Lt. John Pike

I know that his boots were black and heavy as they shined like Italian history.

I know that for three years his salary as a police officer for a university

has been slightly more than a hundred thousand dollars a year

and that on the same day Puerto Rico was discovered (for the last time)

he leisurely sprayed a chemical agent into the faces and lungs of students

sitting passively on their own campus; their heads bowed, their arms linked.

I know that his apartment complex has a swimming pool (aquamarine)

and a tennis court (night-dark green, white lined) and that he lives in no. 616.

I know that when he is not wearing riot armor he manages the Records Unit,

but I will not know the sort of man he is unless he does not put a bullet in his head.

Lioness

On this night, all the while listening intently to her breathing

and the way her heart beats as we cleave together,

I have set my lips upon very much of her;

although perhaps it is imprudent to say this

when considering the jealousy that may arise at my privilege-

Where I glance as she bleeds from playing music through the night

and around her thumb the seeping red has the taste and scent of a strawberry;

but at a moment in time when violence, pestilences, or storms of earth or air

have made strawberries impossible to purchase, even in massive marketplaces.

Where I stare when les autres offend her and fail to appreciate

the danger of rousing one who wields the knife of a butcher, skillfully,

even while drunker than a stone has ever been;

or as she plays a particular variation on a minor chord that evokes Seville.

When once gouges rippled in deep furrows like sand dunes

over my shoulder-blades, she soon stopped where she stood, noticing this;

her grin became as summer days when lightning strikes the sun

(I confess in this memory I generally remember her unclothed,

though it may be that she was bundled in preparation to trudge in snow,

tawny scarf spun ominously about her neck, a swan shaped unlike a swan)

She said, “What will you tell the next woman about those, when she asks?”

I replied, “I will say, ‘How is it possible that you do not remember

needing to put them there, mademoiselle?’ ”

She shook her long blackened hair and her irises quaked in accord,

(And if there was a God of Power then this world could not exist thus,

where the oceans of her eyes do not display the hues of all flame)

and she laughed and laughed but I saw, a divination in glass and smoke,

the day in my future when I shall be a blind man sitting in a wicker chair.

These dreams and fragments of the past, I kiss (leach) from her fingertips

as she sleeps with heavy blankets strewn across her body, socks still on,

her hand half-curled in beauty just above her collarbone:

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

I brush my mouth behind her earlobe and (vainly) whisper-

a rose, my love, its bulb flowering

in the dark of an autumn night,

need only be brought out

when one wishes to tempt the thorns.

Carmen 35

Brick and concrete, silent stone soon to be fashioned into walls

(rocks mingle with the bodies of fallen men to make the mortar)

that keep out dreaded barbarians, but never cold-fingered Death

as He lightly glides in a tarlike cloak-

Hurry masons, craft barriers against the bite of the white-tinged wind

that already has stripped the trees bare down to their bones,

that whipping wind that wishes to peel the flesh from the living

like paring the skin from a fiery red apple.

Carmen 34

To produce upon demand (or request) is a curious thing;

as if the moon were to become full a week before its time

or if flowers were to pierce the icy ground of winter

and dot that snowy quilt with the sun-bright daisy

or the ancient royal blood of the violet, of the crimson poppy.

This disturbance in the tides, the wolves, the lives of women,

it finds a mirror in each of those vibrant, foreign colors.

The light of a slowly dying sun controls these elemental shifts,

although once the withering of the green meadows

of the Earth, mother of all,

was blamed on the Lord of the Dead.

The stolen, abused goddess-child is now forgotten

as though she were three leaves gracefully falling.

Melpomene, you desire so many things on this day. Your impatience

is perplexing: the seasons turn on their own accord,

infatuations end, fault lines are promises, the stars shed their shells,

the dusts of a thousand novas have combined to make my ink.

Is it not enough to be immortal, must you be forever praised?

Offerings

Rising from my sleep, the Holodomor enters my mind

and now, beset by details of a ghoulish fantasy,

I see myself wearing an overcoat, in warm boots

as I walk across the crystalline dirt of November

on my way to confiscate Ukrainian grain.

The image now shivers. What shall be done when I arrive?

What will be found when I leer inside the hovel, holding my pistol?

It is early still, not truly winter, so the children will not yet

have begun eating one another. Praise to Janus,

that such things will wait for his month. What then?

I have heard that some of the others have taken women,

if they have found them alone; no matter, it is less an evil

to abuse the dead than to scuff the shoes of the living.

When I breach the doorway, it is more likely that I will vigorously laugh

in the manner of a pyramidal overseer (one desert traded for another)

and cruelly knock over a few humble chairs before turning

to make exaggerated searches of an entirely bare cupboard.

I take a long drink of vodka from my flask as I stare into a face,

the eyes that are half a face: a boy younger than four. He is afraid.

-Blessedly I am shaken free of this reverie by the ghostlike figure

in my bed. She makes a sound, resembles Garm having a daydream.

She pulls my right hand into hers, smiles in contentment

and rolls toward the wall, pulling me to her. My left hand

traces down her spine, pausing at the knots that time has tied.

There is a statue in Kiev. It is of bronze or something like it.

There is a little girl and she is very thin and wears a dress

that stretches from the middle of her calves to her neck

and the sleeves fasten mid-forearm and her hair is in braids.

She clasps her hands over her heart and in one of them

she clutches five spikelets of wheat.

She stands on a short concrete pillar with eyes blank like fields

and often red apples fresh from trees encircle her feet.

Damnatio Memoriae

I think of the Biblical injunction against the vain repetitions in prayer characteristic of the heathen; enjoying an irony that the savage, imitable Book provides. Even one iteration of praise is a vainglory if the god attested by Matthew the Evangelist does not exist.

Some handfuls of centuries later, Lev Nikolayevich, Count Tolstoy, sets forth a masterful work of prose in which the futility of life is thoroughly exposed; the eponymous character sensibly sends herself to the grim iron path of a train (it is left untold if she is reborn elsewhere as a dove). Then, somewhat inexplicably, Tolstoy turns attention to his alter ego for a conclusion; the aptly named Levin wrestles mightily with his small, complete, universe, eventually deciding to abdicate in this struggle. His final declaration: that he would continue to pray and hope, though he did not believe the impulse to be reasonable.

Life’s mechanistic terms (the water, the food, the avoidance of certain weather patterns and pains) make it an inevitability that more than one man will live a single life; some millions may combine to only four or five distinct lives in total. What does it mean to a leatherworker or farmer to fall in love, when the armies of whole nations have been fed to crows for the sake of a Helen or a Sita? Jesus the Christ is cobbled together and popularized by Saul of Tarsus as an admixture of Dionysus and Mithras; The Son manages to imitate or else plagiarize the Buddha on multiple occasions in spite of the separation of a continent and a millennium: the young Messiah’s now-legendary betrayal and eventual resurrection in the savage form of Medieval Christianity are variants or mimicries of those daggers that eagerly tasted the flesh of the aging Julius Caesar- the numberless holy blades that conferred godhood to Caligula and Caracalla.

At times I am shaken by an impression (a star’s thumbprint on my eyelids as I slumber) that all events of life are a rendering of what has come before: tomorrow, my finding a scarred nickel on the roadside is not only prefigured, as is the date inscribed, 1985, but I have already spent the coin or have left it forgotten for decades in a dusty glass jar; or while standing in a shower, washing off a woman as the steam furrows its eyebrows at the third frost of autumn, that each cascading droplet is the exact memory, or recreation, of a previous cleansing and that the tile shall seem very cold to my toes when I emerge.

The barest compromise available appears to be the best one. It is not that all things have already passed, nor that our lives are mirrors gazing into one another, nor even that every other living thing is an automaton while I am free of such oppressive strings; rather, it is true that nearly all that has occurred or shall occur is and was foreordained. The hopeless worship of a fictional god by a fictional character, celestial tyrants modeled on the Dictator and his dynastic descendants, the length of my beard, the dryness of the apricots that sit upon my desk: these things were always to happen. However,

Once in my youth I was walking in the forest behind my home and I remember that the leaves were in the trees though I do not know if they were dying; let us say that it was spring. Since invention is the order of the moment let us also say that it was morning, the particular rose-colored morning that paper mills make possible. I was playing an unambitious linguistic game. I said to myself, “Dawn, this rose in the air. Don, to put on clothing, or to assume a thing, as Ajax did before his lethal madness. Donne, the poet, with his grudges and his fleas. Dawn, the name of a woman or the feeling of knowing that a woman of any name shall never return.”

While muttering these and other words I passed by an enormous smooth stone, left by the floods that came in autumn. If I had stopped and rotated this monolith some seventy degrees, perhaps everything could have been different. I have not yet decided, but I may choose not to touch it upon my next opportunity, either. If such brutality as has preceded me was necessary in order for my existence, it may be unsafe to alter in any way the arc of history.