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We
were in the fields, cutting the corn.
We
ran through the village, we thought there was a fire.
That
was a hot summer when the war was over.
Hello
They stop to say hello
Is he crying
He’s one of the people
Carrying a pathway
A sacred heart on every wall
It isn’t that he can’t
pull the trigger
Countries try to hold on
to the little ones
Dust gathers
in the corners, shifting dust
Find a house
Communities of people still exist
If I could choose?
Something modest.
12,000 lbs. of total recall.
Is it a funeral? a dance? politics?
The ghosts look cold. He
carries it hard.
Such a tiny thing, but a black chair would be
somber.
Unstable. Disfigured by anger.
In that time frame, little shards appear,
trying to be teeth. A condition formed
by countless mysterious malfunctions.
It becomes the fall you take.
Walk past it all again. Bridge of Fists, Bridge
of Straw.
The Bridge of the Honest Woman.
Dear, I will remain here when you go
(I was always saying)
**
Greenstreet Poem
translated by Bob Hicok, Version 1
On
a species of openness
Dear, everyone has abandoned the country
for the day, leaving their rooms, the sky
blind.
I will remain here when you go, drive by
the basketball hoop
hoping to be a halo for the swish.
Now that the horizon is mine, I'm determined
to line up all the chairs in the field
as if for a movie, putting your black dress
on one, your tiara on another, you get the point
that I'm setting the objects free
to watch light flicker in whatever manner
it deems appropriate to the narrative.
It's feeling you want, but how
does this one language of touch
become this other language of telling
what is touched?
For Christmas, I was given a watch
with a compass on it, I am certain
only of the direction the moment is facing.
It is east-southeast o'clock.
When you return, I'll let the world go,
you can take over keeping it alive
on your eye.
Tiny, isn't it, once you let it inside,
once you wear it against your name?
Like the weight of the crack in a robin's egg
I was always saying
about what you were always saying.
That jagged, difficult birth.
**
Greenstreet Poem
translated by Bob Hicok, Version 2
On the
mistakes in "On a species of openness"
I meant, 12,000 lbs. of total recall.
I would start there and add a pound every day
until we hit critical mass, the one with smoke,
with Christ winking down at me
from the cross, looking over at the nails
as if to say, boy, fetch a hammer, I crave
loose.
Why does no one do that, break into the churches
and set the Lord free, give him a Yoo-hoo,
a kite, is it a funeral we worship as the start
of life?
Such a tiny thing, trying to know the place of memory,
if what we recall or make is the jagged, difficult
birth.
Sometimes, looking at the field, I imagine a bridge
hovering between the nothings, connecting not there
to not there, and in the traffic of these absences, see
you
on your side seeing me on my side, like we're twins
of the same pointless gesture, being alive,
but it is such a beautiful bridge, stone one moment
and steel in the same one moment and fog in every
moment,
and we begin, I don't know, to walk without asking
how we got there.
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