are you dreaming, Frederick?

"[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

"What we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom."
--Umberto Eco


"7 Backward Stages"
1.
They have planted a row of hedge by the harsh-edged
municipal building,
but have not tended well to the branches or leaves.
They grow wild by the suited women,
who lean their shoulderpads
against the cool walls.

This is the windiest street in all the city;
this is the grayest day in all the world.

(But soon, my mother says, the wind will push the clouds
out over the water.
I watch the clouds gather the hems of their skirts
with little cloud fingers
and ominous dark threads half-opaque veins
through the breath speckles of blue
along the horizon of the city.)

The hedges all lean to one side and in my boots my feet ache
with the memory of rain. I search for distinctions
to mark this morning more than the one preceding,
or less than the one that is to follow,
and find that I cannot piece the puzzle together--
fissure healing fissure--
I remember only the cramp of my left foot's littlest toe,
the clouds as they moved just moments before,
this one early morning woman and the rose she wears.

Oh like a prayer, like a ritual,
what makes this morning different from all other mornings?

The wind stretches itself out upon the dark
water bruisingly, hums
nothing, nothing.

2.
Each day the same three-quarters of an hour's walk
yields the same path,
the same stretch of antique stores, windows filled
with rolled rugs,
dresser-drawers, silk lounge couches, empty bed-frames,
high-backed headboards, clawed coffee tables, chair sets,
a universe of velvet and mahogany.

There are Buddhas, wise fat babies,
thick calves and red cheeks and lines of laughter.

Cats lift their left forepaws in salute or understanding,
gold and red and white.

Virgin Marys with their sad faces and their backs
to each crucifix pinioned behind them
bleach pale in this wintering morning.

I am walking through an antique land
of Ozymandian propaganda and old furniture.

What secrets do the beds of dead men tell?
Nothing, nothing.

3.
Past a wild and frenzied intersection an old woman
who is younger than I think she is
with her hair pressed back into the wind by the wind
the crown of her head bald and spotted with age
and the half-ovals of her eyes beneath
unaware of that vulnerability
(initial and final, fontanel yet unfused)
leans all to one side as the wind rocks against her.

She does not bring her cigarette to her lips,
her arm pulled down by a bag full of that morning's shopping.
or laundry
or soda bottles.
I read too much into her: her lined mouth, her lined hands,
her lined and unfirm flesh flesh-loose neck.
In a fit of despair and longing I beg to know
her not as a woman
or a name
or a heavy bundle
but as a mechanical day-dream, the secret
physics of her ventricles revealed,
the palpable palpitations,
the cogs and gears which grind her blood through her veiny veins
and what rot now swells her knuckles, bulges her abdomen,
grabs her, unknowing but yet knowing, down
to the cement and the dirt ever below,
calling to her now,
calling to me.

"What are you," I ask, not 'who,'
and later, "forgive me for not writing more--"
but what will she know of how I failed her, her too?

Nothing, nothing.

4.
Even the rain, strong enough to last the night,
to shake the trees, to break their boughs,
to scatter the gingko fruit over the ground,
to soften the sidewalk's density,
to frighten all nature with its immensity,
to set off the car alarms throughout the streets,
to bully the summer's last burst of heat,
to howl with the dogs from dusk until dawn,
to pour forth from the clouds all darkness long--
diminished, now, to
nothing, nothing.

5.
The dreams before the rain passed were awash with smoke.

My lungs struggled as if in a bowl of dust--

Choking on earth, choking on ash, choking on bones,
I put one blind foot in front of the other,
one blind hand before my blind mouth,
heard blindness as it flooded me
and heard with blind ears moments after.
Where I had been was filtered through blindness,
where I was going I was going blindly,
the moments between distinguished only by the flight of thought
from the secret canals of one ear to the secret canals of the other,
internal conviction of existence only,
while all else before and all else to come
was undefined through infinite blindness
and swirled towards
nothing, nothing.

6.
Each night before sleep suctions me
the sound of my heart beating thrills my brain anew
with delight and fear.

(This is why I cannot bear another pulse
pressed against mine in any embrace;
it confuses the sound of my own.)

Oh, the reassurance of knowing that it's there
(ugly clump of muscle, fat and fluid)
and oh, the bated breath upon which I dangle
(fleshy fish-bait)
should that sound slip into the somnolent silence
of nothing, nothing.

7.
And on this day I rest one moment in the bathroom
my fingers splayed upon the edge of the sink.

Here, I deny all that wheels around me as nothing,
eternal damnation, nothing,
infinite years of boredom, nothing,
of agony, nothing,
of loneliness, nothing,
of incapacitation and helplessness, nothing.

Take my hands but leave my blood pumping--
my tongue but leave my mind running--
my eyes but leave my heart beating--
my body but leave my thoughts coming.

God, come to me through the pipe in the toilet,
the drain in the bathtub;
come to me with the oncoming storm,
rain down on me with the rain,
and tell me the secret of immortality,
give me the reassurances of punishment in the afterlife,
burn my feet, bury me in excrement,
let my tears wet my backside
until the stars burn out and we cannot come up again
to see them; until the four horses ride forth
unharnessed
stamping and snorting smoke.

I have read your Bible,
the New Testament and the Old,
the Wrathful God and the Forgiving God,
each enlightened epistle from past believers
incapable of convincing me:
I cannot believe,
cannot relinquish the self to believe,
cannot discard the beauty of the words,
my own interpretation of them
too important,
for the religion secreted within.

I curse the fruit; Eve, Adam and Serpent;
the diction of God, the word, the forbidding finger
and the finger of retribution.

I commit sacrilege in the bathroom.

That I should grow older!
That I should suffer unoriginal fate
that I should be buried in the dirt I hate,
that I am ash, am dust, am cloud and rain!
That I am reduced, again and again,
to the ground that sucks and time that erodes,
to release all fear in the final throes--

to the one which haunts
with merciless indifference
this nothing, nothing.
--Jaida Jones

"Life is a river. Only in the most literal sense are we born on the day we leave our mother's womb. In the larger, truer sense, we are born of the past--connected to its fluidity, both genetically and experientially."
--Wally Lamb


"There was a moment during this time, when his face was on hers, cheek on cheek, brow on brow, heavy skull on skull, through soft skin and softer flesh. He thought: skulls separate people. In this one sense, I could say, they would say, I lose myself in her. But in that bone box, she thinks and thinks, as I think in mine, things the other won't hear, can't hear, though we go on like this for sixty years. What does she think I am? He had no idea. He had no idea what she was."
--A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden


"I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward."
--Stanislaw J. Lec


"You don't get to choose the heroes...The heroes choose themselves."
--Paul Levine


"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
--Voltaire


"Never explain--your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway."
--Elbert Hubbard


"The graveyards are full of indispensable men."
--Charles de Gaulle


"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
--Marianne Williamson


"To defeat them, first we must understand them."
--Elie Wiesel


"Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic."
--Oscar Wilde


"The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else."
--Umberto Eco


"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."
--Søren Kierkegaard


"We invent what we love, and what we fear."
--John Irving


"I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds 'round my neck."
--Emma Goldman


"Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business."
--Tom Robbins


"You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by; but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by."
--James M. Barrie


"I've been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened."
--Mark Twain


"Just because someone doesn't love you the way you want them to doesn't mean they don't love you with all they have."
--Truman Capote


"I sell souls at the side of the road. Would you like to take a number?"
--The Distillers, "Hall of Mirrors"


"Miniature"
The woman stood up in front of the table. Her sad hands
begin to cut thin slices of lemon for tea
like yellow wheels for a very small carriage
made for a child's fairytale. The young officer sitting opposite
is buried in the old armchair. He doesn't look at her.
He lights up his cigarette. His hand holding the match trembles,
throwing light on his tender chin and the teacup's handle. The clock
holds its heartbeat for a moment. Something has been postponed.
The moment has gone. It's too late now. Let's drink our tea.
Is it possible, then, for death to come in that kind of carriage?
To pass by and go away? And only this carriage to remain,
with its little yellow wheels of lemon
parked for so many years on a side street with unlit lamps,
and then a small song, a little mist, and then nothing?
--Yannis Ritsos


"I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear,
Or anything but that vain animal,
Who is so proud of being rational."
--John Wilmot, A Satyre against Mankind


"First He Looked Confused"
I could not lie anymore so I started to call my dog "God."

First he looked
confused,

then he started smiling, then he even
danced.

I kept at it: now he doesn't even
bite.

I am wondering if this
might work on
people?
--Tukarum, translated by Daniel Ladinsky


"Isolation is aloneness that feels forced upon you, like a punishment. Solitude is aloneness you choose and embrace. I think great things can come out of solitude, out of going to a place where all is quiet expect the beating of your heart."
--Jeanne Marie Laskas


"A caterpillar is letting itself down on a thread, twirling slowly like a rope artist, spiraling towards his chest. It's a luscious, unreal green, like a gumdrop, and covered with tiny bright hairs. Watching it, he feels a sudden, inexplicable surge of tenderness and joy. Unique, he thinks. There will never be another caterpillar just like this one. There will never be another such moment of time, another such conjunction.

"These things sneak up on him for no reason, these flashes of irrational happiness. It's probably a vitamin deficiency."
--Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake