Walter Pavlich 1993
SARAJEVO BEAR
The last animal
in the Sarajevo Zoo
a bear
died of starvation
because the leaves
had fallen
from the trees
because
the air was
getting colder
so the snipers
could more easily see
the few remaining people
who were trying to
feed it.
To Marilyn Monroe Whose Favorite Color Was White
by Madeline Defrees
When you wriggled onto the silver screen, Marilyn–
honey blonde or platinum–I was a nun. I
found you too late in your satin sleep. Now, three
decades past, I grieve from that ancient
cloister, the alabaster body, my beautiful buried
sister. Convent movies had to be clean as
bleach. Even your titles
went wrong: All About Eve.
The Seven Year Itch. The Asphalt Jungle.
Some Like It Hot. How to Marry a Millionaire.
Sex was a bullet I dodged, that shot on the subway
grate! Skirts lifted to seventh
heaven, you scared me all right, as you scared your
jealous husband.
Yet Joe was your friend in the end
as I hope to be. Bride at sixteen like you, given
another name, I was cast with the world’s invisible
millionaire. We didn’t know who we were,
Norma Jeane, too young to care. Even now I imagine
you posed–a pin-up everywhere woman who did it
for 50 dollars. I resent
the photographer smirking
away with the loot: the generous milky
breasts and bottom, pout of a wounded child. Too bad
the bad life fate guaranteed you:
dashing absent father, unmarried mother who
had to be locked away. Say cheese, Marilyn. Open
those pearly gates,
come back with me to my former
marmoreal splendor: the lily-pad I escaped
that was never my passion. Ivory walls, skulls in
our heads all day. Snowy sheets and colorless
towels. Chaste linens framing the parchment faces.
It was color I missed most of all,
white sister. I hated the pallor. I want you to play
this part over. I want to barge in as your crazy
mother stealing the scene: capsules
washed down the drain in a lethal river. The beauty
startled awake in the last act from that
white sleep history promised.
This Morning
by Charles Simic
Enter without knocking, hard-working ant.
I’m just sitting here mulling over
What to do this dark, overcast day?
It was a night of the radio turned down low,
Fitful sleep, vague, troubling dreams.
I woke up lovesick and confused.
I thought I heard Estella in the garden singing
And some bird answering her,
But it was the rain. Dark tree tops swaying
And whispering. “Come to me my desire,”
I said. And she came to me by and by,
Her breath smelling of mint, her tongue
Wetting my cheek, and then she vanished.
Slowly day came, a gray streak of daylight
To bathe my hands and face in.
Hours passed, and then you crawled
Under the door, and stopped before me.
You visit the same tailors the mourners do,
Mr. Ant. I like the silence between us,
The quiet–that holy state even the rain
Knows about. Listen to her begin to fall,
As if with eyes closed,
Muting each drop in her wild-beating heart.
ONE ART
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
HER Grace is all she has,
And that, so vast displays,
One Art, to recognize, must be,
Another Art to praise.
THE BARN
The right way
to approach
the broad side
of a barn
is with one eye
closed
and both hands
in your pockets
then start
whistling
to let it know
you’re coming
—Michael Rothenberg
FIRST OFFENSE
i barely remember the faces
of the officers just a warm,
wet breeze tugging the shirt
against my sweaty body
the red & blue lights flashing
off the buildings around us
while i’m patted down before
walking the curb and counting
backwards from 90 to 69
i was 16 never drove through
the city by myself was following
my mom returning a rental
i tried to tell them this and how
we lost each other in traffic, but
they appeared clueless as if
i spoke some alien tongue
you have any narcotics
on you, they asked, have
you been drinking?
i’ve never smoked reefer and still
hate the taste of beer, my dad will
tell you this laughing about the time
i picked up his can of coke and
choked on the rum he’d mixed in
or how under interrogation
he found out my brother’d been
drinking his Hennessey
step out of the vehicle!
it was evening a kid pointed
out the window of his parents’
car at a red light
and i was once that child, watching
other young brothas handcuffed,
sitting on the curb while their trunks
and backseats were searched
my mind constructing
a series of scenarios for
how they got themselves
into that situation
wondering at 10, why
those guys didn’t like the
friendly police, who were
just doing their jobs
If You Forget Me
I want you to know
one thing.
You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.
Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.
If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.
If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.
But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
CXVI.
LET me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Limbic
It was not only me, my
life marred by the shot
as he found all of himself
and ended it, startling the grouse.
A shot that registered
in the wild eyelid’s snapshot,
in the limbic jolt, the rapid shift and settlement
— one movement — further into camouflage.
The woman, too, with a toothache
trying to walk it off
stopped near the firehall,
and the kickback sound of it
here and there in the pines
moved in her ear and became her,
the fog or dusk already beginning
their memories of him,
the one just now fallen
from a shape in them.
We react.
My lover will open the book and find himself
front and center in a fame of sonnets,
how will he stand it? what will bolt or stir?
The blood begins.
It stains the wooden picnic table’s bench.
And which insect or animal
in the cold was drawn to it,
the night moving itself on,
making room for another.
The heron pulled its neck in,
labored skyward.
The deer looked up as deer will do.
