Explore Poems: Arts & Sciences

 

There is still a photograph of lovers I would like to forget. 
After all, the unsentimental oak trees…

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree,
a late light shifting from the expected place,
all the small insignificant darknesses
that gang up on the imagination. Here they move
with their silent melodramatic shrieks
seeking a wall to touch, and yet persisting
in the darkness of the forest or the road.

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree
in field or forest. Here’s the midnight park
behind the empty street. Under the skin,
children are playing, and the train
waits at the station, forever drawing in
to crepuscular music on a stage
with the reddest curtains you have ever seen.

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree
with a blonde woman walking away from it
into a room or chair or a fluffy unmade bed
where someone else is sleeping. Someone speaks
in a voice inside a head. It might be hers
or the tree in a landscape of speaking trees.
Must you be so creepy, the voice is saying.

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree.
But David, you must stop these endless games,
says the tree. Grow up, David. It’s late
and we have to go to bed. Turn off the music.
Concentrate on the shadows on the wall.
Unpeel yourself from the wallpaper. Sit up.
Lie down. Stop speaking. Shut up. Shut up.

A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree
in the branches of which hoots an owl. Symptoms
of dizziness. Another stage, more curtains,
more transformations. One finds oneself
by listening. Are you listening, David?
And music pours from the tree in copious bars
as if living were a matter of moving shadows.

Must have let out a now-I’ve-seen-it-all sigh when,
aboard another Mexican Riviera Well-Being Cruise™…

Jerry wants to argue about the existentialists again
but I am purposefully disinterested, alarmingly …

Inside us live innumerable others;
If I think or feel, I do not know
Who is thinking or feeling.
I am only…

Vivem em nós innumeros;
Se penso ou sinto, ignoro
Quem é que pensa ou sente.
Sou sòmente o logar
Onde…

The sound of a race is music but like nothing with
strings or words. You’d need a hundred men with
…

A Russian citizen
took to the streets
with a sign that read war.

The Russian police
shoved him into…

A PBS documentary tells me
two thousand years ago in Babylon
astronomers notched eighteen years of eclipse…

Certain words are still warm with your touch: stutter,
for instance. It always gives me trouble. Perhaps…

There’s so much of you that I don’t understand. 
I have B-days. I have D-days. I’ll stutter on an M-word…

A single word firstlast deserves to be
a word in life’s dictionary. Remember,
the firstlast. He’s first…

I am pleased I will soon die and with me the pressing need to make a terrible, terribly poignant film…

The dream came weeks after I visited The Beautiful Captive, a solo exhibition by an Alexandrian artist. In an installation exploring enactments of domesticity, two goldfish were meant to be floating mindlessly around a glass bowl but upon looking closely, I noticed one of them had stopped moving. When I inquired, I was told the fish had died unexpectedly that morning, and that the assistant curator was on her way to the gallery with a replacement. Can I make you some tea while the new fish gets here?A red velvet curtain hung inches above a fireplace with a beige marble mantel, a vase carrying two birds of paradise crowning one side, emptiness the other.In the hearth not fire, but a belly of glass.At his talk that evening, the artist did mention Magritte, but did not say the looping goldfish were stand-ins for fire. I might have read that later, in the curatorial statement.In an old photograph (Geneva, c. 1993?) not one but two bees are trapped in a glass cup turned upside down—how did my father manage that? It was a game we played after we ate, as the light packed its things. When I could no longer see their honey stripes, or my mother’s orange lips, I knew it was night.diary excerpts [weeks preceding dream]No noteworthy dreams.No punctuation.Notes for my obituary: Survived by dust. No cats. Green milk. She always unlocked the door with the wrong key first. Kept her skin on a hanger as she slept. She was two women. One bird of paradise. One ran out.Not again—the dream of wearing glass gloves I can’t take off. Nails painted red. Like flame in ice.Now I cannot clean the house.

Zora Neal Hurston spent time
in the low country
interviewing & filming
kids on corners & folk at work,
but…

You are pursuing a feeling like the dust
In the voice of Bob Kaufman plus the mud
Of the most fertile…

Один російський громадянин
вийшов на вулицю
з плакатом война
російські міліціонери
запакували його в автозак

Інші росіяни
уважно спостерігали за цим
і знімали все на телефони

Одна російська громадянка
вийшла на вулицю
з плакатом мир
російські міліціонери
запакували її в автозак

Інші росіяни
почали ставати в чергу до автозака
з плакатами й без

Один російський солдат
почав читати роман
одного російського бороданя
далі обкладинки не пішов
бо й так усе ясно
читати між рядків
його навчили ще в школі