If you laid all the twinned souls
of this earth end to end it wouldn’t span a river bridge.
But the blooms push out like flattened hands
over the whole earth’s span.

Carob blooms bear the heavy musk
of rot, to take the blackflies in;
deadly oleanders lip at my window
white as matrons’ hats.
And each with a stem that mills like Charon's pole
into the dim evening.
All the warships of Thucydides
could not breathe air into such blooms as these.

Hot wind trembles over the bridge, under your
ankles. I could not believe the air could hold
so many as these,
putting their tongues out into the night.

glossy birds pluck crumbs from the grass
swirled like oil spills.
you and i sit lasciviously
stroking petals outside the library.
soon we are going to fall away into our different summers,
our different years, will forget this plunk-
of-butt sidewalk grunt
into the veined throat
of the purple flower,
slender as the neck of a lynx, smelling of vanilla,
spreading its pollen on your hand, your hair,
downy, tear-inducing dream-
residue
touching your sticky lips and cravat
soaked in dew.
legs crossed I dreamed I had buried you
in the guts of Rome
under the heaving Hippodrome,
I shook my head, the magnolias dropped
in spicy drifts
under the buzzard-clear hot, haze-
drenched sky.

morning sounds its bells
in the rooster’s throat:
spring breaks like a wave
on my shut mouth

the words in there
empty and cool
as cowrie shells

morning condensing
on the window sill
obliterating
the darkness between blossoms

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.

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.

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’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.

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—

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.

poem for march 30th anxiety attack

This evening in March
fear is lighting itself in my belly.
It gutters there
sending up a spined shadow on the wall.
That hungry expanse
dulls the walls of my belly.
A sleepless darkness, mother
of subterranean tremor,
a dessicate mouth
open as if in speech
but black in its silence.

All along the path today
the first flowers cried their lives,
each petal bright
as a sung word.
Now darkness fills each over
and March trembles at its center
like a snapped cord.