to ask a question: History, paintings, language, what else is there? Personal experience, that constantly decaying thing? Homolka addresses the question, slyly eschewing experience in more than one poem, slyly hanging onto it in others. Nonetheless, the experience of the reader cannot be denied—if we read at all it is to have an experience—even if that experience is no more (or no less, depending on your view) than to catch the light and “sit and discuss / the reflections.” And what if this book, by virtue of its intelligence and in spite of its exhilaration, leaves us with a sense of spiritual weariness; what if the book leaves us wanting to be gladder and more puffed up? Consider most of all that if such wishes were granted, we wouldn’t have these marvelous poems, poems that remind us how easy it is, really, to talk to Horace.
—Mary Ruefle, 2015
1
Goshen
Everywhere in heaven’s meadows
Aryans jack each other off
under the willows
breezily
The year Jews’ permits are collected
words of consolation
sprinkle like seed
across their bellies
Over the leafy coastlines of southern
Berlin purest oxygen
slathers the air in
suntan lotion
The destitute teethe at fatigues of cadets
launching themselves toward
some more inward
six day war
While out of the backs of chariots
emaciated lovers receive star
after star after
star
Second Goshen
They’re really going
to kill us all It bears repeating
inferences trickling
in little by little like aphids
I would have to have known history
not been so close to it
I couldn’t make sense of it
where unmatched scrubs
lie draped across the barracks
bunks like forest markers
fate meanwhile continuing
its innocuous silence
They can murder us each
only once It bears repeating
so many believing till the last
moment we’d be spared
Praise God O
Praise God you can hear
spoken again and again
from the hedges and viburnum
Third Goshen
Bright orange koi
in ponds ringing paradise
The Aryan gentleman
promises me things
Wearing a tulip
behind his ear
wagging his petit
black-and-white
buttocks Betty Boop
style regales me
with such as islands
for tumbling
thickets for splaying
barrels and waterfalls
for starting afresh
all the richness
of life’s vicissitudes
I take his glosses
at face value convinced
he just wants
the best for me
and my family
who gave their
oils and corals
moss manna and soil alike
up for the future
But he falls instead
to swimming with
bright orange koi
by ivy-latticed
lawns of the homeland
weaving his Goldilocks
curls with mint
swaying suggestively
in a light sarong
Simple to see
the creatures in whom
he meant to inspire
kinship only
swim on unmoved
I love the koi
I thought I loved
him but no
to the koi and koi
alone I feel loyal
Their loose glow
captures the closeness
the family once felt
stories till late
each of us cast
as saviors draped
in loofahs and
minks O Clark
Gable
