waving
in fear that I would miss the parade
I might have lost my sight
without noticing
Gone on imagining
I saw the same linked-up rooms I moved through
Or some cool gray space
where a silence could be made
I wanted a little animal
to climb inside it cleanly
I was asking to be left alone
but in answer the sun shone brighter
One night, not long after the disaster,
as our train was passing Astor,
the car door opened with a shudder
and a girl came flying down the aisle,
hair that looked to be all feathers
and a half-moon smile
making open air of our small car.
The crowd ignored her or they muttered
“Hey, excuse me” as they passed her
when the train had paused at Rector.
The specter crowed “Excuse me,” swiftly
turned, and ran back up the corridor,
then stopped for me.
We dove under the river.
