After You Have Vanished

Kevin Prufer

The little red jewel in the bottom of your wineglass
is so lovely I cannot rinse it out,

so I go into the cool and grassy air to smoke.
Which is your warmly lit house

past which no soldiers march to take the country back?
When you reached across the table to touch my hand

is not attainable. I cannot recapture it.

And no gunners lean on their artillery at the city’s edge,
looking our direction,

having shot the sky full of bright holes.

The light bleeds from them
and it always will.

Long ago, they captured our city
and now they are our neighbors,

going about their business like they were
one of us.

Soon, like you, they will be asleep,
having washed the dishes and turned out the kitchen lights.

When I inhale, smoke occupies me.
When I exhale—

By morning the wine in the bottom of your glass
will have clotted.

I’m sorry I called it a jewel.
It is not the soldiers who have shot me full of holes.

It is not light that pours out.
Love did this.

I was filled with wine.
Now I am drained of it.

Election Night

When the deified Nero 
ordered Seneca to “open his veins,”
the playwright
complied—though he was, by then, sick and infirm
and his blood wouldn’t flow quickly enough
from the wounds,
so his friends gave him poison
to speed his demise,
though this, too, failed,
and, seeing no other option, they ran a bath
for the groaning old man and, finally
successful,
drowned him in it—

Kevin Prufer

2019

House Hunters

I love the crown molding and the white granite countertops.

And look, dear! Stainless steel appliances! Don’t you love them?  

It’s such a perfect apartment, and, in every room, a coffered ceiling.     

And don’t you love the pink twin sinks, like porcelain scallops?

And listen to the faucets, 

like the rush of a waterfall heard through thick woods just as the birds began to sing early one morning years ago in the hills outside Florence.

Kevin Prufer

2018

Rain

Always, before rain, the windows grew thick with fog.

Mist descended over the evening rooftops

and rain made generalities of the neighborhood.

Rain made red leaves stick to car windows.

Rain made the houses vague. A car

slid through rain past rows of houses.

The moon swiveled on a wet gear above it.

The moon—a searchlight suspended from one of the airships—

lit the vague face peering through the windshield,

the car sliding down the rain-filled darkness

toward the highway. The men controlling the airships

Kevin Prufer

2017

Poems

After You Have Vanished

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Election Night

House Hunters

Rain

Poems

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After You Have Vanished

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