are you dreaming, Frederick?

"If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people."
--House


"Facing It"
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
--Yusef Komunyakaa


"The Day I Lost My Déjà Vu"
The box is like this today.
The box I live in.
Today: like this.

And though similar, so achingly alike,
ad infinitum, line over the nine, again,
it's always
nothing like
before,

nothing, not even the surprise
of another, so similar day of box-living.

Once, I was marked
and markedly different
and at times
while hopscotching
the grouted mosaic
felt my god I've seen
before a pattern
just like this

I've been here!

But no more.

now, I have never been anywhere
else. ever but here and though I carry on
can't return.

even the day my firstborn son broke me
opened and split shocked shattered that quaint notion of "before"
is no more than a rung of how I got
a mother's now-mind, a strung-together-bead's walk.

this moment. this. this. this.

is not what I
expected...

today my beautiful child eviscerates me.

a charmer, a snake, he fits my living heart
into his fist blunt fangs and I go willingly
into love with him. he is
every day a new child
and every day I'm still in love means
nothing like before.

remember when we
used to

remember
things, every night, say
remember the time...
and the smells of the past and sometimes a portal
opened up

and we slipped in there, into the past
rose up to meet us we were not
so all alone then, our lives had meaning
and we were not born again every goddamn
day but felt it what it felt like to be there
in those lost places, the gone?

remember? those days? but I can't.

now all of me but this is gone and I was never a girl.

never but mother never

every same day new again. every way is without a way out or
way to look back, to be back, to bring the fabric into a tight
pucker or pocket or foxhole or hem, some little space to fall into a breath
like an open grave or little death. instead I learn bird names
for the shapes and colors and songs around me though every bird
is different from every bird. I learn the map. watch the armies advance,

forward! they bellow and jab mercilessly with their spear points,
go on!

carry! and so it is I haul my sons step after day each day so swept away by love
and terror I would sometimes rather kill us all than go on like this
marching, marching, new, new, new, day, and when they
are just too heavy to carry I become stronger
than is possible and carry on.
--Rachel Zucker


"As a Bird Dies"
As a bird dies
the spent bullet inside weeps,
because it wanted more than anything else
to fly, like the bird.
--Ivan Zhdanov


"Before The Word"
You--the stage and actor in a deserted theatre.
You'll pull down the curtain, playing out this life,
and the drunk anguish, burning, like sodium,
flies over the utter blackness of the auditorium.
Ragged gardens choked with fruits,
when speech stretches your larynx,
and a tin-can pogrom lifts you up in the drama
to pillage and burn, flood the stage edges with light.
Still the shaky coffins, these unoccupied seats
won't yield, or breathe out, or break in half,
or slide up to the place you've again marked
as a heap and pile, some moth-eaten trash. And here
the parquet already overgrows into a mountain,
the stage seized underfoot, and,
sustaining the argument with muteness,
you let roll your infinite monologue, as if a Sisyphus.
You--the nightingale's ricocheting whistle.
As if someone is sleeping and dreams this place
where you once lived alone, blinded day after day
waiting for the dreamer to awaken.
And your shadow took off naked through the city
to gratify the flower-vendor, stir up a few jokes.
Never a dull moment, it's something altogether
different and can't whistle the same tune as you.
And the bird and flight are one in the shadow,
ice and cold drone on in the marriage, there
the mother and father await the return of their mute son,
and he looks out the window and sees into nowhere.
All the same, somewhere to the side of his icy gaze,
coiling like a tornado through your pungent prison cell,
the world is born of itself in the darkness,
and it reaches toward you, and you move toward it.
You crumble like the steppe gnawed away by heat,
and a herd of horsemen hail down from the clouds,
with crisp strokes strike the vast space,
and the wings of shorelines embrace the rays.
O, just deliver the cross! And I'll cry out for the wound,
the ongoing emptiness and shores heeling over.
I'll quit playing the buffoon--and there, in an open field...
But someone's dreaming, and the dream is outlasting me.
--Ivan Zhdanov


"The Earth"
To Sergei Averintsev

When in the East the night's deep dark begins to burn,
the Earth begins to brighten and to return

the wan, no longer wanted light left over.
Now for what covers us all there is no cover.

And who will cover for you in this vale of sorrow,
soul's simple grandeur? the grandeur of the furrow,

which has no thought of defending itself against the plow
or a local raid. One after another now

they who gather, who trample, who with plowshares pierce
its breast disappear like dream after dream

far away, in the ocean where all are alike, like birds.
And the Earth, without looking, sees, says "Forgive him, Lord!"

after each.
In The Cave, I remember, the caretaker fitted
a candle into our fingers before we visited

the holy elders, like children going some place terrified,
where God's glory (what's worse, its life) is no bride,

where you can hear the sky breathing, how and why.
"God save you," says Earth after him who hears no cry.

Maybe dying is in the end kneeling to pray?
I, who will turn to earth, look at the Earth amazed.

A purity purer than Eden's! In my bitterness
I ask why is there intercession, forgiveness--

have you, mad Earth, for millennia been glad
to swallow insults and hand out rewards?

What did they do for you? Why care about them?
"Because I am," the Earth replies,
"because we all have been."
--Olga Sedakova