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THE CONFESSIONS OF ST. BOROSON
ONE
My mother and I were lonely, so she painted a face on me.
Every day this face grew more lifelike, while my real face began to
yellow like street maps in the glove compartment. And one day the
painted face began to say things only I can hear.
It tells me what to write, here in this dark room confessing.
And maybe the darkness I always feel around me is
nothing more than a tree?hadow that has gotten lost, and
somewhere a tree is weeping for its own piece of the night, which it
cannot find.
two
If our names were Thirst and Hunger, could you taste us?
Would you be able to live, loving us, drinking the misery of stones?
My brother and I rise like a clamor of black butterflies, and our
dark wind will extinguish the moon; listen to it now, its last
crackles.
If our names were Dust and Bumblebee.
Every candle an anchorite ever burned to read by has left
behind a residue, a saggy body of wax thugging floorwards like a
libidinous imp. Proclus Diadochus, you naughty man, how you
dreamed of looking up Mary?kirt as she ascended!
three
Do you think I lurk by choice in the shadow of a tree?
Untouched by even a drop of silly or somber light, with mad words
filling my mouth like snow pouring down into the open mouths of
corpses on yesterday?attlefield.
You and I dance together like boxers in a ring. Like
vultures, we love a good circle, and nothing can shut these open
stones. Your goodbye is another loosening of knots. Stones that
sail through a saint?ream bruise when they tumble into a saint?
skin.
four
Wherever you arrive after your journey, it will not be
where I am. Oh green of the pine trees, winter has never taught you
to surrender.
Maybe I?nly the long scream of a tree, amputated from
its shadow.
five
You have been bound into your fingerprints, you are what
you are and you are brazen. And likely to yellow as the points of a
leaf.
What?he distance between desire and sorrow? I live on
this green terrain.
What?he distance between distance and intimacy? I have a map of that.
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CARRIAGE
On this wheel of more than harsh
imagining, her body is broken
open. A whisper is her sheath, her wound
wears her, yellow is
yellow is her grip. She writes: We lost
the baby. There are fists inside her
that will always be raised and
shaking in a violet wind. I am breathing
at 63rd and West End. She is breathing
at Colfax and her loss. Angel
of the burn victim, angel of the windswept
street, the dirty snow, the tatters
of yesterday's rainbow torn down
and used as a dishrag, I hope
there is no angel for the grieving
unmother whose womb
gives off smoke like the crater
where a bomb exploded, I hope
there are no angels
for her sake.
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SCRIABIN DREAMING "The Russian composer Scriabin conceived a grandiose outdoor theatre to be built in India with the Himalayas serving as background. An audience of thousands was to sit in a semicircle, reflected in a vast pool of water. Sunrises and sunsets would become part of the stage decor, and bells were to be suspended from the clouds over the mountains. The performance-a union of music, dance, and song-would last for seven days; at the end of the twelfth hour of the seventh day, a new race of humankind would be born, combining male and female, and the world would come to an end in a triumphal conflagration."-From Demons, Doubles, and Dreamers, by Daniel Gerrould Wind sulks through Lenin's tomb.
Nineteen o one. The catastrophe
of years to come
scrolls out in palisades of snow.
The hermaphrodites of apocalypse
are coming, plowing
through the snow
of one of our many
futures; Lenin is young
and Trotsky unassassinated,
the Marxist dream and the artists'
dreams contend in the cities,
in Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Scriabin, dreamer in sounds with color,
a yeti picks a flea from its white fur
and eats it, watching
the miracle of a bell
clang a red ringing
dangled from a stray cloud. I too
would like to believe in
an art that transforms,
a song that can penetrate
the carapace of history,
a line of poetry that can
change forever the way
sunlight falls on leaves.
Scriabin, dreamer in music that tastes
larger than Himalay,
how profound
was your disappointment?
I believe, if they'd only
built it, the world would have
achieved its completion in the complete
manwoman and gone out
like a blip into endless
fervor, intimate
with the frozen
stars. I believe. But history
has the temper of a whirlwind, and Stalin
will eradicate starlight
in five-year stretches that sound
like a bus screeching to a stop. The music
of the century reached
a moment when the crescendo
could have fallen, when the theatre
that would at last have allowed
the ocean to speak of its salt-
water cravings for moon and shore
and necessity and wilderness,
could have been built. Nature
would have been a cathedral, and your theatre
a prayer, bruise-blue and surging
like the ocean, toward whatever falls away.
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