Untitled (you’ve died so many times…)

you’ve died so many times in your dreams

that surely you can manage it once while awake.

the soul abandons the body a moment beforehand,

rising over what used to be home,

the clumps of willow, the fishing schooner, the hot current

spirals as it carries you off,

it seems you are flying, a gnat stuck in glue,

your arms flung out—now they’re branching shoots

of glowing tubes.

now you are a fantastical being,

you’ve got sixteen eyes on your face,

upturned like a sunflower,

but there’s no one to see you,

the retriever, concussed and terrified,

managed to leap over the fence,

there’s a honeycomb of grainy light, and this noise, ringing.

bees, bees everywhere, your soles still brush

the roofs of the charred automobiles,

but it’s weird—there are no traces of soot,

and where there used to be legs, now there are

scissors of immobility.

stalks of black-green memories are seaweed

clinging to your face, while sticky clay

glues shut your mouth, the envelope

of nevermore.

you want to say this—about yourself, without yourself,

but pass through words like a ghost’s hand

through a bright-red can of coca-cola.

you are pressed to the thirteenth-floor balcony,

to the support that remains

after the rocket blast—what for?

that’s where she used to live, the second love

of your entire life, she—somnolent, big-eyed—

looked like a startled baby stork,

keep going, keep vanishing,

your back to the river, while the devil hasn’t yet crowed,

while the artillerist hasn’t finished his cigarette,

and the heavy, white sky is still crumbling—

the belly of a dolphin riddled by rockets,

tanks, dark outlines of enormous rooks flock

in the potato field by the river, speeding across the bridge,

passenger cars rumble, squealing

like little first-graders,

an angel holds a broken arm in his hands,

it’s the limb of a strange tree that used to be you

once, but memory drains faster than blood,

your unshaven cheek pressed to the stanchion,

you’re an eye that has swallowed the river and the factory across the river.

there’s no fear; there’s fear, terror, laughter,

you knew it all through your life and a bit longer.

there will be a time

all your pictures will vanish in fire

and come out on the far side of the ashes.