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And bipedal girls are sticking out of stockings,

Blowing smoke with the exclamation buttons of their mouths

And lying out on benches, faces to the skies.

We’re not here for nothing,

We are here on business.

I was sitting here like a pep talk before battle.

My belly warm, rolling

Before me like a stroller,

I roamed here like a hunter on an isle,

I was honored and patted like I’d passed an exam,

For any wretched

Two-winged, quadruped

Carries weight here with a babe on hand.

The assembly line of nature has done its job quite well.

Before our eyes convincing sets of breeds and races

Are reproducing, procreating kin,

Despite confinement and the muzzles on their faces.

And so long as roundelays are lying round the pond

The squad commander Nature, breeder-pimp,

Gives increase to the livestock and feasts out on the porch.

But I have always been the enemy of mandatory “sesames!”

And showy jumps through well-placed hoops.

When Dumber Nature used to hit the gas on me

I would freeze up from my tips down to my roots.

And when my family tree made a try to swallow me,

And presented me with faces, compelling my repeat,

That I cast a few more stitches on the knitting of our genes,

Just by a pinch—but still to go on, clinging to the axis!—

I only answered with my calm indifferent thanks.

But what was the result?

And what’s here to observe?

What are we laughing at, my soul, and where’s our weeping curve?

Like a short and paunchy, greased-up godlet,

(The names are not, the thing is all the same)

I eat a pliant pastry by the zoo’s link fence,

While glances from the public shine my skin to gleam.

I’ve inclined my mind, and today came to submit

Where they are off to mock and kiss—

With my admission of guile and full confessup,

To earn myself a place, like the beaver and the zebra,

Fence off some untroubled corner for myself

Between the summer molt and winter sleep,

To lie down on the concrete floor, to learn to love the grate—

The faithful carcass of the nesting on the way.

Here I am, and here I’ll lay my hopes.

It’s here that I will re(pro)duce myself

With every crumb of food and gulp,

Entrust my body to resilience and polysemy:

That is, two-facetry or monomatrimony.

Here they’re hawking juice and balloons,

Men carry daughters on their backs,

It’s here it’s time to take the place I’m due:

To enthrone myself by “Hawk” and “Stag”:

Another witness to a yawning tomb.

Sleeping nanny and nurse by my own womb.

woman

Cheeta the dope sits nakey in her cage:

Face a bag, nipples pencil-tipped,

Babe at feet and trough at head.

And neither her coating of red fur,

Nor her keeping up a hunky mate

Will pacify or save her.

And her stolen beigey rag may entertain

But also is no savior,

And there’s no second one around to snag.

And days go by, and breasts begin to sag,

Like sails of mangled hopes.

The baby is still playing on the floor,

Its back to you; already bloomed to girl

And eager to please in its own court.

So life’s gone by, with nowhere left to go.

But in the cage across, others have pride of place.

And one’s run up, wearing her son on top,

Testing the speeds and stamina of her tail.

While others hide their girly blushing facelets.

Others lurch for the higher ledge,

Which is so far away.

And build monkey castles in their minds,

And lead monkey troops to the fray.

Some are scary, some are scarred,

Some lie like shrooms on stumps,

Like stranded fish or slaves.

Above them sway liana fakes,

Whose shadows cloud each monkey face.

All their seeds are sown with spring

But time goes and what’s it bring?

And the children, the children fly in a tire

Above the harvest’s ample share,

They flicker by, in men’s or women’s eyes,

To the right or the left of the cage,

They grow old senselessly and stately,

In their mother’s own embrace.

And like a recent patch of cloth you fly away

Worn and weary from the weave of life,

Animal womanness with a rag erased,

Clutched behind her in a death-grip—

A threadbare, cotton, soggy

Scrap, so small, so small and tiny!

And here I’m still heading to you for my face-off,

Like to a clerk for a crucial doc,

To stand and set my mirrors to you—

Recording devices, my glasses’ lenses,

My last hour’s bodies and business,

Marked by the scars of their new breakage.

monkey

The hammers tap, and hidden bits are burning,

Sudorific doodads wind the calendar,

So we mums and girlies turn out for the big parade,

And fathers with their sons work out a dictionar,

Where it shines and snorts, strikes, igni-,

Centens of spoons play in little cups from sunup,

And just breathing out can explain to the doc,

That human reason’s naught or I don’t want.

You open your eyes: time to file in the ark:

Spring comes and swallows you up,

The Czechs are close, Kolchak advances from the east

And under Moscow undressed Germans stand like sharpened pales.

And flayed forest partisans like flanks.

And dead pilots without their holsters or their watches.

All who sent appeals to the setting sun,

All for whom a lawyer bell-like tolled his tongue—

And won them no delay. And the naked earth

Like gums expelling lodgers from a shameful dream.

And they flood the outskirts with black postal streams,

Rattling wattles, walking freetown free.

But wherever they go, the door alltoomatically secures,

And only galing woods perk up their wrens.

Or does the noise come from a lesser, tongueless creature,

That pleads for mercy, beating at the boundaries of its ken?

I’ll go and sit by the pond uncovered by ice,

Waiting for my pardon like before the Last Judgment,

And lay my monkey palms upon my tum,

Like a vault upon a vault,

So what was promised in dark and empty space

Like a victory salute, apply no less to me and my tum,

Apply like the wind, and lie down in an embrace,

As a letter slips into the mail.

In a red and white coat, in a wide red-white coat

We will while by the pond, having laid out our hopes,

In unbounded O, like a window’s wide hole,

Two together home.

Translated by Zachary Murphy King

II

Displaced Person

Poems from books

The Lyric, the Voice (2010)

Kireevsky (2012)

Essays

In Unheard-of Simplicity (2010)

Displaced Person (2012)

from The Lyric, the Voice

And a vo-vo-voice arose

To make verbs roll.

Amid commercial roses

Fine weather to ring a bell.

The drought is over,