Valerie poem
Manahatta in the debate of windows
her tall scenery nailed to this night
shaped language of the stars
skywriting the perpendicular destinations
I love this place, this portrait, this moment
this tar-black shudder of the Hudson in moon ooze
inconstant like a woman unrolling in her beauty
the celestial curvature of her figure
***
Gyres sweep distances even on other worlds
life full of each millisecond in a well of soaring absolutes
the blinking landscape of reflections
of searchlights hinging on edges of darkness
A mouthful of a party fills the walls in a Hoboken flat
the rat-a-tat-tat of end to a dreadful year
pouring in sporadically at an audible level
champagne chants, back and forth wishes. . .
***
and my wishful thinking about your junctures
your undulating slopes in damask
In back of my word, much booze
joint trance squeezed into snapshot of you
How is a painter, a woman unpeeled of her leather mini,
a composition of soul and skin--or both?
Or is she a parenthetical nude: delicacy of nipple
damp slit in zone of pubis?
***
How ruffled your passion
the unpremeditated deeper tones
the rage for that last slip of wine
that last deluge of the hour, that last sob?
Are your paintings psalms to womanly wares
or proclamations of solitary neglect?
Orgiastic pandemonia, undergarments grazed
by invisible fingertips of the Lord, panegyrics to Phallus?
***
What makes you (I've noticed!) situate men
in spaces between the dark brows of your former lovers?
We are like unseasonable moon flowers
falling from corners of an incompleted sky
the split second of your leg refracted in sheen of other legs
the provocative run in nylon of my mind
You whirl about me like a milky morsel in high heels
like a young Lithuanian girl I loved too long ago.
Memories of Paniriai
You are my country, my horizon--and yet
Of me no thread or charmed dream
in you? A word or two? A corridor of a sea shell
a shadow of possibilities that falls across the stars
each time I lose myself in them
You loved me, and then you loved somebody else
No! But your breast did swell to permit passage
of passions at an instant
oh how they sang to the intricate string of leeks
the dancing radish of a scrotum
In a trance you seemed on compassionate streets
of a city, glazed and dreamy and full of sky
You chose gestures familiar to women
I to exist in amputated endlessness
follow the rear lights of passing cars on I 71
in a half-flight from your long body
like sun-lit driftwood in the Wilia
river of milk your thighs
the sweet brie sweetness
of your curled womanliness
Mine are survivor's eyes wrinkled with a past
that frequents me too often
the past in my blood, father, mother
that for all its invisibility unseals this soil
blackens under this clump of taupe thistle
longing for impossibilities
***
Giedre, I've called you enough to outlast a life
firing my desire for the chestnut rain
and screwdrivers under the sun umbrella
the swell of words that seemed right
over like a road sign
like weeping leaves that don't weep
you won't embrace me
won't embrace even yourself
And ultimately, Father in Heaven
words are of no help to sleepwalkers
clinging to gravestones, making lightening
out of age-proof zip bags of sex and grief
I draw a cartoon of loveliness at ease
as days grow thin like a commercial billboard
and asphalt conjures up the lemony wedge of the moon
the casting away of things inside myself
feelings that dodge bullets in sour-tasting dreams
as if you shuddered under the hinds of some Zeus
a webbed, wine-breathed creature
a startling imprint of perfect wings
Last time we met you were half Viennese, your father
a pure German in The Waste Land sense
The Waste Land manuscript loosely leafed like bed sheets
to reassemble a woman's heart
she submerges her nakedness in them as in a river
that shivers in a grimace of daylight
a sidelong glance of glass under the Green Bridge
a sheen impossible to reclaim.
***
It must have been on a star-littered night
in the bough of a massive of oak
in woods where young Vytas hunted boar
before he was duke and Great
in these Paniriai pines
that thickly line the rails to Grodno
There! An eyeshot from old Casimir's wood-beamed hut
a gray specter of birches, curved remains of a ditch
smoldering pyres that climb the summer air
spiderlike Jew sinews
uncoiled human hair stitched into tilted light
a snippet of girl raised skywards
in her frail flight, a scream, a dream
accordioned lives
death with its howl
the dull wind of the Holy Spirit
battered into a hollow skull
furled hope in empty human spaces
a body jerks, a corpse snails in its deformity
the weedy expanse of human junk
night-shattering trigger in a squint
what of conscience in rifles echo?
what of the soul in a grasshopper
or a frenzied blackbirds shriek?
a country once had its Jews
a segment of the Lords mud
the pallid moon gleam in Giedre's window
is all that remains
not much of Jew
in Paniriai mountains
***
Mireks grandma remembers
in the pungent odor of old age
for her only Christ the miracle worker
cleans his wire-rimmed spectacles
in dawns scarlet semicircle over the pine tops
in a row of eight holding his shriveled crotch
shot, his house on Stikliu ransacked
the torch pressing back shadowy grays
Better to know nothing of this Europe
where everything roars distantly
In the discouraging vexation of old age
Mirek and I are chastised for having dared hell
worshippers of a wavery memory
to a crowd of pines
their crests like the ancient script
over the swells of anonymity
so when--tell me--youre off to Warsaw?
when to anywhere?
if all life has its end, Mireks grandma muses
surely the stars illuminate the hereafter
***
You remind me of my wound, my city
I reclaim in the whisper of the Almighty
You, where nothing ever really changes
hasnt for centuries
Giedre will darken like a wedding rose
pray for eternal night without any point of reference
I for a memorial few visit
where hours lengthen in every direction
skeletal Yiddish carved in marble
an obelisk with a star head
limb of a modest crucifix
in whose memory?
Sharing a Cab to Sheremietevo Airport with Mayakovsky
Last gasps of countryside shrouded in dismal colors
in moments of timelessness aslant to a speeding Moskvich
Birches by unmade backroads lashed by swings of rain
the muddy rivulet assailed in its vein
Cold droplets lingering on a thistle low in stem
on bristling hair of a rodent belly-up in the berm. . .
Ought mine be a stranded word of benignity
for a damp and glittery spikelet of barley
for a mantis caught in a curtain of dewdrops
for a blackbird poised in the debris of damp twigs
for a flattened field of mildew and weed
lost in the chilling dreariness of a Russian spring?
***
How unquiet the falling of Rasa's eyes
in each bronze leaf of her eyelash
Imagine the distance between us
even when we are incomprehensibly close
In the moisture of our most intimate gestures
dissolving in her chartreuse abyss.
***
Muscular night in the unbuttoned shirt of stars
western horizon severed by the sweep of a hammer
the roar of you, comrade posterity, on Pushkin's worn tux tails
of my spectacles with chrome rims like bicycle spokes
Yermilov the skirt chaser on the tango floor of the Kremlin
and you, prophecy broken into pieces
an awkward mass of a man who loved
the delicate swirl of her amber violin
the archeology of caress
the spiraling of her spasm
her who steam-rolled over your brain
with her slim volumes.
***
A diamond glacier in her absolutes
an avalanche of one unmoving night
her sweet belly sinking like a bowl
pucker of rose lips in the cough of the hour
her splendid limbs to honor Stalin
in the back seat of Beria's limo.
If bureaucrats are like crested birds of neuter sex
their eye the slope of a desolate field
their seed a sprawl of petrified crap
their sky a torrent of florescent wounds
what of the ribbons of human breath
in the cold taiga night under Bolshevik stars?
***
I'm leaving your unfinished revolution
Reflecting on the odd elongations of its scars
cheated of perfection by the vomit of its miracle
like some half-lit religious monkey
with crumbs of stale confidence
and Stolichnaya poured over the lumps of existence
Enough of this uncorked grimace of nameless, gray rows
this spectral sameness of overcrowded buildings
Enough of coffin faces in flap-eared fur caps
Miserable Sheremietevo welcome!
***
The color of scrap metal hanging in your throat
the motor accruing speed to scale the Milky Way
you embraced the pulpit of love in the lavatory of humankind
dodging the configuration of her exquisite equations
pushing out of the rib cage for ecstasy
for a psalm over the tankerfuls of cell-building sap
her oblong eyes plunged into dreams beyond dreams
like a cityscape on a breeze caught in the crimson folds of a flag
in the hyaline sky of this otherworldly land of lands
absolute and unthinking like the mind of God.
***
Aye, Volodya! Your star long-tailed in its grief
hauls me beyond my heavenly constellations
disturbs my condition on the ledge
of an uneasy descent fifty years from its time
Sail on in harmony of nerve and heart
beyond the peninsula of ordinariness!
