One can find forgiveness for forgetting that Tchaikovsky
wrote in praise of any other month as on weakened streets
tennis shoes lurch like metronomes and coffee burns into mouths,
and once-fearsome insects with their barbs lend their flights to lethargy
and their circling seems lazier than past years as if they know
that the next spring will bring news of a red queen, a dead queen
(regicide so rare these days)
and cousins with book lungs full of pesticides
with their crimson hourglasses or drab earth-tones,
and then neurotoxins flash like a fire to a newly opened door
and the clouds all fled and the stars
were infinite in their tiny crystals
of storefront glass or a million tears
and it was the beginning,
and one too can be forgiven for wondering which Mephistopheles
Pyotr had encountered on his way to painting the future.
II. Walking
The volcanic creep of her breath that pulled poison slower than beauty
through mass produced paper cartridges of affliction was disconcertingly
enchanting and her hands were cotton dipped in the steely breath
of arsenic and I kissed the sugar on her palms in a prayer
and I waited for the wind like Sleipnir in His haste
but perhaps the wise one would not choose to ride this year.
My love sustains herself on sunsets. She wonders at the moon,
so much more frightening now than in her childhood
when its crescent made a torch of her smallest finger,
and thinks of the water of a vacant sea as it laps
its thousand tongues (blacker than the sails of Theseus’s return,
mere calories from freezing) onto sand too terrible
for the fragility of wintered lunacy.
The sunrise turns from vapor and provides refuge
for Russian tyrants and the earth wraps a belt around Her hips
and shudders in the first mornings where frost gives its
mesh of mail to the leaves of sweetgum trees and the air
grows in hatred and the goddess has her vengeance.
The theft is felt by all (eternally chipping away at our oilcloth windows
with unpared fingernails) and the only defense for Prometheus comes
from the demon-blue of her voice and suddenly the threat
of ice-bitten toes seems trivial and laughable
and we close the eyes of the dead because we do not wish
to learn of certain secrets.
III. Memory
There was a girl with black hair. There was a girl and she was paler
than ghosts and she could be seen to-and-from school waiting for her bus
or else getting off of her bus, and later she dyed her hair
but that color is not remembered just as the number of her bus is not stone-etched,
and later she died and for the first time her name was recorded in electricity
but it too is lost, although it has by now probably been given to many more girls.
Some of them may have had hair like ravens at twilight and perhaps
they too grew to hate a face framed in midnight and if they have not died yet
then they surely shall. If more justice was in the world then these new spirits
with older names will have the luxury of burying their parents before they
climb to their own tombs, one in pine and another in oak and another in
iron-bound elm, and, above, there would be angels or modest squares
or towering spires of concrete and on each of their markers they would
have slight allegiance to another family (a composition of strange notes
that are jarring without being dissonant).
They sit at a locked gate without knowing if they desire
what lies behind its curves or even if it shall be the last bar in their path
as they wait for erosion. The leaves of autumn are wept but do not
find regret as a bloody blanket delicately wraps the feet
of an ancient maple tree after a storm.
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