Cold gusts before the running rainclouds streak stone columns
encrusted with white fossil-like remains of tendrils,
sun-bleached, from old vines torn out like decades from a life.
Camellia’s leaves, their sawtooth edges, scrape low roof’s slate,
waking the moths that listen differently — Damballah,
smear their powder on the plaster walls, read what’s written:
Gone is Kush, long gone Third Nubia, now Kabul falls
into rough zealots’ hands, and law will lie down like rain
over underground fires smelling of burnt pleather,
unleaded gasoline. But in the moth-child’s mural
of the future, a hard hat rests atop an i-beam
and in the worker’s hands — a book, bright pages beaming.
You’re there too, firmly in a kiss, in a park, in heat,
in best weeks of the year, clinging to the stone of day,
a vine in the temporal bowl that raises morning
to the trembling grapes. In my present, I can’t reach them
though I know their taste, touch of their greeny ocean skin,
real in my translation as the film that slips between
your time and mine. Rain streaks its celluloid, cold image —
ridiculously fuchsia bougainvillea, absurd
against laid stone of green-brown outer wall, moss-molded,
stacked thick for thieves and stranger’s trespass — another way’s
to move, keep to the road. Both methods keep what’s ours
the same, but differently kept, hemmed in by habit —
unfree to move or stay, respectively. Another
story goes the way of high rise, laughing as I pass
under scaffolds, developer’s knee on my breathing
as I rasp, mumbling: governments are defeats. Hard hats
turn their noses skyward, not to books. Fresh trucks idle
by swept stoops of brownstones to make safe delivery
of supple spinaches to vegans screening novels,
holding space, while in blocked streets young ambulances sulk.
Damballah, take it from them, that there be no markets,
no savings to invest, none passing down their hoarding,
for I’m born without bootstraps. And you remain future,
firm in a body, in the vine of a kiss, trembling
with the ridiculous satisfaction of living,
as close to your love as winter water on the face.
I give my Ted Talk in the shower on translation, how poems
are dead calques, others in ourselves. Averse to versification,
I linger in the kitchen over dishes, even wash the sink,
make coffee to avoid the notebook turning to a naive leaf
and lose the poem. I am the foreign word, the foreign syntax,
the medicine of Mallarmé, Baudelaire’s hospitals, the moon
in cross-hair panes, encased in transom, tensed toes embracing parquet
to rhyme in someone screaming, turn deaf ear. Like a Petropolis,
sleep calls though now night’s nearly over — hold tears back and set the clock,
dream all the versions, squander rolls of dice, and hope that fate decides.
Not everyone can feel okay and no one does the same for less
than that; civilization’s bleating won’t be shut by set-price words.
These symptoms of a severe nose-picking computer depression
as the UN convenes to say the only thing there’s left to say:
“we surrender.” There is no getaway, there’s barely a movie.
These fries stick in my throat. I quit the dive bar early, and couplets,
tercets later, and later still to quatrains I intend to move,
now shirtless, cooking rice, saving for summer to leave the city
and worrying for rent — I haven’t got it. The taxman cometh.
Mess of dinner parties thrown a month ago still on the table
where I write, class-conscious, class-avoidant, thought-policed. The spirit
of the letter rolls painted winter waves against the unmade bed.
Friend, you and I have both had our desires programmed. Tepid
generational malaise precludes our fury. The writing is
not what it used to be: all honored, nothing need be read now more
than once, and once may be too many. I’ve stayed awake worse hours,
the heat is out, exterminators knocking. In my apartments
no rooms divide, quarters scarcely serve as name. Junk in the mailbox
brightly begs. Not a way that has no will, the cockroach seems to say.
If only it could bark. Now trees clatter at the oval windows
of the airplane, my soft voice pitched against the Turner waves. Applause
for those who stand on money, under chandeliers, those being seen
at the embankment after hours fail the day, in banquet halls
of boredom replete in lustful gazes. Have at all costs your fun,
fucked up in salons, on chaise-lounges. We washups keep to ruins
and glasses of fine rain. Tame passes for the new, society
for bloodless murder, hip kids sling untranslatables, rise global;
designer skateboards sleep under couches. It’s sad to think that you
had no computer, and still the heart is empty, the hatband
in your hand, the thread is missing from the handkerchief of sorrow —
fine linen thread. How calculate such failures as our own? You walk
on past the youth that thrashes pent longing for the hearth, the willow
flying into rages, where these words betray their dictionary
meaning. Here I picture and portray the squish of your soft body
ably at my ribs, decoding flesh to numbers. After nature
(of which, at one time, we were naturally skeptical) breaks free
of Reformation’s sacred war on eros, of order’s music,
slinks back to words — which alone could name it as that which we had lost,
pray to it, well pronounce its pagan vows, write contracts known as deeds —
in chronic illness of the days, with worn delirium as muse,
I stand on burning deck of earth beneath feet’s fetal curvature,
inhaling deli flowers for a dying minute. In my hand
is dross, chaff — the germ is lost, what admiration I could muster —
and now these last few drops I squeeze from winter handkerchief of snow.