I have memories of the day I knew my future
that I would marry a soldier
in the wax-fizzing shapes
you cannot read yourself –
premonitions are for someone else
to see – and I balled all night
at the certainty of my sleeping
curled around a rifle
a horse and sword at the breakfast table
his steady hand decapitating my egg
with the functional twitch
of putting down bodies not yet dead
yet it’s a growth industry
and sure to keep me good and safe
and clothed in the modernest ways
women and men at the tea trays
day and night performances
all the staples house and life require
unsnowed hours in the pleasure grounds
mind-projected flowers in the rush
a finger to my mouth to hush
my breathing words of all the planted names
that never go out of leaf. And when my daughter sleeps
to her ear I will sing
the sound the water makes in Odessa
each note a star in the star-ecstatic sky.
I am sure I know how I will die –
when all the people of the world come to Odessa
filing secretly, secretly to themselves,
down the Potemkin steps, idempotent
and glad toward the sea, to wash there,
to feel how good cold can be
when you have no cares for drowning
nor deep water’s charming
murmur of mouth-bubbling water.
I will tell these moments to my daughter
when drip drop they all go over
the great populations in coats and hats
deliberate dress for deliberate acts
bringing the water back.
He was thin and cautious as a cat
surly behind a baroque moustache
spine like a brushstroke
and when he spoke
all good and hiding complexity
I waited
for the day he walked me round by the arm
the ocean horse-kicking itself calm
and black
as such days.
He was quick to talk of love
and not shy to reach
waves reaching out above the sea
and sand-plumes of wind
below my hands.
He fascinated in the salon
walls clad with conversation
a nice line of argument when asked
of bears he killed
in the north
in the past
leaning in the inside fire shine.
The pleasure it seems was only mine
half a season of love shaped with time
and victory beauty refinement dense
as a bad cold.
I will tell my daughter this when I am old.
Bedoved above the silent water
there are nonagons of vulture
sense-hovering, escaping the wetlands
and current social limitations, for Niger,
for the Air mountains, for bones to pick.
In chintz along the San Martine she promised
she would be back
when all the death-houses were hotels
and each new language
from the inflowing people
when the one-eyed boys joined hands
and shared the job of seeing
heavy changes,
the repeating apocalypse of Tuesdays
when all we had to do
had been done.
The waist-high water split her like a question
to an answer I had already begun.
I showed her the emptiest half of the world
islands snow-curled in white sand
whales filling whale throats
time-old fishing and freight boats
lungs of wind below the world ceiling
we made good our living
two stones anchoring beach towels
head-flipped centimes for dolmades
taro and manioc soft
salt lips drunk of kava
laplap in the nakamal doorway.
We spoke much of the night and looked across the islands
to Menelaus in his war-fond tupenu
tattooed with all accompaniments of rank
the top half of his body big and out
lumping his man-breasted power all about
ready to launch a thousand-canoed assault
as though to peg a hurricane to the ground.
Each and every night behind the sound
of men in low-lying warboats just because
I showed her the emptiest half of the world
festooned in rare birds and space
half her face
upon the pillowcase
the backward moving ceiling fan
reflecting helicopters on the divan
to all the tired nights –
to all the tired nights I prayed
as in São Cristóvão, as in that golden glade
of tired nights
of carrying her upon my back, sleeping
in the angled mountain rain
in a house of mud-daubed walls and skin
and llama in the drunken mist
of names of rain and words for raining
and ancestors vanished for never having lived.
The ever-forest canopy dropped our eyelids
till all the hours and all the days reversed
and all the warboats journeyed back in time
and Qusqu raised its blood hearts to the fire
and green in golden magic gods returned
and tapestries of spiders reeled and burned
to celebrate the world-destroying world.
We know now what we never learned, how
expressible in her throat were lyric words
she heard each night from song-wing birds
who fly and fly sunlight around the world
till inexpressible in her throat we heard
the brown voiced Ucayali
the infinity of trees where no one ever dies.