by Jana Prikryl
when he cut those talking in his vicinity:
he cut out small talk
not hearing it, convincingly deaf to its nothing,
although I suspected
he took in every word and filed it.
Romanticism too he consumed in its totality
knowing just what it was he demolished
as all the modernists did.
It being no accident his seeing what was coming
before going, did he regret his own
undoing any little thing?
Listen, he would start
when driven once again
to issue a rebuke,
listen, I’d stiffen,
listen—
Winter
This new habit of warm weather
sidewalks easing into catching up
prolonged in their confidence,
a traveled echo granted evenings
stretching into sports and
uniforms of practice
with dinners waiting just inside
open windows
whose checkered curtains
keep the secret of their color
when pattern/father and
matter/mother both were standing there
separate, solid
whose fault is it then, if not theirs
the fault keeps falling
between us, dispersing, how lucky
who doesn’t love a winter
heat wave though its period aroma
its settled questions
smell so accurate the warm blast
carries something more, antiquity
of future time, the matter settled
Epic
Your friends of friends in the city
seduce each other in the strong light
of their ambition by reading long
chapters of long books to each other
not seeing, in bed with this poem
that two chapters want repetition
as though by the guy who made Rome:
You go Book I, II, III then II, III, IV
because the second night of his visit
Dido begged a redo and he did it
although if he glimpsed a new facet or
felt shattered to relive it, or bored—
her reaction tells us he said it
just as he’d said it the night before.
Heights
Hurrying down Court Street after work
to buy TP and a shower curtain
for C’s weekend stay-over
I notice my Hunger protagonist
for the first time since January.
He looks less distinct (not quite as
near death though he’s wearing
the same tight wire-rimmed glasses
and intelligence in the eyes)
probably because I identify him less
with the narrator, no longer being
so deep in it: “That strange city no one
escapes from until it has left its mark
on him,” etc., though I’m just
as stuck in it. He asks for some change,
I give him my ones (three or four).
Asks how I am—“Okay
how are you?” Says, “You tell me,”
not bitter like how the hell do you think
but candid, as if he might like
my assessment. I guess he sensed
my reticence. We’d walked on and were
a ways apart when he calls, “Oh, miss!
This isn’t a dress rehearsal, you know.
Enjoy it.” Italicizing “Yes, thanks,”
by peering in his eyes, I hurry on
home to jot down my embarrassment.
Fox
Kitchen narrow
as a New York
kitchen, shape still
with me thanks to the
plate she threw, it nicked
his cheek, a mark
I tracked beyond
the crayon years
in Ostrava, never
forgetting ostrá means
sharp when the noun
is feminine,
and who will now
dig up why she
took up edges, smartest
in school, never topped
on lists surveyed
of boys of the
beautifulest, night
kitchen where she fought
his plan for getting out,
she lost, who loved
to love me most, they’d not
expect a little spy, they had one
time of day to have it out
though I would throw
a plate to make you talk
when baby naps, that’s
prime time to write
these fragments out
and then he won
they freed us, bought
a house a Dodge a house
a Buick, I start driving
the Dodge they bought
a Civic, a forest
that was some time
ago, you and I
take trains to this
we rent, I get
to keep that night
kitchen thanks to that
one plate and her ongoing
appetite for seeing
people cut, her news
show is her need
to hurt someone
quite far away,
she’s glued to it
Person
The reason it’s modern to be fragmentary is the ancients had death and war
but a broken herm
was broken, omen of the approaching death in war and not a work of art.
We see the beautiful bizarre foursquare scarecrow with penis and balls growing
from the wall, penis almost
always broken, and miss the broken arms, crystal glittering in the discs.
I don’t, though, miss them, maker keep your crystals to yourself, his balance
between person and
abstraction’s so stirring I want no other token for anything can happen.
He’s a person dragged away from personhood. The movement is ongoing.
A messenger insofar
as he lugs the unfolding news of his enduring. His message his undoing.
Friend
1.
Her voice cut through the talk before I turn
to see her coming in made pulse go cantering
and then our date to see the place—
then a basement restaurant with tropical fish
backlit in aquariums between tables
under brick arcades, more storm cellar
than ramparts of history—
where Julius Caesar expired
was nothing special, maybe we got
gelato after. But weeks after willing her
to ask, too big an ask in my experience.
So, scheming. To see anything
so long as it doesn’t scream pretext.
In that sense how lucky we’re in Rome.
2.
Not just the place but the cruise ship way
we’re trapped with people speaking English,
it cultivates my cultivating favorites.
Group outings every other day, our routes
made little theme-park maps of the city.
Once a lintel to lintel pinned
> our zigzags, each plane bent into a sharp
shallow recessivity by Borromini,
inhering so precisely in each
of his withdrawals. Started with the convent
at the foot of the hill, boutique hotel
that kept the naked brick façade he made,
small nipples tucked out either side
the entry, before the money fell through.
3.
Because I’d spent a Saturday alone
in Sant’Ivo (asked Bob before we came
his favorite place in Rome and following
a pause he named it) when we got to it
could drift so positioned myself
close to her. Wherever she was looking
inside that lozenge I saw it again,
surprised I’d missed the fracture in the dome.
Then onward to the single window
frame and less artless of two staircases
still jostling at the Barberini.
By now the power of all he declined
to do for clients, people like me
or around me who lose it over the
living and sighing flesh of Bernini
emanates out of each unpretending
stone I see admitting it’s made, holding
its own against impartial admirers.
Sticking with them, dipping in and out
of puns with her. Never happier
than orbiting, free to store or shed
energy the nearer the middle of us
I step and put dumb questions to her
or taste my membership privileges
alone, bringing up the back of our set.
Anonymous
Their dated shoes are hidden in a cloud of grasses
of the kind she’s holding in her hand.
The sound of a strand of wild grass ripping
has something human about it, you feel
the earth’s scalp object, and that’s where you assert
your difference from the earth, an unexpected
homonym, in your own perception
quickly forgotten of how a patch of soil
resists you and then ceases to resist
and then the grass is yours. This
great piece of turf, this photo-realism.
He looks into the device
with a face almost expressionless,
a subject very knowing. She smiles.
I’ll be honest with you, it’s difficult
to like the men in these photographs.
My contempt might be capable
of reanimating them, the men alone, so deep
does power lodge in them, no
that can’t be right
when it’s the soil
and they the famished little roots.
Sibyl
Tonight’s host, the city
second city for those of us
we graze
there’s talk of problems
distinguished by fine
distinctions, finer than you’d find
in other cities
aren’t these the friends you came for
distinctions
and an amazing capacity for imagining
more than there really is
when that more helps William of Ockham show
Zeno nothing is a no-go
guests but containers
of capital
capacities
mingle
graze
nowhere on earth, honestly
is the turf nipped
to such a fine buzz
of knowingness
Snapshot
Because the needle at the top of the Chrysler Building
is visible now and then under whitecaps
slightly more of the Empire State
pokes up, like a buoy.
A coral garden Central Park
dreaming at the bottom.
Every shipwrecked cab and bus
noble in its sacrifice.
None but ethical barnacles tackle the struts of the Brooklyn Bridge
while hedonists lap the sweet water
still trapped in the pipes of Harlem walk-ups.
How pleased is the subway
to lose the distinction
of being alone in being under everything.
Coriolanus
Food, money,
contagion.
In a word
Bartleby.
But needs to say so
as is still
in business, has days
to fill not unlike Your voices!
ornately explaining
departure from this or that zone
of saying, whenever the net
diminishes (back-
formation into knife) into gouging
what had been felt intrinsic, this
truce, this just
let me live—an impulse familiar
enough, believe me. For your voices
I have fought;
battles thrice six I have seen and
heard of; for your voices
have done many things, some
less, some more.
The words say so
much less than seems
possible for words to say
they laugh at you, no each so
laughs at itself becomes
the consuming of itself,
a doing not a document, city
archive flaring, hand
on the volume
knob a dancer,
one spin turning it all
the way down, word
silencer, licensed
for burial. It’s that
sudden. Tell me an act
more civil than this
disarming.
Vertical
One night the B took a turn
my ears popped
People in the orange loveseats facing forward
had to hang on
to something,
looking up I see
that man yawning at a pole
is uncle who never had a hard word
for us, who prospered
under every regime
He’s young again and trying like everybody else
to find upright against the angle of the floor,
each car articulated
at a distinct angle, producing different pitches
of screams, no telling
how near the schism in the schist will bring us
to the core
Each person strobing past
on their own line
strains to hear the faint blurred station names
Stoic
At some point you have to walk to work
over those sheet metal cellar doors made
passable by those convex slash marks
marching diagonally through one another despite
very often that mutual hint, syncopation
underfoot, that they’re not locked
and could open on the last abyss. Having seen
some videos I was dying to try a vertical
wind tunnel. Instead it’s that tetchy
sweat wind hugging itself,
so inside you you spend it
on the faces in the car,
closer than a sleeping spouse
sending it back in your face
/>
which isn’t quite far enough away
for my taste from the now
infamous remark, We can have one
as long as it’s understood that it’s your
child. Who do I know who’d not depopulate
the city and be every man himself?
Give that man a raise.
It’s once you reach a certain place,
in your thirties maybe, certain features
undo more of their significance.
Being able to twist and pull their names
from the sprue of an outer lexicon
is step number one. And step number two
may be endurance. Wait it out
I say, thinking the matter through.
Not easy, for you
are the one who’s the matter.
That’s when I hold off, don’t send it,
question if I really want it, take a mini
vacation from worry, leave early
so I can feel that once in a while
I do get a minute to think.
And that’s a step up, a bird’s-eye view.
Optimism
Supposing longing prolongs the time
the jury’s out
This city’s long, you feel,
for a reason
You long to reel it in with a line
gripped in the hands or written or typed with the hands
reel it in from the future
back home
to its past, right now
And if the thing (arrangement)
they want is gone, they haul it in
around a beam
up from behind, past you into future and around
back here, having
first pounded in the fulcrum
with all their might, deep down, on some level
aware no fulcrum is that strong because
a fulcrum cannot long
Anonymous
The girl seen here second from right always levels with the camera like it’s a friend.
But now I’m noticing the girl on the left, in the black skirt.
I like her temperature, sustained from one photo to another.
But I am supposed to talk about the others.
There are eleven.
Two prone in front and four kneeling either side of the older one,