What the earth can’t hold the river takes
And bears away in its black arms.
The trees bent under it, or broke
in numbers, severed at the nape,
and bore down on the street with broken joints…

I remember when we sat by the lake
in Georgia, stunned by light,
gorged on sun and wax-papered croquettes--and murmuring vignettes--
Like my mother, I whipped yolks into a froth,
and earnest as a cake-dish, I sat where the waves
lapped at the waves, sanguine,
and fed you from a deep tureen.

Now nothing is as it was,
Even the oaks turned out to grasp feebly
at the earth, and swooned on their bellies,
bled too black even to protest;
wind opens the doors of the old house
forcing a cry out;
turning the dishes up like silver crabs,
turning the kewpie dolls in solo waltz,
turning our letters loose into the air
like a set of dice that will never come down again.

You can fall in love with the empty air between your palms, knowing it makes the sound of applause. With a brass goose hung on the wall of a stranger's foyer. With the sound of a pane of glass shattering. With a pear on a blue plate. With a ticket to Russia (one way, Moskvu-Kirov). With a cuneiform tablet you saw in the Drashovski Museum. With the foreign grammar of your lover’s body, his sleeping haunches cut off by the sheets like an indecipherable clause. With a desire to roll him in dried mango and clover leaf. With forbidden cigarette smoke on a bookstore stoop. A cephalopod in a glass case. A cassette tape, unspooled. A dirty ewer of rainwater. A hamburger: God bless the intrepid that fall in love with hamburgers! With a murderer in a story. With a burglar at your doorstep. With a set of keys. With a black coat (or the woman in it). The three familiar brushstrokes of an artist’s signature. A half-finished essay. A particular hour of the night you never meant to reach. A hand-press. With the odors of an unfamiliar body. With ten days of rain. You can fall in love: the brass goose will open its mouth and sing to you. The ticket will sit in your hand like a glass dove. The artist will sign your name on his next painting. Your lover's odors will smother your understanding. You will watch the sunset out of a train window and forget your own name, but you will not forget this. A smell of mango and sweat. A dirty ewer of air: your two palms held up, open, ready to take a burden of smoke, of light.

My grandmother was in love with a dentist back in Kiev:
She carried it with her. This secret. Such a profession,
keeping teeth neat and white!
His smile was like a string of pearls
laid out in a deep-red room.
There was a little cat who walked so prettily—
just so, so prettily, the Lady of Kiev--
and a little white house I saw in the back
corner of a photograph, the window
in which a star-shaped hole was gouged
the first night of the war--
just so. I carry Lady the Cat
and the dentist, his cowlick and
spectacles, and a sack
of the ash that makes Babi Yar
livid with flowers
in my belly or somewhere
deep-—shaking my head
my face caked in grease
flipping burgers all night in a furious
gavotte—coming out
into a night the city has slicked up with spilled
light—and smoking a cigarette—
I think, my teeth, they’re turning
black, I tap the ash, I marvel
I haven’t found a dentist for myself,
though glad for my lack of gold
teeth: the little boys of Kiev
sieved them out the ash
at Babi Yar and sold them neatly
wrapped:
they studded the dust, the nubs
of bone, like the lights of this city
stud the hill--a late-night metropol
of outraged tenor saxophones
and women wailing out and stifled moans,
city that holds a few willows
and a hundred rumpled beds in its belly,
and holds me too--and my memory--
and this cigarette--and this breath
and its fellow--under the streetlamp on
First and Tenth--little cup of light--

I am living in a house of our odors
And our memories,
Our illnesses, our rancors.
The parlor leaks.
The red shelf is sagging.
The basement soaked for weeks,
and the stoop beam dragging;

in the morning your scalp appears
Like a pink shell, showing itself
for the first time; the years
are pulling your hairs out one by one
with pallid fingers
But I am parting the curtains
in perpetual welcome.

I remember the first time I heard the story of Orion, and the first time I created him, pointing my finger, out of seven stars. The first time I saw him over the lake, over the hill, between the naked branches of the yew in winter. My first visit to Jerusalem—through the Dung Gate, in rain. Some memories are stories I tell myself and add words each time: the first time I crossed the George Washington Bridge, all the pylons were wreathed in fog, and Manhattan wore puffs of cloud all down its glassy nape. Or: And I cried for an hour, and I soaked the final pages of the book. I couldn’t believe how it ended! It still looks like I left it cooking in steam. Or: We got chocolate ice cream at the diner, and he drove me to school at seven in the morning. And some are remembered impressions - as if looked at through a sheet of doubled glass: the first taste of hot chard, the first wood I watched burn to ember; the first peacock I saw, sidling and crooning toward the hen; the first pains of divided love; the first time I saw a model of an atom, its smooth, bulbous joints; the first time I looked into the face of a supine, dying animal. If I list endlessly, forgive me my lists. My memories click against each other in my palms, like white marbles, and I am trying to play for keeps. Still they contend. They enjoin and pardon each other, but I am hedging my bets, I am filling my pockets: the first song composed, the first watched sunrise, the first rasping wood-frog I caught and let free again, and the way it took off, with a queer, sawing, angular motion, up over the mossy rock.

I got up to watch the sun rise this morning.

My legs felt like heavy putty or molten glass, but I wanted to know the sun rose because I had seen it myself. I perched on the highway bridge. Hidden under a maze of roofs, the sun turned the steam billowing out of the boot factory to a rosy haze. I watched the cars shoot one by one into the open jaw of the bridge and disappear. I remembered: the moment I realized that the words ‘car accident’ meant a moving car hit the body of a man and he died; the moment I realized clouds could move. The febrile sky pulsed with color over heavy ice. For years I have been appealing to the teachers of my childhood, in the hope that they can tell me who I was, who I am. But if once they could recall the first spidery and comical shapes I made, my first letters, these since have fallen to the musty grave of cursive-books, marble composition books, scratch paper, tumbled over each other like leaves in a gutter; the seventh word, the fifteenth step, a customary gesture of the hand.

Walking between dense banks of purple heather, I am suddenly terribly afraid. The sun round as a cockle, fetid brush pooled at the roadbank. I am trying to remember the name of an old friend’s husband, a barbed mess with many c’s and z’s. What if I have lost this strange, Polish name, of a boozy person with a coarse nose? Will I then lose the extraordinary purple of the heather here, the corrugations on the first pale birches, the felt-soft snouts of dogs I have known? So much depends on one coarse-haired person. I remember he liked to cook pierogies in lard. The light on Sasha’s forehead, the relentless sound of dice in his cupped palm, the path I am standing on which is tamped and black – all this seems to fade away even as I step. I pinch yew berries until they bleed their glassy juice onto my thumbs. I resolve to be a warrior until death, wielding my memories, scythes made of light. They’ll send me off in a black ship with a broken neck.

new hope avenue.

All the time we lived on New Hope Avenue
we watched winged shadows
through tinted windows.
The gourds we hung caved in
and showed their pale teeth.
Ripe as grenades, the spiked chestnuts - low.
The sage held on under mounds of snow.
You told me your dreams but I forgot them.
You handled me like an old gun.
It was right to—I spat fire,
grease. And you a yellow oilcloth
draped on the divan,
paper-thin man,
a hollow glass.
I wanted to drink you and break you
and swallow the shards.

All August my father held a flashlight in his mouth
like a bobbin or pearl, and gathered crabs with his hands,
the dark, mealy beach, frigid sand,
the serge waves lapping in the strait.
Father, with my hands I only write poems.
Out in the night the buds furl in
and the wind pitches fits against the roof.
The moon, a child with catarrh, wanes
plaintive and white.
I strip spruce canes
down to their split green hearts.
The black boxer pods furl
like so many skeins of film,
I want to remember everything I can.

au recherche de temps pendu

This is part of an experimental series of poems wherein I try to write from a speaker's perspective that isn't, well, me. One thing about writing a poem every day is you can do all sorts of experiments and series and series-within-series -- or so I'm attempting to discover. Tell me what you think! Tell your friends.

Love.
T


Poem for Les Poetes Maudits

You stub out your cigarettes and put them in your pockets
with fistfuls of matches
stripped clean at the edges.
You didn’t see me, you were transfixed by something,
maybe the light's coronets on the hedges.
I let my heels speak for me
in perfect meter,
I didn’t call out to you,
but remembered the Cimitière
des Batignolles,
where we admired the graves
of Breton and Verlaine,
and the dirty saint turned her head and clasped
her stone hands in her lap.
Fifteen hundred graves
thicker than spruce thorns,
catching the light on the thick rims of the stones.
We had nothing to leave them,
how could we leave them, the poets, in their stone houses,
enchained by flowers?
But today I can believe Verlaine could die,
and did die, once,
listing splendidly away from the sun,
and on a day Verlaine could die
with his saturnine poems, his excess, I too
can hurry away from you.