Powers of Recuperation
1.
A woman of the citizen party—what’s that—
is writing history backward
her body the chair she sits in
to be abandoned repossessed
The old, crusading, raping, civil, great, phony, holy, world,
second world, third world, cold, dirty, lost, on drugs,
gangrenous, maiming, class
war lives on
a done matter she might have thought
ever undone though plucked
from before her birthyear
and that hyphen coming after
She’s old, old, the incendiary
woman
endless beginner
whose warped wraps you shall find in graves
and behind glass plundered
Trans-Neptunian Object
The time and place and manner of my death are three facts that don't exist yet.
Facts exist for whole centuries and then suddenly cease.
Pluto used to be a planet and now it is a chunk of debris, number 1341340.
My grandmother's house stands on the hill above the sea where she left it.
When I come back to visit I discover a crater in its place.
This room is full of facts.
All day I let the cat out, let it in, then let it back out again.
I mean this metaphorically.
Some facts never exist.
It is winter. It is summer.
All night the branches tap at the glass.
The Blackberries
On the typographic bushes of the poem down a road leading neither out of things nor to the mind, certain fruits are composed of an agglomeration of spheres plumped with a drop of ink.
•
Black, rose, and khaki together on the bunch, they are more like the sight of a rogue family at its different ages than a strong temptation to picking.
In view of the disproportion of seeds to pulp, birds don't think much of them, so little remains once from beak to anus they’ve been traversed.
•
But the poet in the course of his professional promenade takes the seed to task: “So,” he tells himself, “the patient efforts of a fragile flower on a rebarbative tangle of brambles are by and large successful. Without much else to recommend them—ripe, indeed they are ripe—done, like my poem.”
It Is Daylight
I called my house from a pay phone
down the street before I went home.
I needed to check on the empty situation.
It was daylight,
still here.
My shadow looked large and unschooled.
The sidewalk was yellow in the sun.
I was thinking that I wasn't anyone
and that my future would be a trajectory
leading further away.
The lilacs were out. They looked like a detail
from a bucolic story or tableau
where people are naked, eating picnics,
grapes, kissing, and drinking wine
while playing musical instruments. It seems made-up,
but it's not. It must be based on a world
something like the one that's here while I'm walking.
Many houses are abutted by hedges.
I don't like this, but I wouldn't take them away.
The hedges are often surrounded by beds of wood chips.
The sight of them is a silent story about the dead.
I was filled with yearning
to sit against the side of a house
between two hedges.
I don't know how to pray but I would try.
I felt somber and excited, about to go into my house.
Outnumbered at 0
The silent south, the workers quiet.
Listen. The pictured environment: An anchor tattoo
In amber, and a cold face like an equally icy chandelier at the top
Of the cage. It's April again. It's October. That's what I said.
It's over, like a ghost in the going to go, Okay, here's the door. See
The trim around the rectangle. Let's walk around,
Get closer to the center. Come over here, sister. Line up
For the photo. It's August. You have on sunglasses. It's February.
It's snowing. I know it keeps changing. You're wearing a jacket.
You're going, Okay, here's the door. See the trim
Around the rectangle. Walking around getting closer to the center.
No rain and yet you're dead center of an eddy.
Listen: We interfere with our own wrath
From the completely unknown inside of a cardboard horse.
I.e., Objectivity is overestimated.
Bridge Passed
Translated by John Ashbery
The bridge once passed
My city shows its wrinkles
Deep furrows always empty streets
Dead shops drawn shutters
It's the face it used to have
In the days when witches died
When from slow boats Negroes
In red shirts disembarked
To dissolve in the nights
And impregnated the young virgins
And made the boys dream
Of impossible adventures
It's the face it put on
In July nineteen forty
When young half-naked Aryans
Machine guns at their shoulders
Intoned the Horst Wessel song
And struck echoes from the walls
Of the never-violated city
Memories lived or learned
Flow together this Sunday
Like the waters of the two rivers
And evening descends slowly
Until night along the embankment
Lights a few streetlamps
Whose reflection at the base of the bridge
Inducted me as a child
Into impossible dreaming
Flow together this Sunday
Coyote
My friend, I could wander
Around out here for years,
Shaking my head for letting him out,
Swearing not to forgive myself
If anything should happen.
He slipped out in the rain
While I slept. I followed,
Desperate, with a picture, asking people,
Have you seen this coyote?
He went across the ocean
On a freight ship, sat in the corners
Of doorways on rue Montmartre,
On Aston Quay, and in London,
Slumped, head between his knees,
Longing for the familiar woods,
Longing for the last red glimpse of sun
On the lake. He says he is a coyote
Who does what he likes. He likes
To stay outside. Tonight under the evening
Clouds in their cold, silver raiment
He sits there, alone,
And I must go out to find him.
I Don't Burn
Dear Darkness--consider this
my last attempt
to reach you. My previous
few missives
having boomeranged back
unread, postmarks blurred
by the gloved hands
that tried carrying
them to your door.
Or, torn
by the machines.
I wish
you could see the water
here, so clear
you can see the bottom--
though that's nothing
new for me. All afternoon
I let sun seep
my skin, steep me
like strong tea.
Despair,
if you've moved
I wish you would
send word
or ring.
How I would sing
like a kettle to keep you.
The Clearing
In a field of thousands
of wheat stalks, millions of wheat
stalks, countless wheat stalks, is the sound
of the field desiccating itself. Or the field of the sun
desiccating the field
of the soil. To the south, a house
with diamonds of glass, diamonds next
to diamonds, became a heap of ash, the diamond panes
bursting when the heat
pressed out from inside. There
were dark-particled plumes in the air:
shadow-birds, the flaws in our sky of diamond, rising
ink, dissipating,
disassembling--the charred
stalks of the charred house, where,
in a series of photographs, a child who was
loved, appeared,
her hair first blonde then
darkened, the progression crepuscular
through the passing of many years, as her eyes remained
the lightest of blues.
It is not the overturning field
that blackens her image, nor the burning
house. It is the turning sphere that turns night-ward. In
this field, only
the insects light the sky.
As embers, they travel ever-upward,
diminishing with greater height, blending into the open
air, the open
air, an opening made by an exodus.
The Last DJ Spinoza
DJ Spinoza
is a mighty wrestler
His angel is a book
He dreams he climbs
lines of print
He shall be a father
of notions
O DJ Spinoza
dandruff speckles
your gabardine
Your wife squints
as if threading a needle
Behind your house
your children torture a cat
Nations shall cast off your yoke
after murderous convulsions
Your street shall fill
with confusion of faces
Your synagogues shall convert
to movie theaters and swimming pools
You shall be replaced
with the silicon chip
since you are both so small
and so black
T. C. Boyle
John Ashbery
Ernst Weiss
Matthea Harvey
Petina Gappah
Mieko Kanai
Sam Stephenson
Benjamin Anastas
William T. Vollmann
Roberto Bolaño
Rebecca Wolff
James Lasdun
Tomaz Salamun
April Bernard
Laurie Sheck
Eliot Weinberger
Jim Linderman and Luc Sante
Austin Ratner
Dubravka Ugresic
Ben George, ed.
Rob Spillman, ed.
Santiago Roncagliolo
G. C. Waldrep
Arda Collins
John Wray
Yoko Ogawa
Fanny Howe
Anne Carson
Wells Tower
Yiyun Li
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