and i belong only to you; the water is filling my shoes

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"[Persian Letters]"
Dear Aleph,

Like Ovid: I'll have no last words.
This is what it means to die among barbarians. Bar bar bar
was how the Greeks heard our speech--
sheep, beasts--and so we became
barbarians. We make them reveal
the brutes they are, Aleph, by the things
we make them name. David,
they tell me, is the one
one should aspire to, but ever since
I first heard them say Philistine
I've known I am Goliath
if I am anything.
--Solmaz Sharif


"Lament of the Conductor"

All the pretty things you do
the way you lean outward
against the window of the train everyday
none of it is mine
    (Only the train is mine)

--Molly Russakoff


"How to Draw a Perfect Circle"
I can imitate the spheres of the model's body, her head,
Her mouth, the chin she rests at the bend of her elbow
But nothing tells me how to make the pupils spiral

From her gaze. Everything the eye sees enters a circle,
The world is connected to a circle: breath spools from the nostrils
And any love to be open becomes an O. The shape inside the circle

Is a circle, the egg fallen outside the nest the serpent circles
Rests in the serpent's gaze the way my gaze rests on the model.
In a blind contour drawing the eye tracks the subject

Without observing what the hand is doing. Everything is connected
By a line curling and canceling itself like the shape of a snake
Swallowing its own decadent tail or a mind that means to destroy itself,

A man circling a railway underpass before attacking a policeman.
To draw the model's nipples I have to let myself be carried away.
I love all the parts of the body. There are as many curves

As there are jewels of matrimony, as many whirls as there are teeth
In the mouth of the future: the mute pearls a bride wears to her 
wedding,
The sleeping ovaries like the heads of riders bunched in a tunnel.

The doors of the subway car imitate an O opening and closing,
In the blood the O spirals its helix of defects, genetic shadows,
But there are no instructions for identifying loved ones who go crazy.

When one morning a black man stabs a black transit cop in the face
And the cop, bleeding from his eye, kills the assailant, no one traveling
To the subway sees it quickly enough to make a camera phone 
witness.

The scene must be carried on the tongue, it must be carried
On the news into the future where it will distract the eyes working
Lines into paper. This is what blind contour drawing conjures in me.

At the center of God looms an O, the devil believes justice is shaped
Like a zero, a militant helmet or war drum, a fist or gun barrel,
A barrel of ruined eggs or skulls. To lift anything from a field

The lifter bends like a broken O. The weight of the body
Lowered into a hole can make anyone say Oh: the onlookers,
The mother, the brothers and sisters. Omen begins with an O.

When I looked into my past I saw the boy I had not seen in years
Do a standing backflip so daring the onlookers called him crazy.
I did not see a moon as white as an onion but I saw a paper plate

Upon which the boy held a plastic knife and sopping meat.
An assailant is a man with history. His mother struggles
To cut an onion preparing a meal to be served after the funeral.

The onion is the best symbol of the O. Sliced, a volatile gas stings
The slicer's eyes like a punishment clouding them until they see
What someone trapped beneath a lid of water sees:

A soft-edged world, a blur of blooms holding a coffin afloat.
The onion is pungent, its scent infects the air with sadness,
All the pallbearers smell it. The mourners watch each other,

They watch the pastor's ambivalence, they wait for the doors to open,
They wait for the appearance of the wounded one-eyed victim
And his advocates, strangers who do not consider the assailant's funeral

Appeasement. Before that day the officer had never fired his gun
In the line of duty. He was chatting with a cabdriver
Beneath the tracks when my cousin circled him holding a knife.

The wound caused no brain damage though his eyeball was severed.
I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps. In the Odyssey
Pink water descends the Cyclops's cratered face after Odysseus

Drives a burning log into it. Anyone could do it. Anyone could
Begin the day with his eyes and end it blind or deceased,
Anyone could lose his mind or his vision. When I go crazy

I am afraid I will walk the streets naked, I am afraid I will shout
Every fucked up thing that troubles or enchants me, I will try to murder
Or make love to everybody before the police handcuff or murder me.

Though the bullet exits a perfect hole it does not leave perfect holes
In the body. A wound is a cell and portal. Without it the blood runs
With no outlet. It is possible to draw handcuffs using loops

Shaped like the symbol for infinity, from the Latin infinitas
Meaning unboundedness. The way you get to anything
Is context. In a blind contour it is not possible to give your subject

A disconnected gaze. Separated from the hand the artist's eye
Begins its own journey. It could have been the same for the Cyclops,
A giant whose gouged eye socket was so large a whole onion

Could fit into it. Separated from the body the eye begins
Its own journey. The world comes full circle: the hours, the harvests,
When the part of the body that holds the soul is finally decomposed

It becomes a circle, a hole that holds everything: blemish, cell,
Womb, parts of the body no one can see. I watched the model
Pull a button loose on her jeans and step out of them

As one might out of a hole in a blue valley, a sea. I found myself
In the dark, I found myself entering her body like a delicate shell
Or soft pill, like this curved thumb of mine against her lips.

You must look without looking to make the perfect circle.
The line, the mind must be a blind continuous liquid
Until the drawing is complete.
--Terrance Hayes


"Ophidiophobia"

Because:

            a garter snake slid over my bare foot

            a copperhead played dead on Spooks Branch Road

            a yellow python hugged a heavy scarf around my neck

            a cottonmouth came charging through a creek I was canoeing

            a black racer at the Nature Center teased a mouse for half an hour
                        then swallowed it

            in the Temple of Doom, the belly of a snake split open, spilling
                        snake-shaped babies

            I used to dream in snakes--I couldn't move for stepping on them

            a snake exists that wears a fish's body

            a man I shouldn't love wore snakeskin boots

--Jessica Reed


"Sheets"
After I.F. Annensky

First the sky was yellow
then white snow followed.

On a hand
was an amethyst: a cube of  lilac in hospital light.

•

Whose fault is it when no one visits?

•

Last night I dreamed
I was in a peaceful place
but woke up
freezing and ashamed.

On a side street (on my sheets)
one I loved passed
as a shadow.
Maddish, reddish, his fist
clenched for a fight.

•

I recalled
his body color
being soft like a child.
The drunken nipples.

•

Honey I called.
We were too late.
God and the gods have moved
outside the jeweled air
and sun motes   ...    

to where a star is:
an amethyst minus a poet.
--Fanny Howe


"Luz"
Warp (v): To thrust (one's hand) forth; to lay (hands) on; to cast (one's head) down;
to strike (a stroke). Obsolete.

Her blood was water:
there was water all over the floor

when I found her I ran
hands through her damp hair

ran to the street ran my eyes
up to the muscled sky, a thigh flexed

squatting over us, God--as a nurse
with her fingers already on the bone

snapped ándale, get over here
and help me lift the body

to disinfect the wound. Before
she died her blood laid its hands

on the steps and on the rain barrel,
on the tile in the garden. Te riego

I heard her tell the lime tree
flowering in the yard.

Before that before she fell before
she died she swelled:

her ankles and her fingers grew
like pale tubers, thrust

from the soil too soon.
She salted everything she ate

until her rings bit into her skin
and her skin grew over them.

In the church I saw her
sanding the feet of Jesus

from a crucifix to collect the sawdust
in her handkerchief, and so she salted

her tea and her tortillas
with, she said, a holy salt,

a tasteless salt from her pocket
pinched and sprinkled

on cakes and on eggs and in milk
until she swelled so much she prayed

for us to bury her but let her keep
her rings, her wedding ring.

When she fell in the garden
watering the plants

she prayed and fell
against the garden wall with her hands

full of soil and salt
like seeds.

We disinfected water to disinfect
the wound: the blush

of iodine droplets in a bowl
clarified to nothing

more than prayer: te ruego
to the water, to the nurse,

and on her lips I heard her
say te riego.

In the church I always saw her,
absentminded, touch her own hands

as if to touch something under the skin.
At the funeral

her hands were laced
in gloves to hide the stitching

where a finger was
sliced off to take a wedding ring.

If, in the church, there was blood
her blood was colorless

on the white lace and on her skin
there was no mark

to recognize by blood
our hands can hold water

or gold or seeds, our hands can hold
our hands hold earth.
--Laura Bylenok


"Tired"
I am so tired of waiting.
Aren't you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two--
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
--Langston Hughes


"Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors."
--Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, translator unknown


"Listeners, I do not know everything about Carlos, and he does not tell me everything. That is okay. We are not one person. How lonely that would be; a couple who has made themselves one so completely that they are once again alone. We are two people, separate, unique, and joined only where we choose to join. I don't know what is his affiliation truly to the University of What It Is, perhaps I will never know. But I can know about the taste of food he has made me, or the feeling of his hand in mine, or the absence of his hand not in mine. I can feel the distance between us and I can know that that distance, viewed properly, is no distance at all."
--Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, Welcome to Night Vale


"If Death Is Kind"
Perhaps if Death is kind, and there can be returning,
We will come back to earth some fragrant night,
And take these lanes to find the sea, and bending
Breathe the same honeysuckle, low and white.
We will come down at night to these resounding beaches
And the long gentle thunder of the sea,
Here for a single hour in the wide starlight
We shall be happy, for the dead are free.
--Sara Teasdale


"What I'm Looking For"
What I’m looking for
is an unmarked door
we’ll walk through
and there: whatever
we’d wished for
beyond the door.

What I’m looking for
is a golden bowl
carefully repaired
a complete world sealed
along cracked lines.

What I’m looking for
may not be there.
What you’re looking for
may or may not
be me. I’m listening for

the return of that sound
I heard in the woods
just now, that silvery sound
that seemed to call
not only to me.
--Maureen N. McLane