Gulls on the sidewalk
Faces too much alike
To recognize or ignore
(A smile works for everyone)
I’m helpless…
Smiling, cautious
Unhappiness lingers
Drips from hands and faces
--No, don’t look at me
Don’t even smile like that.
You whore your hope
Strange girl. I am not him.
Fevers, fevers shiver away
In this city of laundered grays.
She dances with a shopping cart
Tosses rags up at the sky
Red, pink, purple, white
Vanish in a sea of suds.
She won’t last long now, bleaching fast.
Fingers grimy: spare a smoke?
I fumble in my pocket lost in thought.
Say, it’s getting chilly nowadays.
She nods to oblige me, lights up
And wrinkles off, her bells
thru uplit
wisp, blue vision, yet
unripe dreams
the future
flue of
what
lungs weather
adding to the clouds
heavying breath on
lampsquare balconies
night
what is delusion
if only could
I take a breath.
of.
but is that too
thick blocken me
goddammit
you look good now wake
my drippy veins
catch fire! whoop and
for joy, submerge
my throat in your
loveless stupor
the words I
(blood on the wall)
spat
became a tourist attraction.
the songs I
(alone where I fall)
bled
keep couples dancing.
Moth
The calendar unturned now for a year
Repeats, 'tis May, and gathers dust;
And deadlines past diverge and threads fall where
The lines of failure on the floor are crossed.
Now don't look down: a year now past the time
When innocence became no more excuse,
When ignorance meant nothing less than crime--
Your writing fades, your threads unwind the noose.
How everything: the mirror on the wall,
The withered garden, only mocks and hurts,
The wilted letters blow about the floor,
Corrode the bones like acid through each pore
A chill, a sour ache that deadens words:
I am the fruit of a journey.
Before then I hung by the road
On a fig-- no time to whistle:
The road, it charged at me
Sweating rain—
Drifts of powdered sky
Salted a bland city,
They blew clear through me
Not distilling. Moving on
Suddenly
No one’s shadow—
Thank my cleverness
I snatched at the seeds of others
A hell of a lot cooler than
I’ll ever be. Nonetheless
I confess I had little faith
In what they handed me
(I never believed in dandelions)
And there was no echo
Down the same steep
Slope I’ve reached again,
Rolling, wind and wheels
Bad luck, a backseat driver.
By now done what I could
Redundancy my middle name.
Before me the last
Black feverish moments
Flock to the sky
Blinking blinking
Behind me, the storm—
Riding
Through Fog
So one night I’ll open the door
And invite your ghosts:
(It bears no repeating)
Fog smudges colors.
Traffic lights wash off the page
The pages drenched: transparent
Think, I am a shadow, one of many
(Silver spokes turn on depthless ocean)
A black tear in the sheet.
Behind, a child’s crayon
Etches bright lavender roads, they
Swerve into a smile.
Sister of my mornings
Your hair crowned with dew:
I’ll tell you everything, everything.
The memory of sickness fades fast.
We grow reckless again, like the sea
Encroach on hills, shuffling leaves
Where silence dares to hide
Hide we. Silence prowls in the thicket
Poaching for words—
They scatter
Into a sky, color of hope
Plum
blossoms
in branches, stars astir.
your birthday passed
from morn to night
these snows of absence
keep falling.
the headlights shovel
frost in my face
from night to morn
cognoscent roses
open in dreams, pale
auguries of pain
I laugh, am I already old
waking, find in my hair
the petals white
They pass it on in alleys, one to one.
They hide it under arms (I know it)
Afterward the pavement smells sweet.
In whispers? In gestures
the storefronts do not repeat?
On windy corners, I hear down the street
the notes they slip from sleeve to sleeve.
They smuggle it across all borders
to the people of the sun (I know)
to the glacier’s dream of heat.
But I, I know them, I know!
In my straitjacket, once on a street
I caught one, I caught her running
a red light, her hair a breeze--
I cornered her. I tried to squeeze
an arm out-- Already she
had soaked it up. In snug and neat
(she beamed a radiant smile at me)
uniform-- I crumpled simpering at her feet.
what myth was it
looked you in the face
then away forever
in the lukewarm bath
couples surface and
dissolve
again this year
a clown sits juggling
hopes under the pine
on strangers’ grass
anything can happen
this is the season
people turn dreamy
soon the lawns are
unbearably green
your shoes vacant
you tread on dewy
ashes
a loafer spits black tea
between his toes:
your spot taken
you learn
meagerness, how
a landed fish
gets by
on smaller, smaller
mouths of air
not even a hand
a branch not even
a branch a feel
not even a feel
a breeze not even
a breeze
remains
To S.
As a child, out skiing in Russia
Once upon a time, he slipped, fell away
From his father and mother down a long slope
Fell into the winter woods, into their black scrawl
A foreign word. He nearly died—
In later years the wandering Jew in his blood
Took him to yet another landscape
He grew up, silent
In the concrete forests of an alien city.
They taught him to speak in grunts and maybes
The mother tongue hovering about like a curse
Like snow blowing white patches into the undergrowth
Leaving something always unsaid—
Dust blew into his mouth.
A chapter torn out of the book
Became its own history: so he shrugged
And faced the wind always wearing
Boulders thin, blowing loose the pages of fading childhood
Around a curb of conjugations—
Only once, he cried out
At midnight, when all the doors were swinging open and shut
(Li Po, 8th Century AD)
Holy shit!— Steep!!— High!!!—
Shu roads are hard! hard as going up blue sky!
Lord Chu and Yüfu— what mists when they began—
And then a whole forty-seven thousand years
Not a soul, a wisp of smoke from Chin.
West of Taipai there’s a bird-path
Can slice the top off Ermei Peak
Earth broke, mountains crumbled, titans crushed to death
Only then rock-trails hooked up with ladders in the sky.
Up there the six dragons rolling the sun turn back at the
summit
Down there the torrents run riot and burst their channels.
The yellow crane can’t even soar through this pass
The ape on cliff-face panics, loses its grip—
How the Blue Mud Peak spirals upward
Nine turns every hundred steps dizzily convoluted—
Hanging on Orion’s belt you catch your breath
Beating your chest, lean out and heave a sigh.
Let me ask you, sir, when you plan to go home?
I’m afraid you’ll never pass those gruesome peaks!
But look, vultures are moaning from dead trees
Males following females winding through the forest
A cuckoo calls the moon
Cries empty mountains:
Shu roads are hard! hard as going up blue sky!
You hear the sound, turn gray before your time—
Cliff after cliff, inches from heaven
Scowling crags, a withered pine swings upside-down
Waterfalls fling out over abyss, one out-roaring another
Collide on rocks like a hundred charges of thunder.
With these kinds of odds
Poor traveler, what the hell made you come all the way out
here?
A sea of swords, shining sinister
Narrow pass:
One man on guard
Thousands couldn’t push through—
Whom can we trust as watchman here?
They’d all turn to wolves and hounds!
Mornings hide from the hungry tiger
Evenings hide from the vicious snake
Grinding their teeth, drinking blood
Murdering us thick as hemp—
Sure, the Silk City’s pleasant up in the clouds
But please, think again!—
Better to head straight home!
Shu roads are hard, hard as going up blue sky—
Lean out— look
west— and heave a last, long
sigh!
(Ouyang Jianghe, 1987)
All his life spent awaiting execution
He saw his name listed among the numberless dead
How long the years were, so long the table of deaths
All his music a requiem for himself
The weeping of millions of dead souls echoes in it
Their heads tumble down like hopeless fruits
Whirling in them a half-century’s emptiness and blood
And so this music to us can sound so distant
So sunken, as if there were no sky above us
So tense and restless, as if the bones were dancing in our
bodies
And so the silence of the living is deeper than that of the
dead
And so the execution from the beginning makes no sound
A soundless, shapeless execution is a collector’s item
Its torso hidden, mysterious as Mother Russia
An inscrutable face now the Leader, now the People
People and Leaders just so many words
Unruly once they step out of textbooks
The eyes of anyone turn to bullet holes
All Russians have been executed once en masse
Awaiting execution is a way of life
An execution that’s truly terrible fires no bullets
It only aims
Like a conspiracy hovering in the air
Sometimes it steps out of the dead, on their
Bodies piled high as a stage, enacts the imminence of death
The gaze of survivors falling all around
Like snow that falls to the ground, disturbing mournful
thoughts
At other times it enters to spy on a soul
Enters the heart to hollow out or shatter
Enters the air and food to purge the lungs
Enters the light, wipes out those incandescent, fugitive
shadows
The executioners kill in the name of eternal life
And so the time of execution will never pass
An execution forever awaits him
He dies outside of us without boundaries
An eye darts by, black twig,
shadows flit down the sidewalk;
Sad tide of evening traffic
sweeps up the empty street.
Wind in troughs, through windows
prime-time
tragedies circulate;
Two birds in dreams build a nest
on a train
about to depart.
Drinking from a proffered hand,
thoughts reach the uncanny—
Eavesdropping on shifting sand,
heartbeats quicken, vanish—
Faces stare mesmerized,
in curtains, uranian blue.
Bells toll, the sleepwalker
comes no nearer the moon.
Behind a closed door
He whistles to counteract
The fact of my sitting here
He shaves off before the mirror
One face beneath the other
Each with its song off-key
Scraping rhythms
Fly off his neck like endless scarves
He bares his teeth
An Aryan youth jumps on the stage
The ones who left him on this shore
Are gone. He drinks the water from their footprints
Picks up a few anonymous stones
And strings them into a necklace
At birth, his parents sold his past
To raise him properly
Even in childhood his face looked jaundiced
A proper gesture obsessed him
He studies the shape of winds
Catching the latest hits
The door opens:
Avoiding my face
He dances into a gagged history
I should have known it would end like this:
The public forum nothing but a pretext.
A series of nightmares
All seated in the same hall.
Sometimes I think we can sleep only
In our own oceans: yours was too much
And our shores will not again converge.
One breath— how far you’ve blown already.
You’ve lost some pounds since last I saw you
Your ashen hair, your aspen leaves hanging
Darkly down, your vine now bittersweet
With bulging eyes: teeth spill an idiot’s grin.
And you, your happiness near perfection,
The circle can’t be broken, not even if
I blew my brains out here and now. On his neck
I note the lines of your nails, the shape of your teeth.
And you, who after our last good-bye
Keep running into me for some odd reason
A cinematic ending ruined: “you again!”
Sorry, I didn’t mean to be still alive.
And you, whom I become content
Knowing less and less each time we pass and smile
Soon we’ll all turn to strangers, I will wait
Until we meet for the first time all over again.
A key in search of locks
I looked for an entrance into
The basement of your favorite pub
But instead stuck myself
Into a barstool by the window
Between your glances darting
by
I cease to exist
Winter scars on the glass
Turn suburban night to fantasy
Outside, you I sought for fire
In the night found only
A heartless neon
“You overstayed your welcome
The moment you were born—”
You shake your head over wine
You take a sip from mine, keep talking
“Think of the pain you caused already—
Even a glance at you—could mean betrayal.”
Again you leave without a tip
Through the glass I look out at you
You look back at your reflection
From the dark waves of memory
Her cry for help unheard
Tips your night-boat
The road’s illusion there’s
only the sea
Devouring those pale markers along the way
The language of streetlights you cannot read
Sidewalks flickering write
it down
Returning to the old house
How you’ve changed
Realization at
midnight
May be just rumors ghosts
weave
The ocean’s hungry
You look up ask
an absent face
Tell me about the days you spend alone
Ask the night sky will
it rain
We forget the shipwreck until
Someone stretches an arm: the plane
won’t notice
On the packed steps under a stormy sky
A scholar stripped naked
Bargains with the ocean
One student talks like a student
A pack of students barks like a dog
Like soldiers high on text and helium
Depraving an eastern smile
The gaze of dawn cut out of the world
His peace gone blind in whirling sands
A cigarette hanging from someone’s mouth—
Photo for the memories
In the middle of the night
Fire engines mourn
We talk in whispers, weeping
At this eye of the storm
My brain cooked for a whole day by
monitors, I’d like to gas it home, but I drive conscientiously, afraid of
running over angry feminists. When I get back, two drinks and I immediately
understand the laughter in punk rock.
At night my thoughts turn dangerous,
old cobwebs suddenly again astir, they teem with gray spiders. Two men in hoods
mutter darkly, leaning against a shopping cart. The exposed ribs of a church, a
celibate light. I march down the sidewalk in my red sweater, little devil in
search of fires. The girls I caught burned like straw.
Driven out of town I pleaded my
case with the gypsies, but they didn’t understand a word I said, reading over
my well-intentioned, well-thought-out petition, they looked at each other,
winked, made faces, then burst out laughing and danced around me…..
Fever claims my nights
At the edge of alchoholic seas
Trees splashing
The sea patrols the beach hurling grenades
Shaking the stars loose from its greenish tent
As children come to kiss its white-gloved hand
I stood aghast in the wreckage
Of shattered bodies it tosses on shore
Bonfires in
the pinprick night
Fanning spirits to the moon