Leaking through the cellar bars and remaining
Just two eyelids swollen from insomnia…
And then, before dawn, comes an enormous horse.
(1919)
PARTING OF WAYS ON THE STEPPE
Tonight my soul is a steppe and on it drunken Cossacks ride at a gallop
Mikhail Sholokhov, this Don is not quiet like you described
Movements from which the sole has been torn and every prefabricated verse
Eyes brimming with dead-end alleys with muddy streets
From which a surgical procedure has
Removed every stride
This deep blue Don that carries me randomly in its inside
Pocket and occasionally takes me out into the light of mud to see what
time, day, month, year it is
This barbaric ice-blue Don
Tonight my soul
Stuck in an elevator between the cold
And the second floor where at the desk
Small like a man, it writes out on signatures of brain matter
With its sharply imagined pain
Mathematical operations of delirium and intricate equations of loneliness
Just so the night doesn’t grow fat or go mad
Mikhail Sholokhov, until they fire a burst of breath into the mouth
Of an Anyusha or a Tanya
Until this Don takes me
To the bottom of the ocean…
(1920)
A DESCRIPTION OF NOTHING
On a line stretched across the yard
Women hang out
The washed brains
A dead bird without ID
Falls into the wrinkled streets
And everyone wonders
what its name is
The mouths of the dead speak not
On rows of death notices
Your name printed
And year of birth
On my left lung
Likewise your name printed
And year of death
Is that the real reason why
Gutenberg
Invented the technology of printing
After that I go home
Resolute
To read nothing at all
Sunday
Holy Sunday
Fat roasted turkeys
Fly over the streets
Greasy Sunday lunches
Swollen greasy stuffed cabbage leaves
Lazily napping
On the dead backs
Of solemn tables set for guests
In Sunday guest rooms
Fathers counsel children
I’m waiting for you in front of the butcher shop
In solemn Sunday
First person singular
And so wonderfully
I do not exist
You don’t have to come
Anyway you don’t exist
I don’t have to wait
Anyway you won’t come
Let the Earth turn aimlessly
Around its sun
I am empty
Like the universe
This Sunday afternoon is
Longer than the smooth meridian
That severs me lengthwise
Thus there exists
An eastern and western
Joseph Kowalsky
An east and west heart
An east and west hand
An east and west waiting
And all of it divided
By a thin lengthwise line
Into an eastern NOTHING
And a western NOTHING
And in the middle
Holding my breath
I wait for you frantically
(1923)
AMEBAS (1957)
At night, as soon as I fake going to sleep so
I could rest from pretending to be awake, my red boots
would set out. They would check to see if my eyes
were closed, and if my breathing was rhythmical and then
they would go out into the street.
I would follow them barefoot and bareheaded in my nightshirt. Without success. A few streets over they would lose me and there was always a cop there who was bored and liked to ask a lot of
questions.
Who knows with whose feet they went, where they went, what they
did I never managed to find out where
they go
those boots of mine.
And still, I forgave their unfaithfulness, took them to the cobbler,
shined them with whale oil until they finally fell apart.
~ ~ ~
…
It is impossible to simultaneously feel and not feel them
How uninvited they find refuge in the shallow seas of marrow
And blood
Named after kinds of ravings
Bloated shapeless Amebas
Look… two baby Cancer amebas
In your tear duct they are weeping
Jangle the rattles of your bones
Go on let them play
Let their soft mouths chew on you
Bring them mother’s milk
Bring them yourself
In the right pocket of Cancer
~ ~ ~
…
In the left pocket is a trite emptiness
Dedicated to the waters; below the sun shatters into
Tiny boulders
Below is their home and ours
A large village of silence
And we shall
Return Cancer
The one and only Cancer
Look, two baby amebas on the corner sobbing
Break off the hands
Break off the head
Feed the insatiable hunger
Feed the amebas
Of Cancer
~ ~ ~
…
If they gently enter the whites of the eye and become cataracts
What word should you softly say so they don’t become enraged
And deform even these pitiful contours
And these pilfered shapes
And these airy constants
How do you tell them to come to their senses when they do not even
Have themselves and when they don’t know
In which direction and how far they spread
Into which of the unstable senses
Into which of the floppy ears
~ ~ ~
…
Watch out Cancer
One of them slipped unnoticed into your ear
Across your hand
Maybe it will tell you a lie
Maybe it will pierce your eardrum
Fly away, fly
~ ~ ~
…
They are at times in my outstretched palms
and again at midnight they stick to the blind window panes
all by the way from childhood to this telephone booth
in the hospital wing of the madhouse
They call on the telephone: let us into your eyes
let us into your lungs
let us into your veins
let us into your glands
let us into you
Static in the lines
They naturally are not anything but they are also not stars
they twinkle though they barely exist usually around
zero-zero
(when the senses change shifts)
They flicker on the restless boundary between
semi-darkness and…
Static in the lines
PROSE