Mark Strand

The huge doll of my body

May 10, 2020May 10, 2020

I am the toy of women.
My mother
would prop me up for her friends.
‘Talk, talk,’ she would beg.
I moved my mouth
but words did not come.
My wife took me down from the shelf.
I lay in her arms. ‘We suffer
the sickness of self,’ she would whisper.
And I lay there dumb.
Now my daughter
gives me a plastic nurser
filled with water.
‘You are my real baby,’ she says.
Poor child!
I look into the brown
mirrors of her eyes
and see myself
diminishing, sinking down
to a depth she does not know is there.
Out of breath,
I will not rise again.
I grow into my death.
My life is small
and getting smaller. The world is green.
Nothing is all.

Mark Strand

When the moon appears

Byammarkhan May 10, 2020May 10, 2020

in the low-domed hillsand shine with a lightthat is veiled and dust-filledand that floats upon the fields,my mother, with her hair in a bun,her face in shadow, and the smokefrom her cigarette coiling closeto the faint yellow sheen of her dress,stands near the houseand watches the seepage of late lightdown through the sedges,the last gray…

Mark Strand

Someone was saying

Byammarkhan May 10, 2020May 10, 2020

how things pass, how one sleeps towards morningand the morning goes.Someone was sayinghow the wind dies down but comes back,how shells are the coffins of windbut the weather continues.It was a long nightand someone said something about the moon shedding itswhiteon the cold field, that there was nothing aheadbut more of the same.Someone mentioneda city…

Mark Strand

Afternoon darkens into evening. A man falls deeper and deeper into the slow spiral of sleep, into the drift of it, the length of it, through what feels like mist, and comes at last to an open door through which he passes without knowing why, then again without knowing why goes to a room where he sits and waits while the room seems to close around him and the dark is darker than any he has known, and he feels something forming within him without being sure what it is, its hold on him growing, as if a story were about to unfold, in which two characters, Pleasure and Pain, commit the same crime, the one that is his, that he will confess to again and again, until it means nothing.

Byammarkhan May 10, 2020May 10, 2020

Mark Strand

That night the moon drifted over the pond,

Byammarkhan May 10, 2020May 10, 2020

the boughs of the trees, the blue trees,a young woman walked, and for an instantthe future came to her:rain falling on her husband’s grave, rain fallingon the lawns of her children, her own mouthfilling with cold air, strangers moving into her house,a man in her room writing a poem, the moon drifting into it,a woman…

Mark Strand

I was stretched out on the couch, about to doze off, when I imagined a small figure asleep on a couch identical to mine. ‘Wake up, little man, wake up,’ I cried. ‘The one you’re waiting for is rising from the sea, wrapped in spume, and soon will come ashore. Beneath her feet the melancholy garden will turn bright green and the breezes will be light as babies’ breath. Wake up, before this creature of the deep is gone and everything goes blank as sleep.’ How hard I try to wake the little man, how hard he sleeps. And the one who rose from the sea, her moment gone, how hard she has become—how hard those burning eyes, that burning hair.

Byammarkhan May 10, 2020May 10, 2020

Mark Strand

1 If a man understands a poem,

Byammarkhan May 10, 2020May 10, 2020

2 If a man lives with a poem,he shall die lonely.3 If a man lives with two poems,he shall be unfaithful to one.4 If a man conceives of a poem,he shall have one less child.5 If a man conceives of two poems,he shall have two children less.6 If a man wears a crown on his…

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