You Must Remember This

© 2014, Text by Michael Bazzett

© 2014, Cover photograph by Alec Soth (Magnum Photos)

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.

(800) 520-6455

www.milkweed.org

Published 2014 by Milkweed Editions

Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker

Cover photograph by Alec Soth (Magnum Photos)

Author photo by Leslie Bazzett

14 15 16 17 18
   
5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Bush Foundation; the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit
www.milkweed.org
.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bazzett, Michael.

   
[Poems. Selections]

   
You must remember this / Michael Bazzett. -- First edition.

pages cm

   
Includes bibliographical references and index.

   
ISBN 978-1-57131-930-2 (ebook) I. Title.

   
PS3602.A999A6 2014

   
811›.6--dc23

2014019175

Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world's endangered forests and conserve natural resources.
You Must Remember This
was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.

For Leslie

After Machado

I

In Vladivostok

Cyclops

The Field Beyond the Wall

Memory

Soirée

When They Meet, They Can't Help It

Clockwatcher

Atlas

The Difficulty of Holding Time

The Same Bones

Some Party

The Building

The Sinclair Gift Emporium

Rather Than Read Another Word

The Last Expedition

Holder Strand

II

Oil and Ash

Look, he said, and pointed

Aria

from
A Natural History of Silence

Unspoken

From Chaos

What Might

September Picnic

Interrogation

Lions

A Woman Stands in a Field

The Crisis

Elpenor

Look, Overlook

III

The Dark Thing

The Book of _______________

Nuns

The Shop Across the Street

The People Who Came Afterward

The Professional

Imperfection

The Horse

Now Here, Nowhere

In the Pasture Corner

How It Survived for a While

The School

The Orangutan

Manhood

Foretold

Binary

Recollection

The Last Time I Saw God

After Machado

Standing by the water

I remembered

the delicate and confused

dream I had last night

it was bruised

even in the remembering

so these words

can only glance

sidelong at the beehive

that replaced my heart

with all that pulsing

making honey from the loss.

I

In Vladivostok

The woman in the dream

said be careful with your cock

and I suddenly knew

in the way one knows in dreams

that my cock had somehow become

a lever that might detonate

a string of bombs riddling the city

in the way blood clots might lace

a body in its final days.

When I realized I was holding

a rooster, I did not exactly

know what to say. Perhaps

I smiled. I don't know.

There was no mirror

and I've never been able

to see myself in dreams.

Cyclops

The story is such a story we don't always stop to think

about what it was like to be there: that cavern floor

packed with pungent dung, dark as the inner bowels

of an animal when that slab dropped into place: how

utterly it sucked to hear the oaf stirring in his stupor

made uneasy by wine mixing with the bolted flesh

of good friends dispatched while we watched—

it was just a flat-out bad deal for everyone involved.

Polyphemus messed with no one: a law unto himself

there in the hinterland eating goat cheese by the ton

and Odysseus brimming full of the sauce of himself

after out-clevering all Ilium by nestling in the stallion.

He'd had plenty of time to think there in that hollow

belly smelling of fear and fresh sawdust holding his

piss in one endless clench counting droplets of sweat

rivering cold over his ribs and under his breastplate.

And now here he is again groping for his sharpened

pole in pitch dark using one appetite to feed another.

He lays the point in the drowsing embers and jostles

it enough that the cave appears in a blood-warm glow.

You probably know the rest—plunging the blackened

tip through the eyelid, the crackling hiss as the eyeball

burst, the geyser that shot from the socket—then huge

hideous blind rage: it was easy to get inside, he thought,

the real trick comes in the getting out: words that might

land differently if you are not clinging to the fetid locks

under a ram, knees pinning its rib cage, your hips held

high as it drags you slowly into the chill morning air.

Maybe then you'd feel the warmth of Polyphemus's

wounded breath, washing across three thousand years

as he crouches above you, stroking the woolly backbone,

inquiring why this particular one lags so far behind?

The Field Beyond the Wall

We walk to the edge of town: there

just beyond the wall we see clouds

of crows and ravens, also buzzards

teetering down to pick apart the flesh

that peeks from every flapping shirttail.

See that belly pale as risen dough?