Wednesday is quiet as a blurry photo.
I gather up armfuls of soiled bedclothes.
How many bedsheets dumped in the water
Does the harbor have room for?
Morning and evening greet each other
like blind men; they shake hands
uncertainly, and light passes through their palms.
I am limping through Wednesday,
the lame knee of the week:
a hunter without a map,
a singer without a mouth.

Late at night you put your ear to my belly,
seeking out its unsettled music.
It’s still there, and so am I,
translating thunder.
All January we sat
like a twinned mollusk in this house,
thigh to thigh. We glued the mattress to the ground
and set the bedframe on the street:
friend, you and I are so much children of the air
we don’t need to hang high.
Like the wind, we often smell of trash.
If we could, we would hover above the country
and prod at the apples, groaning down flues
and up skirts—we are an untranquil music.
Friend, I fear my soul is like my belly,
A round ship without rudder or prow.

I am a house of verse.
Twenty years of hunger built me up.
I sleep on a rag under an arch
on which two thousand verses are written
in two thousand languages.
In each language I am a daughter
and a sister. In all of them my cells split
and my head hammers when I drink too much wine.
A hundred sorrows sit at my side
and croon like old women then.
I cry out: but ‘the Muses
love deep silence’: and I
am like the child Solomon would split:
two feet, one head, a silence
that severs my belly:
each eave I lay down in silence,
I lay each tile, shingle,
I lay down the lintel in silence.
I am a house of verse
and in hunger I built myself up.

From the battle song of Thorlinda Haraldsdottir

‘I held at my side the glitterer.
Scratcher of men, daughter of fire
and the hammer, sister of tempering winds.
In my belly I held a piece of rage
thin as the moon, and it rolled there,
guttering. Then I took it up
and I opened my mouth. My tongue:
a coiled dragon
born on a windless sea.
I will call you to your grave with it.
Your soul is in your body like a boiled yolk
in a stuck egg, I will pierce it.
Your brow, a cliff’s cave, shelters you: I will shatter it
and I will not stain
my golden armlet.
Though your blood scald it,
my sword, raven-beak, burning
hair of a god, will not falter or cease.’

and now for something completely different... PICK A CURTAIN!

PICK A CURTAIN
a poem/play

AUDIO RECORDING HERE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khnZfDMKwv0



GUIDE
Ladies and gentlemen, this way! Please ignore the howls of thunder to your right, and the writhing mass of spiders at your left! Enter please, I’m not taking questions at this time, this way, downstairs, and down this black passage, step sharp, thank you! I ask every gentleman presently to pinch a handful of dust from the ground and cast it over your shoulder, and every lady please to spit on the stones, just a little formality, a little libation, ladies and gentlemen, this way, no questions, thank you.

A MAN (peevish)
Were we supposed to bring pajamas? You never told us if we were supposed to bring pajamas.

GUIDE
No questions, thank you.

(Mentholated smoke begins to fill the passage. Snifters of brandy fall softly from the ceiling, into waiting hands.)

Ladies and gentlemen, brandy’s on the house, and inhale deeply, trust me, you’ll thank me. No questions at this time, ladies and gentlemen, but one more request: if you could write down the names of your children or other earthly heirs on the slip of paper at the bottom of each cup, if you could write them down and swallow them, it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. And now we come to the curtained chamber, and here I’ll leave you, ladies and gentlemen. Here’s my brother.

(ANOTHER GUIDE emerges who is identical to the first.)

GUIDE
Gentlemen, may I ask you to please step forward! Ladies, you may remain behind or step forward as you like, but keep your skirts smooth and your noses clean. And now, for your delight and delectation, the game of PICK A CURTAIN! The game where you ab-so-lutely HAVE to pick a curtain!

Behind curtain number one… a lifetime of imperturbable beauty fueled by boatloads of cocaine!

Behind curtain number two… thousands of green plantains with portraits burned into their skins!

Behind curtain number three… a small village explodes in an effulgence of light!

Behind curtain number four … a bottle of wine so big you could almost drown in it!

Behind curtain number five … a fifteen-year-old girl on her knees!

Behind curtain number six… 11:45am at a Chinese food buffet … forever!

Behind curtain number seven… no more war!

Behind curtain number eight … perpetual war!

Behind curtain number nine … tasteful and discounted furnishings!

Behind curtain number ten… all the admonishments you’ll ever receive, given to you now, now, now!

Ladies and gentlemen, the universe awaits your selection in total silence! The time has come to PICK A CURTAIN!

(The sound of heavy breathing begins all around. The loud, bass, cartoonish ticking of a clock begins, thudding time. It gets louder, then crescendos.)

(The curtain falls. Silence.)

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.

apologies for the missed day!!!

the storm that ravaged the northeast knocked out the power in my house, so I was sadly internetless. Here's the backlogged poem I wrote in the midst of the storm!



1.
Cats and men caught in their hide-holes under the brow of the storm.
2.
Its brow. Its wrinkled palm. Its sheets of teeth.
3.
Flattened trees gird the street.
4.
Ruins of mailboxes.
5.
Ruins of houses: one slate roof gapes like a toothless mouth.
6.
Making light for hours, we watch the flames rise with gutless avarice.
7.
We fear hunger like a drunk fears the light.
8.
Like a jailor fears an open door.

9. The storm sets its jaw over our house. Swallowed, we light a fire in its belly, so we can see our fingers, our bread.

10. And everyone squabbles over a precious pebble. The catch on a purse (fumbled). A stream of babble.
11.
Later on (or in our dreams) we’ll pray (time to pray then).

I return to the house of my childhood and anger welters up to the seams of my body. I say: who are you, faded posters, to witness my body changing shape—getting bigger, looser? The same mother still offers her wallops upside the head, her Sabbath dishes scraping the roof of the oven’s mouth, but the elms are older, I am more dissolute, my bed is strange, the paintings I made at fifteen watch me with warped grins, my sisters are weary, my lover awaits me, the secret things and the colored glass I kept bundled in a cabinet are dusty; I see everything through my old glasses, they pinch at my ears, I seem to see my name written in a childish hand everywhere: on the windows, the doors, the belly of my sisters, there it is hidden in the hairs under the navel, five letters leering a half-moon leer on doorknobs, on forks, on the veins of the elm leaves.

Driving to the lake, I felt the deep freeze all the way down to my gut. There it stood, pitted like a moon. I drove in circles around the perimeter, eating French Fries at the rim of the world. All night last night there were people yelling on the street. I looked down and under the streetlight there was a boy-man like a young god hooting and curling his body round the post. Perhaps street corners are kinder to young men than stories, where they are always drowned, rent asunder by nymphs, dismembered by enemies; there’s always a river to carry them away. The lake is shut like a stained-glass window. Inside, another battered young man is suspended, but he’s beaming at me. Under the water, thick as blood, under the sodium streetlamp, the young men open their mouths—to sing, to caterwaul love, to check the silence before it can begin (before it can overwhelm).

Sobeska Hlava

This is a woman with skin like an onion’s
and lips closed tight as a preserve jar.
She would darn patches in the clouds
if she could, weave herself a skirt
of straws that hang from the bales.
She disapproves of winter—only because
frost chips at the lindens, their colors grow dull
and meld together. Sister of wool-skeins,
handmaid of the yoke
that keeps the oxen neat
Sobeska wants the whole world under her feet—
Not choked up in her hands like a throttled goose
Or up above her head where the sun hangs loose
Casting its favor carelessly
Over the suffering linden tree.

things fall apart. response poem.

when did the god come down from the mountain?
we used to hear him there
raging at the briars

when did the goddess come up out of the sea?
we used to hear her there
singing like a washerwoman
among her sponges

who was the man who pressed his god between pages,
quiet as a copse
even the bees have fled?
in a rage for silence, this god pins down the hands
of the mountain-god who played javelin with thunder
presses his hands on the mouth of the sea goddes so fiercely
she breaks into foam

the god of silence shelters orphans
but he slew their fathers first

and stamped their yams:
how quickly he moves!
such a god never danced.

he cuts their cowrie anklets
as he cuts the cord

like a wind that dries the jungles
is the word of the lord

Ten days of rain shatter on the holly
that guards my window.
Its lucid buds stay on the points like stars.
I’ve been wishing so long
To be washed out with the tide:
The river will rear up, and call me its sister,
and the geese that gather
in vulgar prayer beside the water
will gather me too;
at first bowed, the misshapen daughter,
I will rise up, borne by the river's arm,
which holds in its palm
a hundred cups of sun.

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.

In August
I pressed seeds into the earth
I ground them in with my heel
And the heavy seed-wheel
Hungrily out of the bitter heart
They thrust down without art
sucking the iron earth up
into their yards of gut

Little garden,
I am like a ghost here,
I take what I can from the air
and I go where I would:
without a nettle to my name
or the least idea of good

Who named the river mouth?
Who put a name on it, the place
their fingers touched?
Where did the name come from?
The river itself offered sonorous
suggestions; the clouds, a flock
tenderly husbanded, did they spell it,
the leaves, did they tell it?
The lips pull the name out
and shape it as it comes.
A hundred lands
murmuring names
various as suns.

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--

A meditation on the names of places

Morocco has two names and two histories:
Al-Maghreb, “the furthest west”
As distinct from the Midwest, and the east
of Arabia.
‘Morocco’ comes from the Latin ‘Morroch’
which refers to Marakkesh, its capital city—
Mur-Akush, the Berbers’ “Land of God.”
To decide between them is like deciding
between the mountains and the desert.
Sister of deserts, Maroc turns eastward
And listens to them murmur.
From the east, over the mountains – that is where God sits;
husband of their quiet, he tends to its keeping,
he does not wipe his brow in the fiercest sun.
In the mountains, the junipers and cedars
put out their hands,
sending the wind away with their scent,
away into the cloud like a black spool reeled with rain.

here's to you, chuck

1.
When I am ill, waking in my body is like waking in a foreign country: a moment of vertigo until I am accustomed to a new, arid climate, one I first came to in the dark, shuddering towards sleep. Sun-dazzled women walk the streets of this city, in white dresses, and with bronzed limbs.

2.
Spring dissolves the ice like a shorn fleece or a tamped breeze. We go down to the river and toast it with goblets of its own blood.

Midnight fits me with its stifling garment;
The moon bit deep by little rings of teeth;
A sour rain, fog’s bilious harvest
Hisses like a kettle when it hits the street.

I loved you, little mime, with your bright mouth, craving
To touch your eyes to mine, those boxed-up pearls,
Caught in the fogs of the black ships leaving,
While the white-capped boys call to the cinder-girls.

15 Haiku in Response to Yukio Mishima’s ‘Spring Snow’

1.
Japan is trembling
Before modernity, as
if before a snow.

2.
Satoko waiting
At the gate, dressed in purple:
Hyacinth in storms.

3.
Leave silence, Kiyo,
Come out from its pallid house,
To the cherry blossoms.

4.
Spring comes: but Kiyo,
Rushing from love and friendship,
Seeks autumn’s silence.

5.
As rain showers pass
So furious passion fades:
Love’s abdication.

6.
Satoko’s obi:
a red serpent, singing
of sweet summer longings.

7.
Honda sees Kiyo
On the beach, in his red cloth:
Seas move in his belly.

8.
The Prince lost his ring,
Then its gem, his beloved:
Loves migrate like birds.

9.
Dead mole in the road:
Cast it away, Kiyo!
Where is its soul now?

10.
Life forms in her belly:
Even by the emperor
Wholly uncontrollable

11.
Blood of a turtle
Passes through unknowing lips
Like a short life’s years

12.
Satoko’s shorn hair
Like a sorrowful monsoon
Falls in thick torrents

13.
Through the early spring
Kiyo moves towards destiny:
A boat of lotus leaves

14.
His heart supplicates
At the feet of Satoko:
Words in weeping wind

15.
Kiyo’s soul is taken
as if by a train in winter:
sleeping migration