Poemunity — your poem community

1. Balak in Hebrew (devastator)—King of Moab son of Zippor (sparrow), meaning he who was always running away into the desert as the Israelites were fast on his back. Angry, humiliated, full of vinegar and sap, looking for the diviner. 2. Balak (in Turkish, eccentric variant) meaning baby buffalo— something forging Anatolian rivers, Armenian fossil of the word, flushed downstream. 3. Who drowned wading in the reeds of the Ararat plain? There the sky is cochineal. There the chapel windows open to raw umber and twisted goats. There the obsidian glistens and the hawks eat out your eyes. 4. If you thought of diaspora, you were thinking of emerald stones. If you thought of the marshes of snails and magenta bugs, you were wading in the reeds. Ur: like rolling a good Merlot on the palate till it runnels up the nose. Ah: breath of the unknown. Tu: also, everything, self and side of mountain. The soul sweats. The blue knifes the canyon. In a cave, a man lived on herbs and water; the sky’s grisaille was a visitation; the leaves were out of toot sin Jants; the angels were alpha and omega— 5. This road goes north— no need to ask where you are, sentimental pop songs are stuck in the CD shuffle there’s a valley, a river, a smoking something— if you ask what color is the sky can anyone say—cloudless, clotted, open?

Having outlived Allen I am the one who has to suffer New York all by myself and eat my soup alone in Poland although sometimes I sit with Linda he met in Berkeley or San Francisco when he met Jack, the bread just coarse enough, the noodles soft but not thin and wasted, and not too salty the way the Chinese further down sometimes make them, the name still on my mind whatever the reason for mystery, or avoidance, though rat Netanyahu and pig that swings from a needle or lives in some huge incubator, they do darkness where there was light, the name hates them, the name in hiding, the name with a beard, and Linda she loves the name though she invokes her Christ as Jack her lover and tormentor did and taught her to do though it is too easy, that, it troubles me but what can I say, what should I say while we walk north on the right hand side, past the pork store and the hardware store, me lecturing on Logos (my God) and what not Hebrews and Greeks where Allen and I once kissed, Jack in the sun now.

In early morning when the sun is vague and birds are furious names of children float like smoke through the empty room: Ariadne, dark as seal skin Ian, fair-skinned baby Marina   Terrence   Alex   John after dinner   pulled back from talk of war and morals their names glow like light around a candle — Jack, my rampant youngest son Celia, my daughter who sings

The boat was beating across the bay, we had our backs to Vesuvius, the wind smacked our faces. Naples was an enormous packet of cigarettes you could smoke till you conked out: the cigarettes were never going to run out and nor was the coffee, the drugs, the prostitutes, the locked churches, the scooters, the rice cakes, the evil eye, the boys called Gennaro, the funiculars, the shrines to Madonna, the shrines to Maradona, the bullet holes, the heat, the permanent state of crucifixion. Anyone could be crucified two thousand years ago but to be crucified now, to be crucified in Napoli — lift me up!

Pepper blacks the pan so never shake it near me. Wait for the flagrant animation in my bedroom, in my bed base. In mountaineering situations sleep swaddled, wake ecstatic my frantic menus in your mind. I taste of them all. Refuse to refuse me. Waste your time on my errands. Squeeze your lime on my lemons. Turn up wearing the whole bird not just the feathers.

The unkempt beard of the fearsome mullah overwhelms the two aging poets from the periphery, the far-flung provinces of Iran and Iraq. They stand tiptoe, toe deep in the master culture, arguing in an emptying, narrowing hallway, in the high imperial language of their poetry, over what became of the muffled, cuffed bulbul or of the straw-stuffed, stone-eyed mynah, over the proper ornithology for the symbols of woe.

If you press a stone with your finger, Sir Isaac Newton observed, The finger is also Pressed by the stone. But can a woman, pressed by memory’s finger, In the deep night, alone, Of her softness move The airy thing That presses upon her With the whole weight of love? This Sir Isaac said nothing of.

Divide the year into seasons, four, subtract the snow then add some more green, a bud, a breeze, a whispering behind the trees, and here beneath the rain-scrubbed sky orange poppies multiply.

His sorceries are boo-hooing a teller, what’s spare’s on the local trots better than breakfast. A win’s the Seychelles or the gurgling Maldives. Going fast. Where the pig-footed bandicoot, the broad-faced potoroo, the gumnut numbat? spooked, bespoke, honor’s in a trapdoor. He stumped up, but crime befell kismet pardon repelled mores coin begat loss.

Limped out of the hot sky a hurt plane, Held off, held off, whirring pretty pigeon, Hit then and scuttled to a crooked stop. The stranger pilot who emerged—this was the seashore, War came suddenly here—talked to the still mechanics Who nodded gravely. Flak had done it, he said, From an enemy ship attacked. They wheeled it with love Into the dark hangar’s mouth and tended it. Coffee and cake for the pilot then who sat alone In the restaurant, reading the numbered sheets That tell about weather. After, toward dusk, Mended the stranger plane went back to the sky. His curly-headed picture, and mother’s and medal’s pictures Were all we knew of him after he rose again, Those few electric jewels against the moth and whining sky.