Ange Mlinko

It’s you I’d like to see Greece again with You I’d like to take to bed of cyclamen You know I nurse a certain myth about myself              that I descend de tribus d’origine asiatique and am part Thracian or Macedonian cleaving to a Hellenic mystique after centuries’ migration inland a full moon rising over the Acropolis I can repeat the scene        this time à deux as then I had no one to kiss slicing halloumi amid the hullabaloo of a rooftop taverna in   July The doors that opened to lovers pulled like tree roots from darkness        I close upon us now like book covers The alcove in which we embrace is cool with brilliant tile and weirded by a dove’s note       chase of ouzo with Uzi          junta-style History makes its noise      we duck till it passes      Love we think is our due Not we think like the epoch the unchosen thing we’re wedded to

It is eighty degrees in December. It is he, on one of his furloughs, bringing himself — and hell — up to date. My Don Juan, the better climber (as the mercury yo-yos), is in a newly roused state, the world circumcised away from an out-of-season bud leaving at the scrupulous rim, as it unfurls, a darker appliqué, like O-positive frozen solid at the sight of one’s resuscitated victim. This rosebush assiduously forks over its works where most grandifloras falter, thriving as far into the year as Capricorn. While named after a lover, it decorates its own altar and wields an extraordinary thorn: once I saw it catch a football in those semiquaver quasi-teeth; it is three-headed, like Cerberus, a hybrid drawing bloodlines from a root-ball on hands all that’s impure lies beneath. Hands can train it, barbarous as it is, on an arbor, and I might like to take its thick canes in harness, first pouring cement as a base (so it would know I meant business). Always poised to strike, they eventually undo their stays, baying out like a window of garnet, as at Chartres (torture chamber in its basement, or so I hear). I wonder how such a daemon rose got its start, what fairy tale explains its scent    ... And then I go out tonight and find him, swiping right on every pretty face in candlelight. It is almost Christmas. Stacks of square plates. (It’s an open plan.) Racks of bottles. The whites and blacks, clear glass, and stainless steel sieves denote compliance with standards. A wire basket of freckled pears is transparency; sterilized knives give full disclosure; and as regards the stemware, due diligence dares a slip, especially on chanteuses like these salting down from state-of-the-art speakers. (Or is it sugar?) Does the chorizo flambé not deter him? Gold as all hell, Valkyries stand tall with beer to the brim. Beakers in Siren form flush with Chianti, if not ambi- valence. Recalling the steel meshes belting Monterosso’s cliffs against the vox Dei of the sea, the myth refleshes: ordering, in the manner of heroes, an Andromeda on the rocks.

A levitating anvil. Omen of seagull blown inland. Ranch gate said Riverstyx, but it was the woodland that looked lethal: no place to put down your foot. Bucolics demand boustrophedon. The by-the-book. “The male cicadas thrummed their stomachs while a dragonfly eyed us from a pole hook. Ripening grapefruit. Us just under. Shoulder to shoulder. Tree-shook.” Milky skies belied the baffled thunder ... They left, not footsteps,trails in uncut grass. “Like parallel snakes. No wonder.” Eurydice should have thought moccasins, aka cottonmouths, apropos stealth. Distilled to systole-diastole. Assassins. And everywhere sharp palmettos clacked their tongues in homage to language — “I should have rhymed them with stilettos.” Why would E. shed her red wedge with its Mary Jane band, wetland mosquito and midge circling ankle (punctuated, understand, by the awl, to mimic ellipses ... )? “Because” — O. — “she mimicked the shy strand of epiphyte — Spanish moss — goose-pimpling the languid pond with its dependent clause.”

"I thought of you as a butterfly tonight," getting to eschatology from a sketchpad, your mom's. And though you write sermons nice and linear you also digress and about-face. The jeroboam trees are dark tonight. Darker in the outage than the stars let the sky be. Partyers all. The abbot told you, "I do not have power, the archbishop does not have power, the pope does not have power. Only God has power." Then it is not a kind of violence to put a photo of the Pope in a luscious hacienda, imperilled by a minature pullbell. Someone admired the hostess's oils. "Yes, it was a surprise when they hired me to teach but they said, 'We can teach an artist to teach but we can't teach a teacher to be an artist.'" "How true," the guests murmured. This was not your mother though artists all say it "comes from somewhere else." When another guest compared the Catholic to the Episcopal service she said, "I think not." In a desert once I almost fell off a cliff. To calm me down a friend told a joke: "Descartes was sitting on a plane. The stewardess said, 'Coffee or tea?' 'I think not,' Descartes said, and vanished." It took a moment to sink in because I thought he said "The cart" as in "beverage cart." Confusion is the only way to get to eschatology from a sketchpad. I'm trying to redeem that abbot. Drawing in the outage. Once you suggest the origins of music lay in the necessity of drowning out the cries of sacrificial victims, I start listening for them—the cries—under my own singing. Scholars resurrect books all the time just by quoting them. When Roman gods popped out of the soil, the Christians looked around wildly. Sculpt the mouth around "sculpture,"ulpt. They reburied them hurriedly, and the earth gulped. The statue of the Commendatore went down with Don Giovanni. Which shall I believe, the unrepentence of the sinkholed Don? Or the statue that converts Leontes by resurrecting his all-forgiving wife? Hermione who's peerless has a likeness; he who won't about-face is not "mocked by art" but brought posthaste to hell, his "shapely seat and heart". . . The moon slips out like a foreign coin from denim: a drachma, an as. Can we redeem it? Cities are places are conversion, you said. But I am citiless. "She ascended to the thrown," you wrote by mistake, of Elizabeth.

Lynette, the stars are kerned so far apart— Through a herniated zodiac I almost see your waled skylanes, your shocked Capricorn and Cancer. In the hundred and two years since you were born, and the sixteen since your heart failed, and the nearly sixty since you gave up poetry, it seems we can’t navigate by the same star chart. I’d like to think we were fated to work the same coracle: you steering with one hand, grasping your corner of the seine while I grasp mine; together sweeping the weirs. Lynette saw the sky made wide-waled corduroy by the flight paths of fighter jets. Corde du roi—“Cloth of the king.” (“A baseless assertion,” states the oed .) A fireman from the Midlands nfs said the raids on Swansea were worse than on Birmingham, where a ten-year-old Roy Fisher gaped at the garden where his cousins were slaughtered, and later wrote,It was like a burst pod filled with clay. Last night, Lynette, my son thought he saw his father in the jumbo jet roaring over Cherryhurst: the weather softer, flight paths altered. Three weeks now his father gone. • Insofar as Moses came to in a coracle, it wasn’t a Welsh one-off; it wasn’t a hapax of vessels. Insofar as it’s kind of a kiddie boat, not a kayak, not the royal barge the Makah sent William Blake, aka Johnny Depp, with into the northern Pacific; not even the Viking ship, its carved prow like an uncial; insofar as it is calico wrapped up in tar, insofar as it is swaddled willow whippets. • “Pastoral ding-dong is out ,” Lynette wrote, and no wonder— bombs hidden on the glossy knolls. In the sorrel. In the tormentil. I thought she was perhaps the closest I could get to my grandmother. While Lynette was writing “Displaced Persons”— Neither from the frosted leaf nor from The grey hard ground could they find Relief

Where we’d recently lain, exchanging a kiss, stork consorted with crane, limpkin with ibis. Was this as much wedding as there would ever be, the fowls’ foot-webbing, the identificatory ring around a throat? Exchange of earth and air: not a vow but a vote of confidence a feather might tip by a single scale ... That one’s a raconteur, so much salt in his tale; this one’s a countertenor, lilting above the feast. The archon of his hectare — spotted — spotted least. Here’s a little heckler ... penciled seagull in the margin. Following line by line the path you took, I imagine no print so fine.