THE MORE YOU LEAVE

The more you leave, the more I want you back;
When you return, our love life seems to lack.
Believing you are unassailable
I yearn for you to be available.
And then you come; I cannot be more bored:
I like your leave, but not your coming toward.
Your distance charms, disarms my eager heart.
But close, I wish we were again apart.
Do stay away, and I'm forever rapt,
But now, you leave me empty, dull, and sapped.
So go away; I'll love you as before.
Love's ebb and flow is tricky as a whore.

A fragment from The Ilatease of Homey, from a recently discovered Mycenaean text

. . . Cythera of the white and widening arse who stalked
strong Lactid on the Bluvian Isles; ah, strong-latted Lactid,
of the swaying sword whose droop in battle was legend
from the Bluvias to the Effluvias to the damp and puddly
Lluvias; a legend, god-written, and of Elera smitten (to whit,
her Attic tits), clad of Hephaestus’s mittens.
Ah, Bluvias, where the gold and green and pink and silver
and ivory and indigo and carmine and slightly beige-ish-off-
mauve-ish fishes fall to the net and the bent, spent trident
of Poseidon, who, green-maned, sea-stained, and a tad
weight-gained, also wore Hephaestus’s mittens as he
made love to Cythera, who looked a bit like Elera,
except fatter in the arse.
Unlike Myrcon the Dorkan, unmittened and unbitten,
on the shores of Elephantinople, where the nasty biting
ponies play in spent, bent Poseiden’s spray . . .
(Here the fragment of The Ilatease ends.)

The Searchers

Curled and inert, an El Greco Christ:

death has pulled your form so long, forlorn. 

What church father said we were urinum and feces,

urinum, sputum, and phlegm?

As if these last moments of wet last release,

the bloody catheter and the mucosed lung,

could take from me, my bicameral mind,

with a chamber owned solely by you;

with a net of live neurons, a billion or more

imprinted on your face alone,

on the sight of you, bending, tall at the door

smiling and coming home.

On the memory of your strong arms, young and hard,

lifting me up when I fell,

like John Wayne in The Searchers lifted Natalie Wood,

when a nail pierced my foot through my shoe.

As rusty we became, as foreign to each other,

till this parting, in your arms, in this embrace. Proschai.

BETWEEN ECLIPSES*

A razor cuts your wrists, but
what cut you off from me?
Is true love quart'red below?

When (blew) an azure sky
separates the chambered clouds,
which Earth will you then save,
which elements recycle?

These eclipses should portend,
but I would always be
the bastard that I am,
had the maidlienest, brightest star
eclipsed upon this gesture.

Fin.

* To Harrow Marrow: Whatever these eclipses portend, what saves you is not salvation with its grace, but the grace of no salvation.

Translation of Mayakovsky's last poem, edited

Still fiddling with this, Mayakovsky's last poem, after so many years. "Milkway" and "cloved" are new to match the Russian abbreviation and pepper pun. Like poems, translations are never finished, only abandoned.

It's after one. You've likely gone to sleep.
The Milkway streams silver, an Oka through the night.
I don't hurry, I don't need to wake you
Or bother you with lightning telegrams.
Like they say, the incident is cloved.
Love's little boat has crashed on daily life.
We're even, you and I. No need to account
For mutual sorrows, mutual pains and wrongs.
Look: How quiet the world is.
Night cloaks the sky with the tribute of the stars.
At times like these, you can rise, stand, and speak
To history, eternity, and all creation.

Telo ("Body, Corpse")

Note: The Russian refrains are individual prayers for forgiveness and mercy.

The hands that lay me out will be the hands of my everyman God,

as they appeared to Ivan Illych at the end: a stranger's hands;

a student, earnest; an old nurse's aide.
My niece, moya krestnitsa, whom I raised and let down, is dead. Her sofas, sardonic, delivered

as she stiffens, stiffens, mens, mens not sana. Pray,dear God,

pray God, pray God,

not in fear.

Forgive me, Irochka; Irochka, prosti.

 Ta budet volya Tvoya. Pomilyu, Gospodi; pomilyu, ty.

     The hands that lay me out will be the hands of my everyman God, 
as they appeared to Ivan Illych at the end: a stranger's hands; 
a student, earnest; an old nurse's aide.

The cemetery, Whites and birch trees; black monashki tending mad Orthodox graves,

the old age home there, elders without fear.
The woods where my father showed me tadpoles, life:

Parents of camps and daughter-strife,
Ancestors, woods, I:would you lived
Forgive the girl who left to live.
Ta budet volya Tvoya.
Gospodi, pomilyu; Papa, Mama, prosti.

The hands that will lay me out will be the hands of my everyman God, 
as they appeared to Ivan Illych at the end: a stranger's hands, 
a student, earnest; an old nurse's aide:
They tell the other residents of my home: “That lady wrote a book.”

I have no Alzheimer's. My face, without tonus, big as the Ukraine.

I loved a few, ignored the many.
Forgive the woman who was so silly.
Ta budet volya Tvoya.
Gospodi, pomilyu; gospoda, prosti.

The hands that will lay me out will be the hands of my everyman God, 
as they appeared  to Ivan Illych at the end: a stranger's hands, 
 an earnest graduate student, an old nurse's aide:
With a chess king in Queens, “Thanks for the laughter, 1985.” Unorthodox Jew,

took  a honeymoon dive in dreadful Cancun.

Vegas bones and manic ride:
Forgive me, Steven, I was still alive.
Ta budet volya Tvoya.
Gospodi, pomilyu. Stiva, prosti.

Steven's old bones, his fine strong teeth, welcome me: Forgiveness is here, immortal, see?
We host starlings, squirrels, a tough, unkempt bush: I am not forgot
by teenagers fucking, looking at tadpoles, anguishing their parents, smoking pot.

Ta budet volya Tvoya.

Gospodi, pomilyu. Deti, prosti.