Kenyon Review Sept/Oct 2018

What new name will you bear in a world governed by code and calculation

What program will reveal the ratio between communal identities and the loss of the body

You are not known or pronounced

Your nonce nonchalance does not convince

Your scores are neither high enough to qualify, nor deep enough to be legible, nor detailed enough to play from

Custodian of nothing, childless, rude and startled

So many scintillating shards or conversations when things shatter

Savagely unbodied by the microscopic architecture of psalmless palm

Drawn means tired or created or a naked sword or tied up and torn asunder

It’s not loving someone who can’t love you back, but the end of loving them that’s the saddest

Now emotional intimacy has tech, yoga has tech, sex has tech, even tech has tech

You don’t even know what day it is, what the weather is like or where you’re supposed to be next

Let yourself be found like water through rocks, you are what’s lost, you are the pool collecting in the ground

Speak now speak always speak in the long undrawn colloquy of night

Lake Michigan dreamed me, I think,
in the winter of 1969, its long currents
combing shipwrecks and where

was my mama, then? (She was wearing
a red muumuu.) And where was my father,
then? (He was fishing for steelhead.)

No one dreamed you, stupid girl, the seagull
said — you came straight from the belly
of your granddad’s school mascot.

You wore plaid skirts and bruised your knees
and lived across the street from the motorcycle shop.
I remember dropping dimes in the jukebox;

I remember embers in the sand. Once I saw God
himself — a small boy running across the RV park
with a toy sword in his hand. I dreamed

we all lay down on the beach and the dunes
moved over our bodies. It took
ten thousand years of whispering,

but we finally slept. And before that?
the seagull asked. Before that I found comfort
in the fur of animals and the movement

of a boat on the water. I was warm
in my mother’s arms. Before that I was
a sonic boom over Wisconsin, and before that, fire.

Translated by Brian Holton

rot    holds the long rows of this great ship of stone
rot    holds your footstep    my footstep

walking the toppled waste where the Admiral gazes down upon the water
marble window frames    door lintels elaborately carved
the oil paint of the sky    soaks the ebb and flow of tides under the bridge’s parapet
young girls’ eyes sparkle on the decks
never afraid to wave good-bye    poems of setting sail    poems of dreaming

we pass through time    like swallows startled by the bells

walk the inverted rotted underwater forest
a thousand years of tamping
a stinking deep black growth ring holds the palette of the waves
smearing your portrait    my portrait
a rotted portrait is invisible    yet like roots
it grows day after day    poking at the sea’s black-and-blue wound
from deposits of sludge rise pearls and dead bones
in the sound of colored glass violins
a row of dead sailors locked into the struggle to keep paddling

in ship’s holds flooded with brilliant sunshine
                 gold    always pornographic enough
                            to make humans dizzier than yesterday

walk narrow alleys where water can’t turn back
hear seabirds cackle like ghosts
                            howl like infants

rotting branches gently sway in the green waves
rotting fish embedded in the silver-bright seashells under walls
the water level    climbs timber stakes    climbs stone steps
like a curse locks a rusty wooden door
like a collapse    another balcony dragged into black moonlight
bleached skeletons    pull another balcony’s snow-white bones closer
in the pitch black moonlight sway shadows of people   sway reflections in water
illusion is no metaphor
periscoping centuries pursue their own termination

you this instant    I this instant
the little backyard jetty moored where flows a filthy river
tastes unloaded from our flesh    spread out on the breeze
winged lions vacantly stare at the future

From this day forward all plants
except the lemon tree
will be banished from my poems

From this day forward I am wedded to the sky

All clouds shall be banished
and my memory of them vanish
like memory itself

Not even a lime shall sneak in

Animals shall exit my poems
including those that cross the sky
in herds or as stragglers

Without plants, without animals
people cannot survive in my poems
so they too shall be sent,
those with shoes and those without
in a long line leaving

Leaving myself under the lemon tree
wedded to the sky
that is light then dark then light

Candles are forbidden

I will feel the terrible weight of twilight
as it falls over the land like a despondent minx,
words I might formerly have used for a squirrel

From this cretinous proposition
I shall write my poems
and try to reach those
who no longer exist

They are not in this poem or any other

From this day forward
I eat lemons in my park

Their complete similarity to me
can now be distinguished

To speak of my promise,
my offering to the sky,
puts a sprig in my mouth

Would this not then be my entry into society?

I am going to die.
No such thought has ever occurred to me
since the beginning of my exclusive time
in air, when God, having made my mind,
first began to wrap it, slowly and continuously,
in strips of linen soaked in a special admixture
of rosewater, chicken fat, and pinecones
studded with cloves to stop them from dripping.
Nor is it likely I would ever have had such a thought
in the time required by Him to finish the job,
if someone else had not first introduced the thought
into the process, thereby interrupting it,
however briefly. But who?