Fragments 5

Each morning on our doorstep, flower petals

are arrayed in prayerful patterns. We dispassionately

brush them aside as we walk (her feet soft in moccasins)

until the day's newspaper is found.

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tradition perishes slower than the sun

or else is extinguished in an instant,

more fragile than a firefly

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A soldier walks past storefronts on pristine brick sidewalks.

He is camouflaged so that he need not see himself

unless he is alone.

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a prison is more than locked bars at the door

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one day in the world's dark heart, the Christians

burned a little girl as a witch

while the devil licked his fingers

and played the world's smooth piano keys

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even if the only consequence of oppression

was the formation of group identity,

that alone would necessitate a march to equality

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even on afternoons where her song is a banshee's wail

and the windows shatter from missiles shaped as coffee cups,

I understand that whole villages would drink the dregs of death

if they could but share a minute's time with the divine

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after three weeks of finding himself buried alive,

he began to play himself in games of chess,

and even though he was held entirely captive from light

the pieces that he moved around no board were white and black

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unravel (as a wave gasping at the release of the shore)

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What characteristic of trees first made men fell

such towering giants to the earth?

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Goddess, tell me of chained misery,

for I know why you came from the sea

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for an age, men knew not that oceans possessed ends

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the sweat on her shoulders scattering

like marbles on a hardwood floor

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a poem about a painting is not very different

than a painting about a person

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Collapse, my love, as the grandest cliffs of granite

change to sand with the lapping of the tide,

for I have licked my fingers and rubbed the mortal source of light

into nothing. There will be no knocks against the door,

nor invaders peering into our haven. Sleep and be mine,

and when we wake the pyramids will be palm trees.

Sisyphus

I.

She told him that when she laughed her ears

turned to the color of apple peels, before stammering

that apples were sometimes yellow or green,

but that she had meant that her ears turned the color

of the peels of red apples, though perhaps that didn't matter either.

Arkady laughed and said, “Do not worry. I assure you

that there are more unpleasant ways to point out that a person is blind.”

They drank four bottles of wine and the lamps of the night faded to blue.

Her hair was the color that all things were

and the skin below her clavicle was crisp like apple peels were

sometimes. Six years passed with the dew and every star burned,

fury flooding across ancient seas that such a love was denied

to the flickering of dying candles and all the other gods.

One morning the sky was shaded like flame bitten trees

and she whispered to him as he sat clay-stained in a chair,

“You must not follow. Tomorrow morning, hanging from the mailbox

there will be a necklace. When the sun's wheel is hidden it will be gone.

Until a day comes that these two things happen differently,

you shall not see me again.”

II.

For twenty years, Arkady woke during mornings and walked

to a box he had never seen so that a chain of silver could be tarnished.

At night he wept like the roots below killing fields when his

frantic hands touched no surface save the cursed tin box-shell or walnut post.

He had stopped speaking to anyone except his village priest

until this recourse was denied him after a particularly virulent

hemorrhagic fever decimated the rural population and it was then

that hushed stories of the blind potter emerged. It was said

that he could craft wine-bowls that would disintegrate if the drinker

was a liar. It was said that he had fallen in love with a wraith. It was said

that he was an immortal who had sacrificed his first eye for the knowledge

of all things and who had later placed his second upon the altar in order to forget.

III.

It was a day in May and Arkady was forty-six years old. The path

clung to his sandals with the mud of three-day rains and he pressed the links

of the necklace to the curve of his jaw. After a moment he sat on the ground.

“Grandfather,” they said (his beard made lions surge with envy and it was

white with clay). “Grandfather, can something be done?” He sat silent.

He wrapped the necklace around his craftsman's wrist.

Arkady did not move and the next morning they said again, “Grandfather,

can something be done?” The next morning they pleaded with him (his skin sallow,

his urine dark brown and dribbling from his pants, the slim silver of her token

metallic in his mouth) to drink water from a spring, but he shook his head in reply.

On the third morning of his vigil he began to break his teeth in his madness. Before

night his heart broke entirely. They buried him in a simple coffin beneath

an apple tree high on a hill. Next to the headstone of Arkady, shaper of clay,

a monument pierced its way into the dungeons of the clouds. A bronze setting

proclaimed the name of the Tsarina Alexandra,

dead these twenty years from an outbreak of plague.

Rapping in the Snow

Cop rolls by and he’s nibbling on a sweet confection.

Streetlights flash in my eyes from every direction

And putting steel on my wrists is that pig’s obsession.

He can’t see me ‘cause the night is my soul’s protection.

I’d punch his mouth but he’s got a fucking Smith and Wesson.

That’s not all, just a taste of talent’s selection.

Son of Pan, immortal life without introspection,

Can’t talk ‘bout women since I am the picture of discretion,

But if you wonder who’s the greatest I’ll answer the question:

The bi girls say that I should give the lesbians lessons.

Cairo

Barbarous men with masks like men’s faces step heavily.
There is a peculiar tinge from the foreign sunset pooling with the dust
and it is remembered that gutters are not only for the rains.

There is terror in the air and the feet of the pursued are war drums
(pulse, pulse, the rumble of a slipping fault,
the shudder of foundation’s collapse, the suffocation
of a religious festival that sends too many to god).

They die and here it is winter. They die with ribs broken by batons
and because my toes are cold I wear socks with my slippers.