Now dreaming through newfangled
medications, things move along
in ways you might not have imagined
(the time we clenched even after
the room went dark and sleep consumed)
and in ways you did not desire
(feeling each pluck of grass
prickling the back behind individual
motion) because life is sometimes
easier to figure out through coils
than straight-faced bored life.
So I've been editing.
Pandora on the Freeway
This is dreaming
of Pandora
on the freeway
riding a giant
box, made of gold,
glittering, and
inside, directly
beneath that
gilded box top,
are tiny scraps of
paper, rolled up
tight like how the
Chinese do it—
wind forces the
lid off, and the faded
scrolls dance beside
the vibrating Woman,
unleashing strings of
pitch-breaking
words, blankets
of scrolls fluttering
on down the
center lane,
seen and known
only through
rearview.
The scrolls’ words
form magically
atop each crack of
the dusted pale
current, and the
distracted will
never see these
sources of fortune,
flame or falter
under the roars
of their engines.
Only the hitchhiker,
sitting entranced,
is able to hear the
ripping paper.
Also, there have been some fresh happenings.
Dancing with Vltava
As it sways, the Charles Bridge is a gently-cropped vision
balancing snowflakes, umbrellas, stretched wrists
and yes you (too swaying forward to damp metal sheens
forgetting about those pickpockets so invisibly soft)
and yes these tourists (mass of bugs knifing like a plow
maybe causing your short fingers to snuggle my icy wrist
offing clumps of snow from skin to stretches of cobblestone)
are part of this scene of stone statues restricted with frostbite
. . . down, down into those frozen plates of ice that sparkle,
chucked rocks shatter our reflections, and then you start spinning,
fast as you can, twirling in the middle of some sunburst field,
then down, down you mimic an angel’s epileptic sputter, an
ecstasy over your mother’s front yard—just a frosted smash of weeds,
and the noon’s frozen phosphorescence picking eyelids apart,
pulling open a halo of color, forming my silhouette, all concrete . . .
Squint and you can make out Josefov, once a center of oppression,
but now a monster of rows, clean-slated apartment faces, capitalism
with its crowned whitewash center: Paris Street, where art is bravery,
where the designers hope the mosques will draw in crowds of coins:
no, that Jewish Quarter is lost in a blanket of thick white haze,
forcing imaginations to lead machinations from your bright mind,
our history as two beggars’ hands weaving folktales and mythologies.
. . . even after the rocks have spiraling, spasming images out
into the jagged ice edges, our eyes still notice below, where
four hands without mittens redden quickly, as spring is summer,
and winter is not far behind, locking competition to delusion:
but the best part is looking past our hands and finding out there
has always been melt here, there has always been a source of water.
The Aerospace Museum
I imagine intellectuals forming intimidating lines,
my eyes clamping shut so I can flee to past loves.
The overarching mental madnesses push me out,
but beyond the glass trolley horns blast me back in.
I feel like I am an ocean of lost balloons, trapped
beneath a ceiling, trying to escape, to burst:
I want to believe that this feeling will pass on, so
I can move my body past the door-guard, to the huge
gallery of traveler’s things, long needling things
that pierce, things that understand the sky’s sides,
whether way up there, or like the weather way down
here, in the land of scurrying sparse-haired creatures
who cannot escape their own damned weight, or
their fate, moving around like ants seen from a car
(these planes will fly far away, through galaxies,
or maybe they will shine as they are shot down
from the sky; loads of debris ready to swoosh
past, and in an interradial blast, we will look,
sending symbols, following the messenger’s way,
colored in the respect of red, in the silence of grey.)
Even with air spinning around me in this corridor,
it appears there's still dust to be touched after all.
