I Know Your Kind. William Brewer D.

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the frozen lake

      to hear the ice recite the Iliad.

      Not Hog Hill where Massey Energy

      dumped cinder, the gray waste

      between breaths, poisoned trees

      black like charred bones,

      where we burned cars while girls

      wrote our death dates on our palms

      with their tongues—even now,

      rain choking the throats of smokestacks,

      the river a vein of rust and trash.

      Have you ever seen so many cold faces

      slapped in the afternoon?

      So many voices screaming— Wake up.

      This is beyond desire.

      This is looking through a hole

      in the wall around heaven.

      How do you forget that—

      a world without ruin,

      a world that can’t be taken?

      Where once was faith,

      there are sirens: red lights spinning

      door to door, a record twenty-four

      in one day, all the bodies

      at the morgue filled with light.

      Who can stand another night

      stealing fistfuls of pills

      from our cancer-sick neighbors?

      Of the railcars crying,

      the timber trucks hauling away

      the history of a million birds?

      Pitiful? Maybe. But oblivion is all we have.

      And if we want to chop it down

      or dig it up or send it screaming

      into our hearts—it’s only now

      that our survival is an issue.

      Pin oaks arm wrestle over the house

      as barrel fires spark like stars in the valley.

      Day closes its jaws.

      I can hear my brother explaining

      how when Jonah woke inside the whale,

      he didn’t know where he was.

      I’m not saying this ends with a leviathan,

      but I’m not saying it doesn’t.

      Here it comes, rising through the floor,

      the voice that tells me I’m tired

      of the world, that pulls me down

      to its pale kingdom. Should

      someone find me, they’ll scream

      stay with me as they fish

      my tongue from my throat.

      Should I wake, they’ll ask me

      if I can tell them where I am.

       ICARUS IN OXYANA

      Talk to yourself. Console.

      Invoke an image of progress,

      failed. Two Vs of geese colliding.

      An X, exploding. Pretend

      not to worry about your father,

      or that he no longer worries for you. Something

      about angels, levitation, waking up

      with a belt around your arm,

      some blood. Tell yourself to listen,

      something about your mother,

      how she’s the best part of you.

      A memory of childhood

      equated to a bomb. It worries you.

      Which worries you. Think again

      about the geese. You have migrated through today

      through sleep. Someone on the porch

      who’s lost both his arms

      chain-smokes. Something about angels.

      Or geese. Or wings. He warns you

      about flying too high. Then helps.

      Something about chances, not knowing

      it was your second till your third

      never shows. Summer air. People

      blowing up things and celebrating.

      Something about pain

      as a private choir moving through you.

      A movement. A movement. A movement

      helps you up. To the porch. To the armless full

      of smoke. Where do you want to go?

      Nowhere? We have just enough

      to get there. And then some.

      And then, something. The geese

      piercing the sky. They rise, and then, they rise.

       HALFWAY HOUSE DIARY

      Somewhere at the bottom of the world a whale sings to itself,

      running through its temple of otherlight and salt.

      I have decided water has a god and its name is gravity.

      When it’s my turn to fix the gutters, I call myself

      Master СКАЧАТЬ