Self-Portrait with Shadows and Turgenev
The novelist binds his love-crimes to the lightning’s penumbra.
I study his syntax in light of my own
shadow, the umbra invented by the extending
dark area in the song of the streetlamp
who knows the shape of this body
better than
any man
can.
Electricity grows me and bestows me
this halo, this sense of belonging within the oval
of private jokes, the intimacy of laughter
peppering the letters between Turgenev
and Flaubert.
Nobody’s lantern can be held entirely responsible
for sight. I spy another Ivan
in the eye of an idling van
whose metal surface
tastes white.
Night is the planet’s self-portrait as shadow
in time,
a locus minus brightness,
a sight who turns away from the sun.
In this darkness we can’t see or distinguish
its being as separate.
Shadow with borders
ungraspable, vast as the laughter of Turgenev’s
women as the pen murmurs over
and over them.
Something That Began as 13 Poems About Ovid and One Concerning Turgenev’s Women
The shadow that strolls in the sundial of your life
is speechless.
An evening in March, midnight’s ribbon on the water.
Light loves to lick a rumpled surface.
If you placed your right palm on the knee of the statue &
promised something that could only be spoken
across the Black Sea who is not even an ocean . . .
One of your books will be
removed from the library
in your homeland.
Blackened be the mind who is missing
this invisible limb.
The poison dart shot straight through the art of it . . .
Dear tyrant, your new rule is smart
but you are smarter. Forgive me.
For who else has loved the land you are ruling
more faithfully the poet
who odes it?
Dear friend, I am screwed for eternity.
Picture me pleading. Picture my insatiable loneliness.
Do not leave my bones to die alone
on this foreign beach, abandoned
by my own language.
Do not let me perish outside the words
that first created me. These books must live
beyond my body. O friend, you may
betray me at the party but keep
whole my corpus in the streets.
* * *