The Poem She Didn't Write and Other Poems. Olena Kalytiak Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ Threshold

        Note(s)

        About the Author

        Also by Olena Kalytiak Davis

        Acknowledgments

        Copyright

        Special Thanks

1

Summer Fiction

      My fancies fluttered round the same images

      like martins round a bell tower at dawn.

      I checked my e-mails, then, I checked them again:

      lariat sweep and stallion glow.

      Some one hour’s experience for which we

      stubbornly subornatively return:

      a dalliance at an execution.

      Everything reduced to occasion

      but the dailiness of my great Slavic beauty,

      unwitnessed, being passed on and through. But

      green after green after green!

      Summer like summer like summer!

      Fat, like Tolstoy’s—

      inside the house and out, fat!

      Gathering raspberries in a bikini (chto takoe?)

      as if the will of everyman were free!

      The great Sky over Austerlitz.

      The old Oak near Otradnoe.

      The Hut at Mytishchi.

      The Platform at Astapovo Station.

      In the Backyard in a Billabong Bikini.

      Each day you did not see me was something

      you lost, like, at cards.

After Grass and Long Knives

      Suspect enthusiasm—

      having eaten pins before—

      but that’s what keeps one

      quiet, that’s what makes one

      stay. Empty is just the first

      temporal name

      after something smaller sat there is gone.

      Then that space

      regains its height and wild.

      Let let lovers be

      light thoughts, just touch

      remembered in some not unkind way.

      It was all fine.

      It was all right.

      And now what’s next is

      clerestory:

      wait become place—and not a cowardly one—

      like in some great house made of purest plank,

      place to pause, place to be welcomed.

The Lyric “I” Drives to Pick Up Her Children from School: A Poem in the Postconfessional Mode

      “i” has not found, started, finished “i’s” morning poem,

      the poem “i” was writing about “i” having sex with the man “i” left her husband for

      the night before or maybe just this morning.

      a sex poem, so to speak, so to say, so as to lay...

      a foundation for...

      what????????

       SEX

       i lost my sex/poem!

       how did it go?

       i know it was called

       SEX

       something about my bosky acres,

       my unshrubb’d down

       ’bout all being tight and yare

       (bring in tiresias?)

       did you say soothe?

       tiresias, who lies fucking more?

       whoops.

       who likes fucking more?

       (“bring in // the old thought // [allen grossman doing yeats]

       that life prepares us for // what never happens”)

      today (the color of) my sex

       was lavender then yellow

       gold then muted mossy grey and green

       i bid my lover

       lower

       i bid my lover shhhhhhh

       i bid my lover

       linger

       i bid my

       lover, go

       lover, go!

       (see!)

       i bid my lover stay

       away

      “i” СКАЧАТЬ