by Jana Prikryl
girls on Sunday after
noons to see the planes goes
forward not back in time,
all the time unearthing
one picture after an
other of the woman
and her smiles, her magnet
ism (though had it made
him her object how slight
its motive force would seem)
all the time it travels
time peeling images
it flies on to deter
mine will or won’t, that’s why
it needs seeing over
and incessantly for
ward laying pictures down
around the obstacle
of war, imagined
war, but every war’s first
of all imagined, made
imaginable, how
else make peace with losing
them, our own darting a
round this Sunday, to pause
in picturing it would
be unbearable
On
a beach you could reach
by water taxi they threw
this party, beach maybe
forty feet wide—
trucked in to show
in a granular way
how fine for folks
like us to settle down
by—and forty deep,
big plastic palm
trees propped like
cocktail umbrellas,
Pet Sounds booming
inside a chain
link fence, this or
that birthday, boy
I’d stopped seeing
for the boy in
L.A. brought a girl,
she shoulders this
tote bag I’ve got,
no beach for me
on planet earth,
open-and-shut.
Santo Stefano Rotondo
Come, walk this path
between flapping tarps
holding back on either side
construction sites
the way a bedsheet hides
from her her labor when
the scalpel’s in it, come along
behind one friend in front of another.
Looking back the path narrows
(memory a scarce resource)
and bends, takes on the gentle
curve of the earth as if in the space
of that city it were given your body
to feel for itself the four inches
up and four inches down
per mile the planet swells.
Come and look at the frescoes:
they pucker with little logs
each round end is red
with a little gray circle in the center:
on each horizon (belted
from sea to sea) the dim awakening
potential for something equally made
from ignorance to rise up
all of a sudden is forecast
and if to get to safety slowly,
laboriously, circumstances draw
the flip-book of the city unbuttoning
one building at a time until it stands
revealed in grasses, slaves, with little jugs’
worth, little necks
of red paint splashed among
the pastures and meadows
and symbolic birds, and dewdrops
everywhere red, then who am I
to call it unconstructive.
Stoic
You know
how what pain is
for is brains, how be
capable without a line on
pain and how be here for any-
thing incapably, first you must admit
that pain has a body and if it can be cut then
can be sewn up, prepared to spare you admission
to its gut and not going there helps you stomach every-
thing, in the long run exposed to more of it, or how else play
fair in capture the flag, a touch of the surface there then rush back
to your side and interviewed hugging the trophy you’d not ask they hear
the question sealed inside your version—it was hard and my own momentum
toward undoing kept me from it—though you’d want to ask, you’d be dying to know
Friend
Gentle sincerity the color of fruit,
exes troop by, a beauty pageant
There’s Kris in a Brazilian wax,
she topped my efforts collaging cards
and mixtapes (take so long to glue),
slightly on edge those two years in our
two-bedroom on the sports-bar side
of Gramercy, I think we both knew
I’d not be unlucky enough to
even the seesaw she couldn’t unsee
and I’d still now deny was unbending
at its own dignified pace between us—
Is it the city that lights each debut
so professionally and choreographs
each entrance a celebrity, alone
There’s Mel with a French manicure
(taking swipes) whose monologues
undid me, her fluency imparts this
almost physical feeling I’m reaching,
reaching to assist her in laying tarps
over the silence, any old hole we’d
come to and diverge around, if nothing
else I got so I could chart the New World
before journaling honestly told her
how to spare me that frantic feeling—
Or is friendship quite this
first class in every town and country
when supplies dwindle to zero
There’s me with the microblading,
continual surprise tattooed
over my eyes at finding I’m again
an object of that gesture, an adept
since birth I’d say at reading the letter
of her meaning all the way in and
bearing it, allowing it a bower
in my musculature, see when I bend
I too suffer my build as an offense
and want, want, want it to be different—
Anonymous
One has the more organized face, a bowtie
producing a wide dark rectangle, like a strip
of censored text, at her collar.
The other’s rounder, softer, and though both wear
half smiles of the same degree of satisfaction,
the other expresses contentment
more and thereby appears more resolute.
Oftener than family albums
I’ve taken down their faces, now
these faces float up with greater clarity
than faces I’ve known and that ease
of picturing confuses.
I must have known them well
but since misplaced
how they moved, which
more talkative, which I loved,
which preferred peaches and pears
just shy of ripe. Or is it that
their faces floating
always float up precisely in front
of what I happen to be thinking,
cover girls. No way their faces can be let
sit empty, must be always rented out.
Inwood
That quiet time before sire
ns
was a meadow of missed signals
except they weren’t missed,
they were extraneous—noise.
Corlear need not have blown his trumpet
when he did, by Stuy Town
where my then friend lived.
Had he not that lowlands paradise
of polyglots survived official neglect
and rolled its carpet out into the vast
scrub of the country. With the onset
of sirens I harbored
these very specific longings for the hills
of Manhattan, they were so strong
I couldn’t budge them into a line
of events like a package. So I’d think
what then, all overturned in subtle
ways, my then friend not enjoyed
parquet floors rent-stabilized with a girl
who ran a charity helping sick women
find gently worn couture clothes.
First they assemble out of scarves
a plausible figure of authority,
then they try to shine for it.
And studies show this to be crucial
for survival, all the more so
in the city. The appetite for that source
of light’s implicit in the thickening
of undergrowth: this is why
undergrowth’s so comfortable,
a relief, not a person
in the round, although my first time there
alone its stillness was enough
to breathe someone dangerous, a man
was tailing me. It’s thick with freedom
from the transparent striving
of the trees, so I kept going
even feeling I’d be cut down.
That’s how headlines are made
I thought and kept going knowing
this had been thought prior to many
headlines having been made.
We’d broken up and without planning it
I took the train to the northernmost stop,
walked to the last remaining hill
and walked its spiraling walks
up and down taking a new kind of careless
snapshot right and left, seeing
with sudden candor, which is
to unsee time. Distraught,
released into the nick between
before and after. The blank busy pictures
of nothing I took home then absorbed
a form of regret I carried on
past them, and grew heavy, so dense they sank
into one or another hard drive
it’s years since I’ve seen them.
I tack up their memory
as if they were a reservoir
I might dip into again, though how
I’d bring it up without blanching
and blunting I don’t know. It’s as if
my muteness were integral
to the turbulence that brings new objects
crashing on shore. And one day
it struck me, what if I did nothing
to gloss the blankness, the chalk sound
of effects undone or words fished
from their glistening? So much rather
stay mum. That’s how I gather
these keepsakes, a glacier strewing
drumlins behind her. The things
you’re not yet equipped to say will not,
later, find their voice but reenact
themselves in costumes of their own
devising, portray their original forms
while facing backwards to study
the way it was. You’ll be able to just
make out their backs and the backs
of their masquerades. And in that way
they shed the true development of time,
collate the then and then
into a stack of light, opaque glass brick
I like to think of as description,
dangerous brick. A sign that’s what
happened in your country is widening
doubt that it happened at all:
failing to put it into words
circulating, inducing the news,
its tissue starts to decompose
in indeterminate ways,
which can’t be done unless your mind
and every mind as it was then
does the same.
Lady
Wherever she goes the planes
of horizontals wave at her
their horizontal hands. The filth-
furry sills of restaurant windows, the increasingly
horizontal curves atop once
red hydrants, it goes without saying the passing
roofs of cabs and the little irregular ledges
on their handles, far from spick
and span call to her hands. They’re confident
she’s too discreet to use them as
the others do; her hands restore. And other men
and women when their shapes move
across not up or down, there
where they collect the motes that fill the air,
these surfaces she scans, no more than scans.
Is it out of habit or has habit been turned
and turned as on a spit
into an appetite?
Don’t say the horizontals mean
anything to her.
They simply wait for her where others don’t
like threats, but threats so ubiquitous
they’re comfortable
waiting, like friends early to rendezvous.
Garden
Because of what I seemed reduced to
and I’d expected more
I wore this blank
effect
to the reception
not discouraged, willing
and only mildly tired though the lights
were out again east of Madison
and three or four helicopters hovering high above the little park
She’d have congress
with him on a bench they said
I pictured her backside
nodding at the bushes as he sat
comfortably, increasingly comfortably
and he would never settle, said that up front
Amazed they got away with it but then forgot
when bombs blossomed vast
orange anemones near the end
of Clear and Present Danger I came vastly thanks
to him, my fly down and others in the audience
saw what I know not, and that was in a small town
A Shake Shack now carpets the little park
I climbed to a railroad apartment
long in all directions, known as an open-plan office
the lights were out anyway
to signify canapés,
at large but shouting
endless prayer to shrink from every person who spoke
to me,
transaction
Waves
The whitemaned seahorses, champing,
the steeds of Manannan stolen
here, nipping
and eager airs. He closed his eyes.
He closed his eyes to hear his boots.
I am getting on nicely in the dark.
No harm comes to him on that curving sand,
then first he sees one of her sisterhood
lug
ged me squealing into
modality of the. Ladies,
whither do you follow your eyes so fast?
They are coming, waves.
Bob
i.m. Robert Silvers (1929–2017)
I think he found relief,
a kind of carnival, only in the tunnels
he forced, as with his body, in the replies
to questions he’d shipped by overnight.
This also explains why he swam laps.
Master of the deferential, intricate
refusal, lifetime ban on anyone
once deemed faulty, whetting his wrath
on the failure to secure
a seat on the aisle for that night.
And then he says yes,
yes, with a naughty smile
accepting the lesser thing
and raving about it
because when he accepts it
it’s different.
Rubs out the sub’s query
and rewrites it in his hand, his pencil.
Pencils sharpened a fistful
at a time by some sub-sub.
Walks in and quietly, melodically
says to himself
Any little news or calls or things
today or no one gives a fuck?
He bares his teeth, enunciates, and bugs his eyes
to be charming—You’re all moving manuscripts
around my desk and I feel like Ingrid Bergman
in that film, what was it?
Gaslight!—and because he’s a tyrant
I dry my eyes while laughing.
It’s an uncomfortable fact (for
whom?) that those who went to certain schools
sooner found ways to resist him
or stop resisting.
The time it took me to see I’d never bring him
round to my view of metaphor’s telling.
And then I proceeded
to pledge thirty more years to his archive.
Please understand
in tribute to him
I mean that literally.
When every man of letters was toppling
I thought this gives him
never dreaming of that kind of thing
yet another eccentricity.
Did he have material of his own, I wondered
early on, as if originality were invention, as if it weren’t
some precision of knowledge and morality
applied to matters of substance, which among friends
we call taste.
Not that that excused my blinking
