Step to the tree
under its spread limbs.
The petals cut free
by marauding winds.

Each one slid to the earth
like a deposed bride:
each stamen a birth
that can no longer hide.

At the prow of your body
Need pulses like a nerve.
And you approach it coolly
In the linden grove.

Lenka Nemec

Lenka Nemec:
a hood of dark hair
brows two black points
hands two white cups
ears two coiled cakes
two lips to scoop grapes
into
two by two:

at twenty Lenka already wept
and lay still among the reeds
for the emptying of her teeming breast
and draped herself in black beads

Lenka at thirty
arrayed in light
shivers between the pews
and out to the east mt wielka
dulls like a shutting book

It’s April and I’m watching videos of dead men
telling their stories. And half-formed ideas
shake their tendrils from the books of dead men
scattering their seeds all over me. Oh people ask me
why do you write all these poems about blooms.
Oh people ask me
what do you do with all these blossoms.
There’s wisdom behind the podium.
Pile the books to the bones of your brow.
And down your handles of black coffee.
If you black your brow with ink
a fine sorrow will guide you through your trammeled nights,
these days fettered by whorled suns.

So I go out to meet the dead in a rumpled sweater
and a crushed dress.
And each day my humble body
longs for an egress.
All day the birds repeat themselves.
What are they saying anyway?

I drink fragrant coffee and feel it swill
into my bones, something is coming
unstuck at my seam, falling
open, like the night does, parting
for the light at each end, rose
gumming up its spine, a dawn
that fringes the yawning blooms,
and to the little boughs that blossom and shed
and still arc thick up to the light
I ask, how can I swallow my dreams
and keep them still where they are
trembling
in the night's black belly?

January spent its seed
uselessly, against the north hill.
Now a spring gale
resolves itself in a torrent of blossoms.
Look up at the moon
watch it twin itself
on the dark waters:
the year passes by like a man ascending a staircase
in the dark, hand over hand,
step over step,
blindly by fist and heel.

the song of jane pelikopolous.

My ideas are unfelicitous and my skirt too short, as ever, screamed Jane Pelikopolous. I dreamed of a room I owned to myself. I was the queen of it. I lived inside a floorboard, it was my whole world. I drank out of a thimble and I shat in a miniscule can for dolls. I bathed in a pool of water I gathered in the fingernail of a mouse. I was so small, the eye of a needle served for me as a window. How marvelous the earth appears when you are so small! In the mouth of a blossom I could live for a hundred years. Looking at the light that came into the cup. I could live on the memory of our love for a hundred years, like the aromatic smoke from a powerful flame.

Let me tell you why you have a myth of a young god who dies and will return – I could name you ten, twenty of them. Adonis. Osiris. Tammuz. Baldur. Jesus. There they are, embossed in stone, entombed. Osiris will reassemble himself (but Orpheus’ severed head remains severed, and his lips sing about it). Down in the dark under the earth—away down deep, away from eyes & lungs—the stars are being born. There they’ll flare and die, in the nebula, a star’s nursery. The god who is born and dies is like the meteor that flares in the desert and disappears, like the imploding sun itself. To be born, he informs us, cannot be borne. He shucks his life like the hull of a seed. Then he returns to us, sucking his fingers and licking his lips.

MAN: I am the seed.
WOMAN: I am the cradling husk.
MAN: I am Heracles.
WOMAN: I am the burning dress.
MAN: I am Theseus.
WOMAN: I am the skein of thread.
MAN: I am Sisera.
WOMAN: I am the cup of milk; I am the killing stake.
MAN: I am a furled scroll.
WOMAN: I am a story told in the night.
MAN: You are as you are. I will pin you in a book. Bind you to a rock. To a fear of the sea. You are the moon. Cast from the earth. Shut in a wall. With your hands pressed to your mouth.
WOMAN: I press my hands to my mouth. When I open my palms—

It’s April everywhere.
All on earth is full
to its green brim.
Your curls, flushed husks,
burn down to your shoulders
and the moon,
a rind picked clean,
sweeps over a scene
heavy with bulbs and bric-a-brac.
What you hold between your palms
burns like a lamp in its glass cradle.

the song of oscar rosenberg.

I am Oscar Rosenberg. And when I sink into white sleep it is like falling through a waste of sand. I am not like you, though I have cast my God into the putrid rivers of this city. I am a newly modern man, stripped and base, naked of head, but pure of heart. I will stand as I am under awnings and linden trees. I will seek love as spontaneously as sunlight. In a Laundromat, or in the belly of a train, I, Oscar Rosenberg, with five new liver-spots between my neck and elbow, who forgets the words to songs and whistles them with a flat metallic tone, a bundle of limbs in perpetual motion, will love and die in the streets of this city like a rook that cries out in constant, crystal syllables.

poem

It’s April, barely
April any longer,
the leaves are flushed dark now
no longer pale and new,
and I’m afraid and drug-flushed
on a Monday night,
dreaming of my Alejandro
whose skin the rain washed white
when he stood, dizzy, under it
for twenty years; softly
the night breaks over him, lowly
the eaves and asters bow to him
where he goes on the street
the rent brick summons itself whole again,
he is Alejandro, in his black boat-shoes
whom the night looks wonderingly on
filling his pockets with stones and grasses
with damp odors, with sussurant stars.

I live in a peninsula of stone,
three sides in air,
I smoke like the daughter of a sultan
and I curse three times with each breath
so weary am I of my body
and this love which keeps it soft as it is,
and this self, ruthless as it is,
I want go up over the rocks
and away from Jerusalem, the heart
of my country, I want to call out
like a hyrax or ibex from the grottos
casting my name down and away
where it won’t ever be seen by the sun,
I will shut it
in a hole cut
in the face of the rock,
sealed in ash-earth,
tamped by hooves, by resolute
silence, the ceaseless winds
that peel away the skin
of this desert time and again all spring.

I’ve been breathing in perfumed smoke
all day. I want to grind up the jasmine
and ram it down my throat on a cloud
which shivers and splits, plunging deep
into my lungs.

In the wet air, I get hungry,
uneasy, reading books full of animus
and malice, getting grieved,
dead sweetness in my mouth,
the whole sidewalk gowned
by little wet magnolia’s tongues.

exhausted. maybe hitting the end of these poems. sad.

I fall in to sleep like I’m hungry for it,
Hungry at least to exit my body
Which is too plain, Slavic, heavy,
Held too much to the earth,
And I like my body am comical
And heavy, made of a set of bones
Cast out as if prophetically
Over the raw earth of my lumped soul.
I sit under the stripped magnolias.
Spring is going to do this to all of us someday.

I am a poet from a desert country
and every night I dream about floods
they’ll erase the earth they’ll destroy these cities
like copper etchings washed by acid
like a dime left under a faucet for a hundred years

“night is the province of death, sleep, and love”
wrote this woman who writes poems as dense and strange as mine
all night I stay up listening to the jasmine clapping its white hands
and murmuring its terrible quiet songs
I flick my cigarette stubs into the garden
I dream a cabaret of drowned men
every night is young, and every night is hungry
and every night returns again

response poem for wide sargasso sea [it's really long]

It’s April, and the blossoms are being put out all around us like calves’ tongues. Who knows what kind of strangeness is in them? We shouldn’t forget that, in order to spread out and photosynthesize, the minute new leaves have to break open the waxy scales that shut them in all winter, like hands cupped tightly over a flame. The little blossoms, severed by winds, fragrant, even a little phosphorescent in the sodium lamps that burn down by the river all night, lap at the air and at our hands, desirous of something as strange and terrible and transitory as they. It’s April. I read Wide Sargasso Sea to remind me that sitting in the heart of a blossom like a pretty cat on a lap is a kernel of madness, and each stem is like a little bone plucked out of a defenseless animal. What am I? A woman in love? Where do I sit? By the river? What am I, hungry, dreaming of Caribbean seas, of merciless thunders? Here the year droops blackly through its months, sunk low in cold; it’s so prostrate it doesn’t believe in itself, its presence, just like the mad young woman didn’t believe she was in England. Being in love in spring it’s easy to remember how we bewitch each other, we tear into each other’s hearts like a new leaf into its hard containing scales. And what does it mean to love? What’s the difference between love and enchantment? Mr. Rochester never knew the difference, he sat in the rain-gutted house and when he spoke bronze coins fell from his lips, he didn’t know whether he loved her for her money, her hair, and what the blossoms, white as gold-ore, had to say in the matter. We can gut a chicken for obeah, scatter its blood, hope the drops turn to blossoms that nod in a code we can decipher, telling us what our love is, and where our twinned bodies begin and end.

it’s april
the leaves are breaking open their wax scales
and putting out pale tongues to the light
the slick birches are sloughing off skin
so many flowers too the trees calving these soft-
bodied blooms which flare and die in an hour
and oh my love whose restless hands don’t still,

your mouth is livid
as a branch impelled up by flowers

history is drowning there
and in the sunlight which washes the day pale to nothing
and in the vivid clapping of the pale leaves as they emerge knocked roughly
by the spring wind which takes in its arms a roomful of blossoms

open your mouth
let the wind in which takes all succor and turns it into song

It’s April. I want to build up a dozen white columns and break them again. The stems of the tulips look like bones to me. A field of unbearable bones. Spring, a violent dream, a shudder through all growing things. I feel like one of those waylaid on the road by Siris the bandit, a giant who tied his victims between two bent trees and let them go again. Flung on the curved shoulders of winds, my limbs, like red standards, will fly into the bellies of many countries; where the drops of my blood fall a flower with a new name will rise and open its gaping mouth. Spring, feeding on blood and dust, will grow lurid as a painted bust, will continue its dense chorus, adding day after overbloomed day like a handful of seeds that brims, lapping up the wrist, falling, piling, trembling.

Today the wind made a hail of petals all down the street. You watch the segmented flowers fall cup-down to the earth. You wish, as always, that there were labels on each of the trees, that the whole earth was an arboretum. You would also like to see labels on everyone’s foreheads: Ben Jones, born 1980, shivers when he passes big dogs and open doorways. Rashid Hamaowi, b. 1975, still remembers her. You wonder what yours would say. You wonder if, slimming the kern of each line, you could make your unruly self disappear. Limb by limb, like a rain of blossoms, you would drop to the pavement, settle in a whorl, drown a little, taken by an impulse of wind into the water. The days pass like geese driven backwards by a gale. You want to build your life like an almanac: ripe wheat, shifting moons, black lines of ongoing predictions.

It’s April
I pluck the last toke from the ashes
and listen to Ray Charles singing about America the Beautiful
there’s something poetic about a blind man singing this way
what does purple mean when you can’t see it?
what does a poem mean when you’re too drunk to see straight?
are we done?
I hope we’ll never be done
like the blossoms turned to princes
by the flowering of April
I hope we never get used to all this

It's April
I am falling in love with men in sweaters
with the gold stamen in each flower like the needle
in the brooch with whihc Oedipus blinded himself
and with April herself
a girl who hems her dresses with light
and from whose smoke-seared throat issues
a perpetual song of praise
April: I am listening for the sound of my hungry friends
who cry like ravens for a crust of bread
while in the public park the girls in bright dresses
built out of heat, draped in floral flags
dip whole loaves in fragrant oils

April, the violence on this earth has never seemed as sweet to me
the hot night comes like the crust of a dark bread
pressed deeply with signs
I dream that all night my breaths are turning into flowers
dappling the room, turning the air black with fragrance
I wake having dreamt that sleep evaded me
on a black ship gone over a white sea
April: I sleep and I drink and I smoke and sleep again
dying, like a field of poppies,
for the least touch of sun

It’s April, incantatory April
the warbles of birds rise up like a gas
and reading Marx under the almond tree
drinking a glass of coffee
My whole limbs feel sharp as knives
I want to rend the day open like a toffee
and place this rage, this unsaid
name at its heart
and the spring day strung on a gold thread
with its hungry art
the flowers blazons of sex
with whorled, sprawled limbs
and the sea-tempest of seeds
seeking blindly in
if I could make a blade of my tongue
if I could split the air in two—

So many blank pages
are waiting for a little writ spittle.
So many blossoming trees
are turning white under the full sun.
I feel each leg as if it’s a saber
piercing and black
stumping in the dull earth.
I hear my love cough and toss
in the dark bed behind the door,
the shades are drawn,
I feel the sun licking its bloody lips down
the public lawn
and I want to go out to the white
places on the map.
Maybe I’ve got some Tatar blood
or maybe I’m just going pale with my imaginings
but I want to go where the sun forgets to set
just west of the Urals,
I want to speak the language of horde-tremors
and tents, the kind the glassy cupolas of blooms
blow full as, then collapse,
where the light falls like bone-shafts
and solidifies to mosques;
I want to gather in the calls of ibises
and the teeth of my foes for a wristlet
I want to bring them to my love
and hang them on his bones
letting the drapes fill with a moaning song.

Janusz Bartel

Janusz Bartel is staring at the plums
that hang, still tiny nubs
outside his fourth-floor window.
It’s April
and the whole apartment bloc
feels like a hotel,
the hall
littered with half-smoked butts,
cards, corpses
of mosquitos, green rinds, the cheap perfume
of blossoms.
It’s April, each bloom is a dizzy box of glass…
Janusz wrecks clocks
and rooms, leaving his prints
on the windows,
thinking of Ada while
mangling the shag,
a woman, a strange white
house to move
into, retreat from.
spring baring
its nectar-gutted teeth
through splintered glass:
the red stain in the cup
of the plum bloom pucks
its lips up, calling
an unheard name.

it’s april
we all hop in a van after ingesting too much marijuana to see straight
little cartoon rabbits keep hopping from the vegetation grinning blankly
and we all know their only purpose was ever to die
max calls up his ex-girlfriend and shouts at her
i know that chick her body is like an elongated diamond
i bet mark still wants to be pinned under her and the delicious hair of her crotch
and when he shouts he’s shouting at mark-who-is-dreaming of her pearl-and-anise tongue
i can’t see the lintels of the van through too much smoke
it’s april the magnolias put out their tongues like calves
ryan says each one is penance for each individual hailstone
that dented our heads and our shingles all winter
i myself am preoccupied with the fact that he just licked my knee
and with the poem i’m writing about these shocking experiences
the clouds pulsing round the low sun like a vulva
the narrow road dented by the flat brush of dusk
the miles disappearing themselves from yellow line to yellow line
the several hairs on ryan’s lip that i stare at half the way to daytona
like the feathers on an ibis like the corrugations on a cowrie shell
fuck anyone who tells me this is medicinal
i am going to daytona
i am going to hell in a puce van full of lucid uncertainty

יתכן שהגענו עד הסוף
הכוכבים מקסימים, הנוף מגדירה נוי מחדש
אבל הכל שממה
הרוח בין רגליך נשמע כאגרף דופק בדלת
ומה יבקש
ומה יצתרך
הרוה הזה בלי פה בלי בטן
הוא רוצה לפתוח גופנו
ולשרוק בעצמותנו
הוא תופס מעל התמר ומושך שעריה
והיא מלחישה ייסורה לדמדומים סגולים
היא פעם התאהבה ברוח
נטה ראשיה לשמוע אותו
ועכשיו
יתכן הסוף יבוא לבקר
אותה ואותנו
הוא יפתח פיו לדבר
אנחנו כולנו חרשים
ברוח כזה

Holy days sit around my life
like a circle of aunts, clucking
and singing, cutting chickens
and endlessly speaking. And the children
dancing through the kitchen, pulling fistfuls
of hair or sugar or cards from cabinets
and closets. Somewhere on earth it’s always a holiday
and the name sits on the time, heavily
as a smell of cardamom in the air,
as light on water. Someone bellows a song,
someone holds a glass of tea
poured over sugar cubes,
and while we fill our walls
with a queue of calendars pale as a snow
the sun recalls itself to us slowly
burning its name into the hills.

Let’s blow up all the tall buildings and turn them back into mountains. Let’s whittle the picnic tables into a fine dust, saving only the knots and whorls. We’ll keep them in our pockets for little whistles. Let’s gut our houses and leave the doors open, cool caverns for birds. Let’s cut away our jeans until they’re nothing. Let’s thumb our noses at the wind for the time being and also because we’ve forgotten where our tongues are. Let’s watch the moon slowly turning away from us at the cusp of each April. Let’s celebrate the birth, death and resurrection of Tammuz, the perfect, youthful god. Tammuz, alias Baldor, alias Jesus, alias Osiris is back from the dead. Let’s eat dates on our knees in the middle of a sealed room, on a prayer rug. Then, turning our lips back, clucking with our tongues and dancing, we’ll walk out of the door together, we’ll petrify into crystal on the walkway under an outrage of stars.

It’s April. Chaff-rot boils
downstream, the grapefruits hang
going dry between green split tongues.
They close the Hermon at sunset these days,
shoot to kill at what moves in the night.
Abraham is always stabbing at Isaac
up there in those hills
while Sarah chokes down her bottle of pills.
It’s better than sitting by the TV set
with its rusty horns;
after all, she didn’t ask to come here
where it never rains.
Up there in the hills
maybe it was whiskey
or an angel or the climbing barometer
egging him on. No one expected it,
not since how rich he got—
nor Sarah to fashion a razor
from her compact mirror.
But so it goes. Abe fits a new hose
for the persimmons, pulls at his thumb
where the knife sliced through the web.
Meanwhile, Isaac, the dumb
lamb, is drawing maps in the sand.
He’s looking for a new girl to scoop
And pin up in the dark house.
He’ll take her away, her kerchief streaming
in the wind of the convertible. She’ll scrub
the last pale red stain from the bath,
and sing over the Sabbath candles,
which all April will flare like small, bloody suns.