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The Waking Comes Late (2016)
The basic subject of poets is their own living body.
— Giórgos Seféris
Nor shall I care to write poetry that is not praise,
lamentation, or both.
— Stamátis Sm´yrlis
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Inspired by a Line by Paul Celan
Betrink dich und nenn sie Paris
Each day I wake feeling I’ve already failed.
Tonight let’s get wrecked and call it Venice.
A woman I loved lied that she was healed
and for a night until waking, we were. I was born
with a mortgage, now show me the house, the home,
slip me the dose that’ll make me care less. I wake
each day feeling I’ve already torn
what I meant to rethread. (Did anything seem
in Eden, or was it all its own is?)
There was that woman, so enlisted in life,
one of passion’s true recruits, Love, I said,
I am so bad at loving, and the usual biz
ensued — scenes, loss and its isotopic
slow-fade, never done. On the deathbed of the skeptic
where he slept each night of his dying life
he said, It was hard having so little skin-to-skin
with the world—but look on my works!
with the world—but look on my works! Venice
is sinking, and it might be the case
it was never the key at all. Said a small voice
in the cirrus of a dream, Love is its own abode.
Not sure what it meant, though I think I knew once.
There is some cold road that you must renounce.
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The Last Sturgeon
Deltawave shadows
of his deeds
and didn’ts, slid
under his shoes
like fillet knives, severing
soles from soil,
so he always walked
a little above his life,
not knowing it was
his life, while it waned
from waking-coma
to coma.
to coma. Came a land-
locked night
he dreamed that he’d
landed the last sturgeon in the world
and she looked bad —
shrunken, bludgeoned,
a blue-ribbed cat scan
of herself, her buckled
gills gawping,
a foam of green roe
welling from her mouth.
Each egg
was a tear, a tiny, entreating
vowel he couldn’t quite hear
as he cast round the boat (now morphing
into a mountain shack)
for water, the merest
rainpool, or glacial stream,
he panicked,
my dearest,
my loved one,
let me bear you back
to haven — by river
the ocean
is never far.
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Variations on a Cranial Cat Scan Profile After a Laryngeal Fracture
Most intimate
of portraits, yet
clinically impersonal,
like a medschool textbook
graphic — cross-section
of a cadaver’s
head and throat — or
a silhouette embossed
on a dime or quarter,
the chilling silver
of some undead realm.
You cannot love this monster —
the werewolf rictus
of grated teeth, the side-seen eye’s
great, avid globe;
periscope esophagus, probing
up through the contused throat
as if to peer out
through the silenced mouth.
You might never speak again
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