crack it open, leaf
through pages, stop at a line:
a waste of paper, of trees,
of lumberjacks’ painful work—
each blurb on the back, a kiss
on the butt of modern verse.
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(New Derry, Westmoreland County, PA)
I wonder what appeasing light, if any,may have eased your pain and strengthened youas blind and bleeding underneath the manywinding caverns of the hellish earth,your starved lungs gasping for a final breath,you prayed for some miraculous rebirthto justify the agony of death.But what your friends could rescue from the groundresembled only contours of a man.And…
(After a Black & White Photograph by Jared Carter)
seventy years ago? A familyof WASPS set in their ways? The leafless treein front was just a sapling then. Despairdid not weigh heavy on the owner’s brow,a man who paid his taxes, loved his wife,and who in ‘44 gave up his lifefor freedom. Who today cares or knows how?And now the house is boarded up,…
(Eastern Siberia)
(marked by discs made from the lids of tin cans,rusty now, stamped with the ID numbersof Tsarist and reactionary slaves) ,some with their inhabitants’ remainsexposed to heaven, as if halfway risen,we look down at the commandant’s old house,past the howls in the cramped punishment cells,as the wind brushes bent and brambled bars,behind which stand the…
You fly back home, sit at the kitchen table
Thirty years have passed and you are ableonly to stare outside. You watch him toilin the garden, turn the frozen soil.You open up his lager, pick the label,look at the food that in three days will spoil,wonder if there is meaning to the fable.He rests the rusty shovel by the window.His heavy breath is warm…
(October 2014)
while others who are new,wait stacked up on the floor.For you see: there’s a queueinside the Donetsk morgue.Death masks and private partshere are processed and tagged,cadavers on display,mere torsos, arms and legs,mouths open, nothing to say.They can no longer hearthe whistle of big guns,nor feel guilt in the nude.Outside, their blood still runsnear where they…
Milosz lies on his death bed,
awake in a grey roomwhere there’s no night or day—a Swedenborgianself-sentenced heaven-hell.I stand nearby the window.He says: “I’ve always knownI am the greatest poet.”I answer: “I feel the sameabout my humble self.And what about God? ”With stern hawkish eyes,he looks at me and says:“Electricity! ”