Wheel With a Single Spoke (11 page)

the way I break the sword in two, or three.

Since I couldn't understand a single thing

and neither could you,

I thought we made a nice pair.

We confessed to each other

our darkest secret –

that we existed . . .

But that was night, and oh, in the morning,

what a terrible vision,

I awoke with my head against you:

you yellow, you haystack, you wheat.

And I thought – Lord,

what kind of bread am I going to be,

me,

and who will eat it?

I may be forgotten, because

I don't care for my arms. I may lose them.

I may be abandoned, because

I don't love my legs. I can walk

just as well with air.

I may be left alone, because

my blood will pour into the sea

in any case.

There's room. My ribs have all risen

like sea walls.

There's enough light. My eyes

see only one mask.

But it does not yet exist,

so there's room, there's room, there is.

Soon it reaches the teeth

and the scrape of enamel is heard,

long words

with seven heads,

breaking free.

Cautiously, it comes to the lips:

nothing more is heard, in silence

the lines of my teeth advance,

barely visible, row by row.

It floats in the air for a time, and a bird

jabs its wing into the moon, there is some flapping,

then nothing more. It must

have stuck the other wing

into the moon, too. Reverberating,

my teeth have arrived, and now they glitter in the sky.

Higher, and higher, Excelsior! I hear myself shouting.

You will let them bite you soon

to make room for the moon to pass, the victor.

Higher, and higher, Excelsior!

Too quickly they change, what we call

moods,

as though a mime

kept falling asleep in the barracks,

in an unending line of beds overlapped inside me.

The tired mime, his mouth on a cold stone,

evaporates from the bottom bed,

in order to condense on the bed above

even sadder and more beautiful.

The mime's vague edges

do not distinguish truth from a lie,

choking them to sleep, together

upon the same pillow.

Sliding toward cold, from heat,

and then toward the burning,

highest bed, the tenth

in the aurora borealis.

A curse, yes, when you can always begin from the beginning,

your life unborn.

Poetry is an eye that cries

a shoulder that cries

a shoulder's eye that cries

It is a hand that cries

a hand's eye that cries

It is a sole that cries

a heel's eye that cries

O friends,

poetry is not a tear

it is crying itself

the crying of an uninvented eye

a tear

from one who should be beautiful,

a tear from one who should be glad.

We are two, you are alone,

so we let you do what you want.

We give you two hearts;

one we keep in me,

the other we keep in you.

Your face we make

like our face,

the way coins match

the two brutal stamps

when the coiner gives them birth.

We are two branches of you,

one shooting toward the moon,

with your love of the sky,

the other shooting from your belly,

with your love of the earth.

We and you wanted to be one.

But matter hates truth

and, to punish us, made us three.

We are two and you are alone

so you are the master,

so you are the queen,

because we two are the same.

But nothing is the same as another thing

except in boring stories about happiness.

Eyelid with teeth, with a tooth-marked tear

and food that lacks its salt,

the proof I cannot live in the present

are my memories, one and all.

The proof I cannot see without a witness

are my childhood and adolescence,

doubling the nonbeing of these seconds

with nonbeing from some other time.

Ah, laughing tears

ah, laughing tears

break over me when I talk

to the old moment rotting in the current

moment. Ah, laughing tears

ah, laughing tears

in the eye of cold things

and the tooth, like the scepter

of uninvented kings.

Vision did not go straight ahead, rather

it circumambulated things, went over

to a pillar in a corner, dark ogive, and

interrupted sleep, below an unmoved star.

Parting, you made a friendly gesture

rustling your hand like leaves,

soul of spider, soul of a horse,

like a sail slowly unweaving

or like the shadow of a horseshoe, bleeding

over each approaching moment.

A long row of eyes tumbled silently

over your shy gaze, gentle woman.

And nothing was straight, or simple, or holy

in that afternoon spent downing pints.

After the massacre, the nearby seconds slowly

rotted through hours that were fat, thick, alive.

It was crushed music

running down the ankles.

It was vast indifference

that scaffolded my heart.

It was a gaze through sleep

like through an iron ring.

At the door, the porter in epaulettes

elegantly helps undress

snakes of their skins

and stones of themselves.

The wine was pretty good,

the death agreeable,

as one after another, celebrated

skiers plunged through the air,

spraying me with snow.

I'm so tired I can't go on, he said,

standing like a veiled wave . . .

eye, O iris, iris-eyed

proffer a truthful gaze.

You hit my chest with sightless

wine from your goblets spilled,

which I now drink, and while I do

I am drenched but unsullied.

And you beat me with

Saturn's falling vine,

the thick tail of a comet snuffed

when it and thought entwined.

While my frozen skull turns white

around the eyes it hasn't got,

from one to ten

the bears eat ice and grow thin

with the polar desperation

of “haves” and “have nots.”

What happened to those amazing guys

from after the war?

High school students who visited society women

and even spoke French

with a decent European accent?

One or another of them would print a little book

of poems

on his own dime, or by subscription,

and we, the students,

would read it melting with admiration, un-understanding

the un-understandable . . .

Where are those young men

dressed in melancholy, in the image of distinction

framed by our wide eyes

and oval eyelids?

Where are you, eighth-grade

homeroom teacher,

whose effeminate nose still guards the smell

of a very young man, just shaved?

Lord, what pure days, Lord

what respect would fit within

our boyish talk

our breaking voices.

What happened to those amazing guys

from after the war?

Where are you, homeroom teacher

from the eighth grade?

Halerib, Khaa

Halerib, Khiiii . . .

Heoro, loro, oro

don't understand, Halerib, Khaa

don't understand, aero, loro, oro . . .

You leave your scent of milk

like a river in my bed,

I sleep exhausted through the night

a royal sword above my head.

Ha! there is white still in the world

and there is the heavy, livid

tang of thirst, when a certain sleep

runs through the dawns, like liquid.

But the smell, ah, the smell,

precedes you in the air, awake,

when the moon, to harvest valor,

bends its bone until it breaks.

of metal and woman,

of an insect fired inside the clay

of Chaldean space,

of a future column

from a century unborn,

of the wall charred in a blaze

that once charred Ruth.

And you remind me of a

bitter rain, a brittle cloud,

my sweet antique

of future age.

The guide lost his mind in the Å pilberk, high up

in the prison;

he plays out the old tortures run amok