Barry Schwabsky
After Amy King
Is this my last meal? Is this my only porn,
my only easel—my last sentence? Could it have been
floating in my head, flowing
into yours? The philosopher’s
conquest: my only
look back, my only everything, except
yours the last whip and crack, my lethal
flight to quality, my low degree of bliss
overthought (were I ever to think again)—
My genius pants were far too tight.
They split under a cloud of images.
What cloud? Occulting what moon?
These are questions for aesthetic beginners.
“Tell us a secret,” the piano sings,
immersed as it must be
in the language of the fathers, a cavity
as clean as the one we buried them in, long ago,
as soft as the hollowed roundness behind the picture plane
that slanted away that night, the aptly-shared intimacy we bent
on lovely knees, still shuddering
for art’s sake and yet unwilling to burden time with poetry,
that night forgotten in your vaudeville life of silence.
After Catherine Wagner
The bloody show was entertaining us.
The poet runs from the stars.
The bloody show was causing us reaction.
Her feet, sublimely imperfect.
The bloody showy business made us money.
We use it to incite people.
The bloody business was a source of harmony
so we began collecting illness to spread
among us, the disciples of the bloody
cherry tree, our new name:
antibody.
Folded and kept in a pocket.
The business wasn’t bloody; it was blood.
Blood, the pet name for a body.
A body gleaming sweat in headlights unzipped into mud.
Our open seams filled with sweaty words.
The rest of us zipped tight our skins and opened
an artery to the heart of my lover, leading right
through our enemy’s, who did the bleeding for us.
Veins always bring the blood back in the right direction, don’t they?
After Simon Smith
A few go there
you ask me who but you know so well
and whose heart stopped
the pain a wasp feels when it stings you?
Don’t stop at Deptford
don’t blame my brown eyes blue
PVC harder-wearing than diamonds
lasts a thousand years
manufacture to landfill
Pegged together polyester blouse
odd sock, panties, woollen skirt
sour candy, bramble, ivy, marram grass:
Fragments from Gravesend
ghost memories, tricks.
After K. Silem Mohammad (II)
When a man has his tent ropes severed in sleep
so curling up on the cold earth to rest
the future is his only possible voice
the brief and fretted dream in which
arrested for treason having conspired
to seize so many stars he was presently silent
and slept in his secrets
but what may I ask ever happened to the sleep
he was buried in
was it not until evening
he heard your Highnesses’ calls to account
he preached to Britain its manifest density
working upon their fears he persuaded them that
the accusation against Lord Russell was true
soon the letters swarmed across the page
like ants at a picnic
the Duke himself told them they were mistaken
but up he appeared in Westminster Hall
stars swarmed across the sky that night
my king he then died cheerfully in faith
passed gratefully into restfulness too
though the poem grew so long
sleep came upon him copying scrolls
amidst so many popping flashbulbs
what else can I say of his dreaming end?
he took his pipe out of his mouth when to sleep
his dream a stipend from some future time
and when the latter is said to be hard
lost his head and drank the warm milk
the north shall come and he was told not to fear
for there was never any present tense
o heart of this love be the slave
fine sheets how soft how smooth
and after that the music unless we try
to stop it there is no turning back
until a man of skin
but look to the star that was written in an age
when sleep could make you happy
to stay in that island where they had landed
the falcon all the while rubbing its narrow wings.