August Kleinzahler

The Tartar swept across the plain In their furs and silk panties Snub-nose monkey men with cinders for eyes Attached to their ponies like centaurs Forcing the snowy passes of the Carpathians Streaming from defiles like columns of ants Arraying their host in a vasty wheel White, gray, black and chestnut steeds 10,000 each to a quadrant Turning, turning at the Jenuye’s command This terrible pinwheel Gathering speed like a Bulgar dance Faster and faster Until it explodes, columns of horsemen Peeling away in all the four directions Hard across the puszta Dust from their hooves darkening the sky They fall upon village and town Like raptors, like tigers, like wolves on the fold Mauling the zsa-zsas And leaving them senseless in puddles of goaty drool Smashing balalaikas Ripping the ears off hussars and pissing in the wounds They for whom the back of a horse Is their only country For whom a roof and four walls is like unto a grave And a city,ptuh, a city A pullulating sore that exists to be scourged Stinky dumb nomads with blood still caked On shield and cuirass And the yellow loess from the dunes of the Takla Makan And the Corridor of Kansu Between their toes and caught in their scalps Like storm clouds in the distance Fast approaching With news of the steppes, the lagoons and Bitter Lakes Edicts, torchings, infestation The smoke of chronicles Finding their way by the upper reaches Of the Selinga and the Irtysh To Issyk-Kul, the Aral, and then the Caspian Vanquishing the Bashkirs and Alans By their speed outstripping rumor Tireless mounts, short-legged and strong From whose backs arrows are expertly dispatched As fast as they can be pulled from the quiver Samarkand, Bukhara, Harat, Nishapur More violent in every destruction This race of men which had never before been seen With their roving fierceness Scarcely known to ancient documents From beyond the edge of Scythia From beyond the frozen ocean Pouring out of the Caucasus Surpassing every extreme of ferocity From the Don to the Dniester The Black Sea to the Pripet Marshes Laying waste the Ostrogoth villages Taking with them every last cookie Then dicking the help These wanton boys of nature Who shot forward like a bolt from on high Routing with great slaughter All they could come to grips with In their wild career Their beautiful shifting formations Thousands advancing at the wave of a scarf Then doubling back or making a turn With their diabolical sallies and feints Remorseless and in poor humor So they arrived at the gates of Christendom

Green first thing each day sees waves— the chair, armoire, overhead fixtures, you name it, waves—which, you might say, things really are, but Green just lies there awhile breathing long slow breaths, in and out, through his mouth like he was maybe seasick, until in an hour or so the waves simmer down and then the trails and colors off of things, that all quiets down as well and Green starts to think of washing up, breakfast even with everything still moving around, colors, trails, and sounds, from the street and plumbing next door, vibrating—of course you might say that's what sound really is, after all, vibrations—but Green, he's not thinking physics at this stage, nuh-uh, our boy's only trying to get himself out of bed, get a grip, but sometimes, and this is the kicker, another party, shall we say, is in the room with Green, and Green knows this other party and they do not get along, which understates it quite a bit, quite a bit, and Green knows that this other cat is an hallucination, right, but these two have a routine that goes way back and Green starts hollering, throwing stuff until he's all shook up, whole day gone to hell, bummer . . . Anyhow, the docs are having a look, see if they can't dream up a cocktail, but seems our boy ate quite a pile of acid one time, clinical, wow, enough juice for half a block— go go go, little Greenie—blew the wiring out from behind his headlights and now, no matter what, can't find the knob to turn off the show.

Weasel and the Ponce were having a confab under the chinaberry tree, in the shade of the dusty old tree— pious Weasel, indefatigable Ponce. Abroad in the land were pickings to be had, marks beyond measure, fat aplenty for tooth and hand. Will and cunning are the clean, bright edges of a creature in the wild, of a vigorous man, so that goodness finds sustenance, charity nurture, in quietude, in quietude within. The nose will relate to you a world, a world entire, from the merest trace of wind— the topography of weakness, gold in a river’s sand. And there they sniffed, sniffed and with hooded eye conspired, in the shadows thrown by the dusty old tree. Trading knowledge, whetting tools, they made ready for their necessary enterprise, the fate nature bestowed. All the while drinking in each other’s aspect: they found uncommon pleasure there, did Weasel and his friend, in the other’s smile and guise, as a young girl in flattering light, as a darling young girl by her reflection might— the two of them, lovely beyond compare in the shade of the chinaberry tree. Groomed, laved with blandishment, almost gilded in the hours afternoon turns to evening and evening, stealthily, to night, how would they have noticed the rustle in the thicket, felt the heat of its burning eyes?

That bummy smell you meet off the escalator at Civic Center, right before you turn onto McAllister, seems to dwell there, disembodied, on a shelf above the sidewalk. The mad old lady with lizard skin bent double over her shopping cart and trailing a cloud of pigeons is nowhere in sight. A pile of rags here and there but no one underneath. An invisible shrine commemorating what? Old mattresses and dusty flesh, piss and puked-on overcoats, what? Maybe death, now there’s a smell that likes to stick around. You used to find it in downtown Sally Anns and once in a hospital cafeteria, only faintly, after a bite of poundcake. But here it lives, cheek by jowl with McDonald’s, still robust after a night of wind with its own dark little howdy-do for the drunks and cops, social workers and whores, or the elderly couple from Zurich leafing cooly through their guidebook.

The dog Stoltz pushed his paw pads into my neck, the warm, beaten leather deep under my chin, and let slip the one paw to up near my mouth with all the filth of the many blocks we trod, together trod, a well-moistened, adenoidal sound, part sigh and part growl, coming out of him, transported, he seemed, in a slow-motion delirium as I tickled his chest and behind his ear when he just then told me he’d tear out my throat, looked in my eye and smiled, best as a dog can, then turned ruminative and spoke once more: —I simply have to knock off that essay on Sassoon. This would have been Sassoon the war poet, understand. Dogs cannot write. My mother told me this. As for his talk, well, I took no special notice. His love of the war poets was well known. Stoltz would have been part bull and something else. Two friends walked by just then, handily as these things go, and inquired of us sitting down there on the stoop, not even, a doorway merely, along a busy street, how went the day and what pursuits was I attending; but what interested the two of them most were the tergiversations of the dog Stoltz, first beast, then scholar, then abject and adored. (Say, who among us does not care to be undressed?) He was not really my dog, you see, and of this made note, but were glad as well at my having a new dog in my life. It was a busy stretch of pavement, Amsterdam maybe, or Broadway, or farther down just south of Chelsea. I can tell you it was the West Side, of that I’m certain, and it was mild, spring-like, a few drops in the air. The friends passed along and the dog Stoltz slept. He was not my dog, you know. He simply followed me out of what can only have been a very fine home, such were his graces, his recondite tastes. But he was a killer too, and rather smelled. I cannot accommodate another animal now, please understand. I am between places. I will yearn for Stoltz, but no.

A faint smell of urine embroidering that bouquet of mold the big cushions give off days the fog won’t lift, and a shelf of bone growing out over the eyelids like evening’s shadow across a field of corn— The whole parade leaking out from your shoulders, bequeathing to the groin a pang of distance; then that metallic taste in the mouth and a voice you had let yourself believe was dead close now by your ear, intimate and sweet: Well, well, well, look what we have here.

The crow’s raw hectoring cry scoops clean an oval divot of sky, its fading echo among the oaks and poplars swallowed first by a jet banking west then the Erie-Lackawanna sounding its horn as it comes through the tunnel through the cliffs to the river and around the bend of King’s Cove Bluff, full of timber, Ford chassis, rock salt. You can hear it in the dark from beyond what was once the amusement park. And the wind carries along as well, from down by the river, when the tide’s just so, the drainage just so, the chemical ghost of old factories, the rotted piers and warehouses: lye, pigfat, copra from Lever Bros., formaldehyde from the coffee plant, dyes, unimaginable solvents— a soup of polymers, oxides, tailings fifty years old seeping through the mud, the aroma almost comforting by now, like food, wafting into my childhood room with its fevers and dreams. My old parents asleep, only a few yards across the hall, door open—lest I cry? I remember almost nothing of my life.