Three Poems

Michael Palmer

STONE

What of that wolfhound at full stride?

What of the woman in technical dress

and the amber eye that serves as feral guide

and witness

to the snowy hive?

What of the singer robed in red

and frozen at mid-song

and the stone, its brokenness,

or the voice off-scene that says,

Note the dragonfly by the iris

but ask no questions of flight;

no questions of iridescence?

All of this

and the faint promise of a sleeve,

the shuttle’s course, the weave.

What of these?

What of that century, did you see it pass?

What of that wolfhound at your back?

AND

The ship—what was her name, its name?

Was it The Moth? Or The Moth

that Electrifies Night? Or The Moth

that Divides the Night in Half

in its Passage toward the Fire?

The fire of forgetting, that is,

as we remember it,

while in the scatter song of dailiness

as it eddies out

near turns to far, beeches, red cedars and oaks

dating to the revolution, and a few long before,

suddenly in unison are seen to fall,

for so somewhere it is writ.

And your project abandoned in fragments

there beneath the elements,

the snow of the season enfolding it,

the flames of the season consuming it,

improving it: Hashish, the tales it

tells, the scented oils and modern festivals,

the sphinx-like heads and the shining ornaments

for ankle, waist, neck and wrist,

dioramas, cosmoramas, pleoramas

(from pleo, “I sail,” “I go by water”),

the hierophant in wax, the iron and glass,

the artificial rain and winds,

mosaic thresholds, all of this

bathed from above in diffuse light.

We share the invisible nature of these

things, our bodies and theirs.

And the moon did not appear that night.

—to the memory of a suicide

UNTITLED (FEBRUARY 2000)

The naked woman at the window

her back to you, bowing the violin

behind the lace curtain

directly above the street

is not a fiction

as the partita is not a fiction

its theme and variations

ornaments and fills

not a fiction

as the one-way street still

wet from all this

rain is no fiction

and nakedness not a fiction.

It reads us like a book

as we listen to its music

through milky eyes wide shut.

And what does this fiction think of us?

The rain, the notes, both softly fall.

Slight errors of intonation do not matter

in the faded green

notebooks where we record these

things, and conceal other things.

What’s the name of that tree, anyway,

with yellow flowers, small silver leaves,

planted in the concrete—

I used to know.

As for today, Leap Year Day,

the window was empty.