Threshold
Note(s)
About the Author
Acknowledgments
1
Summer Fiction
My fancies fluttered round the same images
like martins round a bell tower at dawn.
I checked my e-mails, then, I checked them again:
lariat sweep and stallion glow.
Some one hour’s experience for which we
stubbornly subornatively return:
a dalliance at an execution.
Everything reduced to occasion
but the dailiness of my great Slavic beauty,
unwitnessed, being passed on and through. But
green after green after green!
Summer like summer like summer!
Fat, like Tolstoy’s—
inside the house and out, fat!
Gathering raspberries in a bikini (chto takoe?)
as if the will of everyman were free!
The great Sky over Austerlitz.
The old Oak near Otradnoe.
The Hut at Mytishchi.
The Platform at Astapovo Station.
In the Backyard in a Billabong Bikini.
Each day you did not see me was something
you lost, like, at cards.
After Grass and Long Knives
Suspect enthusiasm—
having eaten pins before—
but that’s what keeps one
quiet, that’s what makes one
stay. Empty is just the first
temporal name
after something smaller sat there is gone.
Then that space
regains its height and wild.
Let let lovers be
light thoughts, just touch
remembered in some not unkind way.
It was all fine.
It was all right.
And now what’s next is
clerestory:
wait become place—and not a cowardly one—
like in some great house made of purest plank,
place to pause, place to be welcomed.
The Lyric “I” Drives to Pick Up Her Children from School: A Poem in the Postconfessional Mode
“i” has not found, started, finished “i’s” morning poem,
the poem “i” was writing about “i” having sex with the man “i” left her husband for
the night before or maybe just this morning.
a sex poem, so to speak, so to say, so as to lay...
a foundation for...
what????????
SEX
i lost my sex/poem!
how did it go?
i know it was called
SEX
something about my bosky acres,
my unshrubb’d down
’bout all being tight and yare
(bring in tiresias?)
did you say soothe?
tiresias, who lies fucking more?
whoops.
who likes fucking more?
(“bring in // the old thought // [allen grossman doing yeats]
that life prepares us for // what never happens”)
today (the color of) my sex
was lavender then yellow
gold then muted mossy grey and green
i bid my lover
lower
i bid my lover shhhhhhh
i bid my lover
linger
i bid my
lover, go
lover, go!
(see!)
i bid my lover stay
away
“i”
