Sunday, January 31, 2016
Saturday, January 30, 2016
t(his), (he)re
t(h(is)) (which is ours)
here (ours,(he)re now)
t(his) h(ere) (you, pre(sent)
t(here) (my (fu)ture is (y)ours
Friday, January 29, 2016
MY VRONSKY
He
told me, repeatedly, that
people
considered him
the
most intelligent person
they’d
met; that he was not
more
successful was a conspiracy
of
minorities, lesbians, blacks, and gays,
and
a coterie of cliques
that
sucked up all the grants.
He visits me; his handsome features,
now marred by fat, peer at me.
“What are you reading?” he asks.
(A
hundred pages a day, to live.)
He is an expert on Nabokov,
international relations, modern art
David Foster Wallace, Heidegger,
and the poets I translate.
(And
yet he never understood Karenina,
any
more than Nabokov did,
as
they focused on the crevices
in
her carriage train,
in
that foreshadowed bier,
but
not on the abortions,
nor
the Vronsky of her death.)
Before
him,
I
remember feeling beautiful,
and
those times people said
I
was the smartest woman they knew.
"My Vronsky" appeared in the St. Petersburg Review
Thursday, January 28, 2016
PERSONAL
I
want to know
what makes you
tick.
I
want to know
what makes you
fickle; I want to know
what makes you stick.
Tell
me
which ion propels you
which soothsayer spells you
which folksinger trills you
which hardwood distills you
which downward dog twists you
which protest resists you
which neural net fires you
which siren desires you
which villennelle sings you
which jailbreaker springs you
which Uncle Sam wants you
which calculus daunts you
which lullaby lulls you
which confidence gulls you
which apple you’ll bite from
which hither you’ll welcome
what
makes
me
forget the right answers
consult necromancers
allow the forbidden
ignore the guilt ridden
unlearn all the learning
embrace this new burning
to know
what
makes you
tick.
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