David Wojahn

Blurring the window, the snowflakes' numb white lanterns. She's brewed her coffee, in the bathroom sprays cologne And sets her lipstick upright on the sink. The door ajar, I glimpse the yellow slip, The rose-colored birthmark on her shoulder. Then she's dressed—the pillbox hat and ersatz fur, And I'm dressed too, mummified in stocking cap And scarves, and I walk her to the bus stop Where she'll leave me for my own walk to school, Where she'll board the bus that zigzags to St. Paul As I watch her at the window, the paperback Romance already open on her lap, The bus laboring off into snow, her good-bye kiss Still startling my cheek with lipstick trace.

... in which generally the patient has the sense of having lost contact with things, or of everything having undergone a subtle but all-encompassing change, reality revealed as never before, though eerie in some ineffable way. —Louis Sass Or gallery. Or strange askew museum. Or painting of a hotel bed with some cheap print above the headboard. (Palm tree or a sleigh pulling Xmas trees.) Or the day two-dimensional, subzero as I run the beach along the frozen lake. The waves lathed to Hokusai spirals. Cold gallery, every inch of wall space covered, park benches derbied by snow. House designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. House for battered women. House of the servants of His Godhead Reverend Moon Who plots in some Seoul penthouse His glorious death and resurrection. Ten minutes ago I left you to the laying on of hands. Maria talking fast in glottal Polish, and the physical therapist, hugely blonde, lifting your legs, white cocoons of the casts. First up, then to the sides, the hospital bed in the living room hulking, whirring as it moves along with you. To talk of this and you directly, though I can’t. To heal you with my own hands though I can’t. Legs not working, hands not working, tongue encased in plaster. The tongue going numb with the hands. Why my friend Dave loves jazz: to hammer and obliterate the words, nullify too the wordlessness. “Blue Train” on my Walkman as the Moonies leave from house to van, lugging crates of silken flowers. Blue pills that didn’t work. Then my month of yellow pills. To not metamorphose to my father writhing as the charges surge from temples down the spine, a dog’s twitching legs in sleep. To mollify with acronyms: ECT, Odysseuses and Tristans of PDR, yellow Prozac, sky blue Zoloft. To heal you with my own hands though I can’t. The day two-dimensional. (Past and present and to dwell in neither.) Truth-taking stare. Height and width, no depth. On a screen the paramedics ease you from car to ambulance, having labored with a crowbar at the door, and I push again through the crowd on Thorndale.This is my husband. Please let him come with me.

A recent piece in PRAVDA gives the library books checked out by Stalin between April and December, 1926. Much has been made of their oddity... Robert Conquest I THE ESSENCE OF HYPNOSIS (Paris: LeGrande, 1902)

How long it must have been, the girl’s hair, cascading down her shoulders almost to her waist, light brown and heavy as brocade: the story I’m remembering of N’s, remembering as my own hair’s washed and cut, the salt-and-pepper cuneiform to frill my barber’s smock. Arts and Science is expanding. The wall to the empty shop next door pulled down and a dozen workmen slink improbably on scaffolds butting the dusty ceiling, cacophony and plastic tarps, the whirr of drills that mingles with the dryers’ jittery hums, the scissors’ flash, veronicas of clicks, the coloring, the curling, the antique cash register, melodious with its chime. And best, the liquid gurgle of hands massaging scalps the row of sinks, twelve hands and six wet scalps in a line. I’m next, and leaning back (let me wash it in this big tin basin, battered and shiny like the moon)

Jerboa on a triple: I was in for it, my zither on a double looking feeble as a "promising" first book. Oedipal & reckless, my scheme would fail: keep him a couple drinks ahead, & perhaps the muse would smile upon me with some s es or some blanks. January, Vermont: snowflakes teased the windows of the Burlington airport bar. The waitress tallied tips & channel-surfed above the amber stutter of the snowplow's light: it couldn't keep up, either. Visibility to zero, nothing taking off & his dulcimer before me (50 bonus points for "bingos") like a cautionary tale. The night before I'd been his warm up act, the audience of expensive preppies doubling to twenty when he shambled to the podium to give them Martial & his then-new poems. "Why do you write something nobody reads anymore?" queried one little trust fund in a blazer. "Because I'm willing to be honestly confused & honestly fearful."Il miglior fabbro, a.k.a.Prez: sweet & fitting honorifics he has left upon the living's lips. Sweet & fitting too that I could know the poems much better than the man, flawed as I am told he was. Connoisseur of word-root & amphibrach, of Coltrane solo & of California reds, of box score & Horatian loss, his garrulousness formidable & masking a shyness I could never penetrate, meeting him would always find me tongue-tied, minding my p s &q s, the latter of which I could not play, failing three times to draw a u. The dead care nothing for our eulogies: he wrote this many times & well. & yet I pray his rumpled daimonion shall guide our letters forward as they wend the snow-white notebook leaves, the stanzas scrolling down the laptop screens. Game after game & the snow labored on. Phalanx, bourboned whiteout & the board aglow as he'd best me again & again.Qintar &prosody, the runway lights enshrouded & the wind,endquote, shook the panes.

Her first child belongs to the crows and his days go circling the yellow-black fields summers and into the falls. He scans the horizon, mouth in a sticky O, like a spirit caged to infinite space. Winged One, she calls,Winged One, come here. Receding, he pulls off his straw hat and waves, showing his tuft of obsidian hair. He’s not coming back just yet. She remembers how crows are small black rivers like stairways leading to rooms that can’t be rooms, only the hallways of space. And then, how she watched him last night in the ruined farmhouse across the road where only a chimney and staircase are left jutting up to the vacant precincts of moonlight. He was stepping so lightly then, who at sixteen forgets his own name, and shits himself like the mindless, fear-mad prey of barn owls. He belonged to the crows and stood for hours on the stairway’s precipice, weaving a dance like crows in flight, until his brother, with rope and fists, carried him struggling down.

after Pavese Under the trellised arbor, and our supper’s over in the memory I’ve found myself inside. L not speaking, and beside us the river sliding softly by. Now the light will fade to moonlit water. And in memory I work to make this lingering accurate and sweet. White ouzo and her hand that lifts the grapes, first to her lips, then to mine. I may as well speak to moonlight as to her. And the walls of Bruges light up again, a costume jewelry pearl string. Her profile and her shawl hugged tight against the breeze in memory’s flammable celluloid—flaring and gone, replaced by bread and grapes, a checkered tablecloth. The two chairs stare each other down, empty now, upon which moonlight flickered all night. The bread and grapes drip mist as dawn carves the morning with a chilly wind, slicing away both moon and fog. Now someone without a name appears—first the fevered hands, Dustdevil quick, that grope for the food in vain. Then the pale light shows the open mouth and rippling throat, white face on black water, sparrow-flock fast, its spiraling path. But the bread and grapes stay where they were, their smell tormenting that famished ghost, helpless to even lick away the dew that gathers on the grapes, blue fluted sides of the wineglasses. Dawnlight, everything dripping wet, and the chairs stare at each other, alone. Sometimes on the riverbank you can sense an odor—of grapes, or sex, or memory. It swirls through the moonlit grass. And now wakes someone always mute, someone without a body weaving also through the half-lit grass. The hoarse wail of someone who cannot speak, who reaches out but cannot touch the grass, and only the nostrils flare. Now the dawn will break, late autumn cold. To crave so endlessly the warmth— the blood-pulsing fingertip, the body to embrace, the pungent smells commingling. To rise like breath and slither through the trees and tangle every branch in this unappeasable longing, this endless lust for touch and smell which afflicts the dead. The souls in the trees face the gathering light. Other times, in the ground, the rain torments them.

The night mist leaves us yearning for a new location to things impossibly stationary, the way they’d once float houses made from dismantled ships, brass and timber, from Plymouth, Massachusetts, across the sound to White Horse Beach. You were only a boy. Years later, gazing out to the red buoys of the harbor, you sought those houses, each the location of your childhood’s end. Jon, I make this all sound too complex. Our view of time is stationary, a long prediction of remorse. We’re drinking in timber, camping above Tucson, Arizona. Below, the houses are vague points of light, describing a grief you’ve housed since watching those buildings careen on water, a boy too sullen for your father. So the aspens creak like timber in an aging sloop. The others sleep. You locate the figure of your son, small and stationary, but tell me he’ll die young, body unsound, a childhood diabetic. The bourbon makes you sound entranced—to think one day you’ll return to the house to find that you’ve outlived him, maybe the radio station playing some popular song. Outliving the boy, you’ll outlive yourself. Drunk, we’ve lost our location. I shine my flashlight to find the others. The timbre of your voice grows slack. Leaves and timber rustle in the promise of rain, in the sound of distant thunder that, like death, has no location. Below, relentless clouds will cover houses. The campfire sputters, then grows, buoyed by wind, our bodies the only things stationary. Because of death, our small, unstationary lives become narration—a child is lost in timber in a fable when night approaches. The boy can’t even see his hands. Only owl-cry, the sound of his heart. But soon the aspens part, the houses of his village appear, their location precise and consoling. He’s stationary, not a sound from below. Beyond the timber, floating houses. And there his papa’s lantern, a light the boy can locate.

Bottles on the closet floor, bottles underneath the bed. Of course he thinks he’s caused it all. The hiding places unimaginative, the vodka’s glass sides clear when empty, clear when full, like the cellophane -transparent plastic skin of the model he glued together thirty years ago, The Visible Man, the tiny organs in “authentic colors,” kelly green lungs and scarlet heart. But he’s trying, as they say, to reside in the moment, stuffing the duffel bag to bring her where she’s trembling on the ward, where she’s hating both herself and him, passing four locked doors to reach her, as if each were some frontier checkpoint to a country even farther distant than the one he’s trapped in now. The zebra-striped gate, the guards who hold his documents against the light, peering through the watermarks and faded passport stamps. And he knows his skin is glass, his mission shame, and shame the lingua franca of these lands, the sign language of fingers unzipping compartments with a nylon hiss, to probe her sweaters, jeans, and stockings, (the toothpaste tube uncapped and sniffed) and shame the notebook and the novels he’s brought her, riffled and shut with a strange and final delicacy, and shame the signal that motions him on.