War of the Beasts and the Animals

Everything is packed and the crates stowed,

All reckonings completed, all logbooks closed,

Blinds drawn, flags lowered, I am asleep.

My dearest, I went out late in the evening

To look at you in photographs taken at college,

I haven’t seen her for so long, she hasn’t changed

My Dearest I hoped I would never have to tell you,

My Dearest, I hoped to conceal it

My Dearest, I hoped I wouldn’t live long enough

To meet with, the coming together of two halves,

The full combination of classical attributes.

Addressed to the President of the Academy, Professor Nikitin

A copy to the Kremlin, the original for my widow.

Research notes. A diary with his observations.

Height, weight, estimated age.

Those characteristic scars in the abdominal area –

There, submerged in water, last-century surgery

Operations without anaesthetic on the seabed

Changes in pressure, fibroids, scars

Giving birth is hard; bringing up the child is hard

And marriage is a near impossibility.

And such yearning, such yearning, although on dry land.

…But most of all: I love you, your very own.

But most of all: forgive me, this is not goodbye

But last of all, and first of all,

And Christ! All in all: fare you well.

And if this place is the far edge of the earth,

It is not the furthest edge of the earth.

The Body Returns

(2018)

The Body Returns

Z

Need to clean the room / need to clear space

Y

So speaks poetry, the poetry that lives in a women’s body in Canada, in English

So she speaks: once cleared the room writes itself

X

And now what to do

The room is shining

The room is cleaned to its bones, its marrow, must write itself, no one writes to anyone

W

Where are they, where are the men like Ares

Who lift the rafters and will not pass through the lychgate

Where is their bone marrow, their pleasuring digits, where are their teeth and tongues

Into what elements have they dissolved

V

Deep underground in the growing cells

Cell unceasingly makes cell

To put forth like apple gall, when the earth harvests its own

Underground rivers grope for their mouths

Sperm seeds

U

Spring pours like warm piss

Over permafrost

And the ice rises and floats.

Under the ice a turmoil of green, yellow letters

And then, when unseeing branches make lone drawings on light

Poetry, speaking Danish, lying under the earth, female

T

Dead, like the others, alive for some reason,

Resting in the hollow cheek of the clay like a boiled sweet

And has no rights, no more than the ones lying under the other bush

Whose only memory is the reflection of self

In the flat pewter face of a flask

Hearing has run dry

There is nothing more for them to hear.

S

Where there was once ear, now there is earth,

Holds the unhearing place in embrace.

Where there was once mouth, now roots mass

To make a wellspring of growth.

Dead poetry speaks, she says

I write like the wind.

She / they / the others / many who come before and after

Lie there, there is no wind, what is there, why do they need wind

R

Break the frozen earth, touch the dead song.

Under the level winter sky says another

From the same Canada, and lying in someone’s earth –

Since September 1922 her germinating body

Must have brought forth fruit: under the level sky

I saw a thousand Christs go by.

What were they doing, we ask from the kerbside.

They were marching.

They were singing.

Q

Winter. 1918. Petrograd.

Poetry heard nothing, except

Noise, constant noise:

A rhythmic boom

And look out of the window

(the fields multiplying, and in them the dead the dead the dead

heads thrown back

tongues stilled)

We see the snowstorm, flutters like lace at the window

And makes a sign: the room is now cleared.

P

And then

When you’ve grown used to the absence of light

And the flickering pixels of matter

And the gunfire on street corners

Where they sold newspapers before

It happened, and every fifth flower was free, gratis

Lubricating the buyer-seller relationship

With the milk of humankindness,

The milk transparent,

Once the eyes have grown accustomed to the scene, the man and his poetry are clairvoyant

There is a Presence here.

O

As if wind (I write like the wind)

Gainsaid any human part in this

As if the room had been flayed to its very bones:

What would remain?

As if the ear of the earth

Its huge funnel, described in Russian in 1837

The year of the death of Pushkin, but notpushkin

Received and transmitted the very same

And even Blok, like Mother Goose,

Says in wreaths of white rose with Christ at their head

And that is how it was.

But who believes a goose.

N

They lie, shot, in ravines filled with stars and bird cherry,

They lie in marshland, like dry stalks, like sprats in cans

They lie under banks, beneath lakes and autobahns

Beneath freerange grazing

Beneath sheep fields, where sheep go wild

Gainsaying any human part to this,

They lie under multistories

And runways

Where fingers of grass slit the paper-thin ice

Where blue signal lamps are cleverly placed

Where powerful bodies fly without our hands.

Where is my body, says the middle stratum