Thursday, May 20, 2010

Translators

It is not the conclusion that is wrong but the premise.
-Werner Heisenberg

A notable poet wedded
a ten-year-old student.
Their love was never consummated:
he discovered and feared
the hair women had
atop their mons pubis.

When he asked if I wanted to get lost
he told me to look up
and I did and it was gray
and so was everything else.
It ranged from white to black
in uniform and I laughed
wantonly
like herbaceous plants.

A Rubik’s cube that can’t be solved
is still a Rubik’s cube
revolving around itself.
A poem is ink on paper
until it becomes
something felt.

Keep up with me now.
In Edo period Japan,
Jinsui-kidney water is semen
Dokketsus are poisonous lumps near the coccyx
Fundoku is “fecal poison”
(which should be washed with urine)
and Joketsu means “superior ass.”
These terms, created for protection,
classified the body of potential suitors
in the quest of male-to-male love
between a teenage boy and a man.

This is goofy but it is May.
It might be the eleventh.
The lightening struck
a couple miles off
and echoed
I didn’t eat,
the clouds were too fat.
I abstained.

It was wet.

Stark lit in nicotine sweat
is how she remembered
sleeping on a pile of blankets.
She dreamt of shaving
her pubic hair
for the green weather
before a rain storm.
She is watching
the rain somewhere else.
She is drying the dishes.
The cardinal pitcher broke
(the bottom came right out).
Her thumb was almost severed
in a similar accident
involving a hand plant
on a ceramic bowl that broke;
its bottom shattered nonsense.

When his waistcoat advanced
in misty sunlight spots
she watched sand dust
from a garbage truck
that tapered past.
Maple leaves helicopter
from tall canopies,
whirring into the smell
of recently paved street.
The clouds left the city.
It is humid today.
I taste undoing
in the dead rain.