After Adomenaite’s House Built on Sand
In the end, if the house is a thought,
begin by sifting its ash, belief without mortar,
belief built on nothing
and less than nothing, under constant
threat of collapse,
as all lies must eventually collapse, from within,
as actors in a house of lies
must act and speak like anxious violins.
Without warning it is 1939, Stalingrad.
Soon history will roll out
its severed heads of slaughter and starvation,
soon soldiers and the lovers of soldiers
cannibalized beneath ruins,
streets snow-packed in surrendering shades.
It is awful, the grainy silence,
something flickering and yoked in the margins,
but just then everyone ignores it,
bowl-shaped clouds
on the horizon, pogroms slow-burning forward,
sun bleeding through windows
milky from smoke.
They gather each evening in the vodka-soaked
parlor beneath paintings of stern
Russian steppes.
On the piano someone plays Chopin,
someone recites poetry; someone pirouettes
from room to room
trying to erase the larger erasing
by waving a see-through scarf.
It feels shot through with guilt,
the way no one can say exactly what they mean,
the way every word seems punctured
and leaking, but still
we are meant to forgive them, their deathly
faces, for who hasn’t ignored
the coming storm or switched the channel
away from disaster?
Who hasn’t nuzzled a lover’s neck
while next door or a world away the bombs
dropped free and bloomed?
Mostly we thrash in a private cosmos
of hope and loss;
mostly this is not a mistake.
Until it is.
So in this version we see it,
the old drunk shaking in his tux, the little girl
in white hiding from her parents,
X sneaking off with Y while Y’s husband
digs the party line’s ditch.
Suddenly X with his simmered
thoughts of apparatchiks and bears disappears
like a theory.
Suddenly Y, pregnant and seething.
Suddenly trucks in the middle of the night
and men in trench coats demanding papers.
It’s about choice and the smoke of choices.
It’s about beauty with so many tanks.
It’s about Sonya looking positively Karelian
in braids, wicker basket for hat, mouth
that gives nothing away.
The world is falling apart
but she keeps watch for a certain iridescence,
still she tries on old dresses and prays
for her intended, a lover who is nothing more
than sappy letters and twice-licked stamps
sent by insulting friends.
Of course it’s a terrible trick
being played on her, but so is winter,
so is the last bag of potatoes, so is history
with its promise of liars and thieves but you,
you must imagine being there
wrapped in blankets and lice, burning books
to stay alive, you must imagine
one night breathing deeply the forest brilliant
under a cloudless sky,
another night ducking snipers,
waiting for a spring that will never come.
You must imagine salvation
kicking in your teeth, the hard beans of desire,
spooning water to one in despair.
--originally published in Branches Quarterly
Hush of Something Endless
It was one of those parties
where I was a stranger, where every other
guest had a face that I knew:
Salvador Dali spilling drinks on the divan,
Elvis with fingers in the fondue,
a barefoot Madonna dancing
beneath a pulsing crimson light , her breasts
and hips a red shiver
with each turn. Through a wall
of windows I could see the so-called city,
a glittering mini-cosmos
unfolding below. For awhile I stood there
silent, my thoughts glued
in the vagueness of unmaking,
but a rhine-stoned Dolly Parton kept bringing
more and more bottles of wine,
merlot and sauvignon, until soon
I was terrifically drunk, tripping
from room to room like
some minor idiot from Faulkner, telling incredible
lies to anyone who would listen.
I’m an ex-con, I said
to some down-to-the-minute lawyers
who fanned their starched collars
and loosened their ties,
I hot-wired cars in the Pittsburgh of my youth.
Then, to a women who whispered
drunk affections in my ear:
I’m an orphan, stolen by gypsies from my native
Ukraine. I did this
mostly without regret, trapped in the sap
of twenty-something and alone,
when the daydream of hauling nets
off some far-off peninsula
or running drugs in some independent film
brought the slightest relief, as that night it did,
I remember, my first in a new city
minus a dependable car, sensible shirts, friends.
When the host finally got fed-up
with my shit, he kindly showed me the door.
Sleep it off on the lawn, he said
and it was a good idea, though as I stretched myself
in the cool, my mind sliding down
that blue rail of otherness
that makes you a stranger even to yourself,
a cigarette flared in the darkness
and I heard a woman’s voice. Please, she said,
sounding only half-interested
like late-night TV, tell me all about you. Beneath me,
my hands pressed firmly
in the grass, something spun and spun away.
My name is Vincent, I heard myself say,
and there is really nothing to tell.
--originally published in Open 24 Hours
Poem Where I Don’t Get the Girl in the End
I felt lashed and torn with X again
on the phone but it gave me comfort,
later, as the President threw out
the first pitch, to remember what Josh said
about Iowa City, how its gutters
run yellow with the vomit of the gifted.
Oh to be young and lonely.
Oh to be irrational but drinking scotch
on a comfortable couch.
That was the night Josh and I argued
the meaning of dead mules in southern novels,
how they might represent
a purposeful going forward yet dis-invite
moral judgments and then,
back at his condo, Josh insisted something
like a condor or eagle
had nested in his air conditioner window unit
and yes, though we were
ferociously stoned, in search of the bootlegged
copy of Dazed and Confused,
eventually we heard it, a livid flapping
within the machine, a sweep against sill,
strange pre-Cambrian chirps,
sounds of desire and loss but sooner or later
we must feel it,
I wish I were only saying so, our hearts
torn asunder, fearful, interrupted,
beating against otherness.
But what does it want, Josh asked, in or out?
In the case of X, it was out, and when she said so
everything felt hammered
with regret and doubt, the abstract art
we bought, my cat she helped name, the chair
she sometimes sat in
naked after sex, night twitchy through leaves,
street lamps lit like neon lozenges
and how I heard it then, my soul totally abuzz.
One needn’t read poems
to understand the lorikeet of loss, Josh said,
its slender papillae that resembles a brush,
though it helped, after crying all afternoon
then scrubbing the floors,
to think of addition and subtraction,
and what it means for our hearts
like in Josh’s ridiculous poem about sleeping
with Julia Roberts.
Of course it’s not real, the pillow talk,
the susurrus dream swathed in thunderheads
and mums.
It’s a metaphor for the young and lonely,
for desire, for a purposeful
going forward and there, Julia’s shark smile,
her teeth rising gargantuan on the screen,
white as knuckles or pain.
--originally published in The Southern Indiana Review
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