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His brain is famous for its subtle flavor,

though it's no good for trickier endeavors,

for instance, thinking up gunpowder.

 

In fables, lonely, not sure what to do,

he fills up mirrors with his indiscreet

self-mockery (a lesson for us, too);

the poor relation, who knows all about us,

though we don't greet each other when we meet.

 

 

Subject
King Alexander
predicate
cuts
direct

object
the Gordian knot with his
indirect object
sword.

This had never
predicate
entered anyone's
object
mind before.

 

None of a hundred philosophers could disentangle this knot.

No wonder each now shrinks in some secluded spot.

The soldiers, loud and with great glee,

grab each one by his trembling gray goatee

and
predicate
drag
object
him out.

 

Enough's enough. The king calls for his horse,

adjusts his crested helm and sallies forth.

And in his wake, with trumpets, drums, and flutes,

his
subject
army made of little knots

predicate
marches off to
indirect object
war.

 

 

Here are plates but no appetite.

And wedding rings, but the requited love

has been gone now for some three hundred years.

 

Here's a fan—where is the maiden's blush?

Here are swords—where is the ire?

Nor will the lute sound at the twilight hour.

 

Since eternity was out of stock,

ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead.

The moss-grown guard in golden slumber

props his mustache on the Exhibit Number . . .

 

Eight. Metals, clay, and feathers celebrate

their silent triumphs over dates.

Only some Egyptian flapper's silly hairpin giggles.

 

The crown has outlasted the head.

The hand has lost out to the glove.

The right shoe has defeated the foot.

 

As for me, I am still alive, you see.

The battle with my dress still rages on.

It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!

Determined to keep living when I'm gone!

 

 

Little girls—

skinny, resigned

to freckles that won't go away,

 

not turning any heads

as they walk across the eyelids of the world,

 

looking just like Mom or Dad,

and sincerely horrified by it—

 

in the middle of dinner,

in the middle of a book,

while studying the mirror,

may suddenly be taken off to Troy.

 

In the grand boudoir of a wink

they all turn into beautiful Helens.

 

They ascend the royal staircase

in the rustling of silk and admiration.

They feel light. They all know

that beauty equals rest,

that lips mold the speech's meaning,

and gestures sculpt themselves

in inspired nonchalance.

 

Their small faces

worth dismissing envoys for

extend proudly on necks

that merit countless sieges.

 

Those tall, dark movie stars,

their girlfriends' older brothers,

the teacher from art class,

alas, they must all be slain.

 

Little girls

observe disaster

from a tower of smiles.

 

Little girls

wring their hands

in intoxicating mock despair.

 

Little girls

against a backdrop of destruction,

with flaming towns for tiaras,

in earrings of pandemic lamentation.

 

Pale and tearless.

Triumphant. Sated with the view.

Dreading only the inevitable

moment of return.

 

Little girls

returning.

 

 

My shadow is a fool whose feelings

are often hurt by his routine

of rising up behind his queen

to bump his silly head on ceilings.

 

His is a world of two dimensions,

that's true, but flat jokes still can smart;

he longs to flaunt my court's conventions

and drop a role he knows by heart.

 

The queen leans out above the sill,

the jester tumbles out for real:

thus they divide their actions; still,

it's not a fifty-fifty deal.

 

My jester took on nothing less

than royal gestures' shamelessness,

the things that I'm too weak to bear—

the cloak, crown, scepter, and the rest.

 

I'll stay serene, won't feel a thing,

yes, I will turn my head away

after I say goodbye, my king,

at railway station N., someday.

 

My king, it is the fool who'll lie

across the tracks; the fool, not I.

 

 

Her mad songs over, Ophelia darts out,

anxious to check offstage whether her dress is

still not too crumpled, whether her blond tresses

frame her face as they should.

 

                              Since real life's laws

require facts, she, Polonius's true

daughter, carefully washes black despair

out of her eyebrows, and is not above

counting the leaves she's combed out of her hair.

Oh, may Denmark forgive you, my dear, and me too:

I'll die with wings, I'll live on with practical claws.

Non omnis moriar
of love.

 

 

In Paris, on a day that stayed morning until dusk,

in a Paris like—

in a Paris which—

(save me, sacred folly of description!)

in a garden by a stone cathedral

(not built, no, rather

played upon a lute)

a
clochard,
a lay monk, a naysayer,

sleeps sprawled like a knight in effigy.

 

If he ever owned anything, he has lost it,

and having lost it doesn't want it back.

He's still owed soldier's pay for the conquest of Gaul—

but he got over that, it doesn't matter.

And they never paid him in the fifteenth century

for posing as the thief on Christ's left hand—

he has forgotten all about it, he's not waiting.

 

He earns his red wine

by trimming the neighborhood dogs.

He sleeps with the air of an inventor of dreams,

his thick beard swarming toward the sun.

 

The gray chimeras (to wit, bulldogryphons,

hellephants, hippopotoads, croakodilloes, rhinocerberuses,

behemammoths, and demonopods,

that omnibestial Gothic
allegro vivace
)

unpetrify

 

and examine him with a curiosity

they never turn on me or you,

prudent Peter,

zealous Michael,

enterprising Eve,

Barbara, Clare.

 

 

“
La Pologne? La Pologne?
Isn't it terribly cold there?” she asked, and then sighed with relief. So many countries have been turning up lately that the safest thing to talk about is climate.

“Madame,” I want to reply, “my people's poets do all their writing in mittens. I don't mean to imply that they never remove them; they do, indeed, if the moon is warm enough. In stanzas composed of raucous whooping, for only such can drown the windstorms' constant roar, they glorify the simple lives of our walrus herders. Our Classicists engrave their odes with inky icicles on trampled snowdrifts. The rest, our Decadents, bewail their fate with snowflakes instead of tears. He who wishes to drown himself must have an ax at hand to cut the ice. Oh, madame, dearest madame.”

That's what I mean to say. But I've forgotten the word for walrus in French. And I'm not sure of icicle and ax.

“
La Pologne? La Pologne?
Isn't it terribly cold there?”

“
Pas du tout,
” I answer icily.

 

 

Everything's mine but just on loan,

nothing for the memory to hold,

though mine as long as I look.

 

Memories come to mind like excavated statues

that have misplaced their heads.

 

From the town of Samokov, only rain

and more rain.

 

Paris from Louvre to fingernail

grows web-eyed by the moment.

 

Boulevard Saint-Martin: some stairs

leading into a fade-out.

 

Only a bridge and a half

from Leningrad of the bridges.

 

Poor Uppsala, reduced to a splinter

of its mighty cathedral.

 

Sofia's hapless dancer,

a form without a face.

 

Then separately, his face without eyes;

separately again, eyes with no pupils,

and, finally, the pupils of a cat.

 

A Caucasian eagle soars

above a reproduction of a canyon,

the fool's gold of the sun,

the phony stones.

 

Everything's mine but just on loan,

nothing for the memory to hold,

though mine as long as I look.

 

Inexhaustible, unembraceable,

but particular to the smallest fiber,