You Must Remember This. Michael Bazzett

heard the staccato

      footfalls of my brother

      and his curious gait.

      The door burst open

      with a gust of cold:

      A bus! he said. Huge

       as the sperm whale!

       The mirror of my soul

       is a crosstown bus!

      My father smiled,

       Good for you, Jeffrey!

      His face was frank

      as an open sail. Then

      he looked at me and

      mouthed these words:

       The steam that blows the whistle

      never turns the wheel.

      Now that I am a man,

      I can clearly recall

      how snow sifted sideways

      through the air, how

      I never had a brother,

      how my father yearned

      to be elsewhere, how

      I longed to board that

      crosstown bus and sit

      quiet in the weak light,

      using a stubby pencil

      to draw the curious

      members of my new

      family, smiling there

      on those paper napkins.

Soirée

      Your humor is deft and cutting

      my fingers off one by one,

      she said as we left the party.

      I started up the car and said:

      Every joke holds one blade inside

      the breast pocket of its coat

      to open things and liberate

      the world of unremembered light.

      This exchange took place without words.

      A snowbank leapt into the headlights.

      The car seemed to know the way home.

      Until that moment I had been waiting

      to put my mouth over her mouth

      and breathe the ferment of the evening.

      This might have led to touching

      the soft parts of our bodies together.

      Instead we fell asleep, tongues

      heavy in our mouths like fish.

When They Meet, They Can’t Help It

      His obsession is a cart drawn by muscled oxen

      over rain-softened roads. Salt marsh spreads evenly

      on either side. Reeds stir like fine hair in the breeze.

      The land seems flattened by the heat. The wheels

      crush white bits of shell into densely packed mud.

      Her obsession is a small animal gathering seed husks

      in tunnels beneath the snow. The owl listens for the

      dry scrape and scuttle. The bird blinks once as the

      animal stills. The images collide here, in this moment.

      The cart on the road is real. It exists in the resolute now,

      drawing sand toward a work site near Dakar, where the

      driver will sell it cheaply to make substandard cement.

      The owl and the small animal are real as well, moving

      through boreal forest in Siberia, they possess a reality

      of sinew and ligature, of worn tooth and cracked beak.

      Without these images, neither obsession could be seen.

      The man lives to deepen grooves. The woman offers

      motionless chill to mask her alertness. He is attracted

      to this stillness at the coffee shop, sensing the appetite

      through faint chemical signals that stir both arousal

      and fear—if pressed, he could name neither impulse.

      His persistence seems to her a steadiness that could

      calm. Conversation over coffee leads to a coupling

      neither can quite believe, a coupling in which they

      open like strange flowers. In the emptiness afterward,

      while the silence holds, he thinks of what they’ve done

      and is aroused once again. It seems that he will do this

      forever, in and out of years, until she is an old woman.

      She looks at the ceiling and wonders, What’s the sound

      skittering across the roof? A cloudburst? A raccoon?

      If either speaks, this will come to an end. These things

      are fragile. Yet just as he opens his mouth, an airliner

      thunders overhead. It cancels all sound and saves them.

Clockwatcher

      The night is not a hole

      to fill with your thoughts.

      It is not a sock to stuff

      deep in the gob of morning

      and hope the sun has

      soiled itself there on the couch

      where it collapsed after the gin.

      The sun can be so tiresome.

      The night is not a black dog

      snuffling around the muskrats.

      The night refuses to stumble

      through Byzantine circuits

      like loose electricity. The night

      has no limbs. It never stutters

      or grabs. It settles in like

      a headache: there before

      you know it then a pressing

      darkness stained with light

      and you wish you’d taken

      that handful of crumbling

      white pills before it came.

Atlas

      When they lead you into the room with the blind man

      and let him drag his hands across the landscape of your face

      so that you can smell his old skin and those yellow nails

      that have begun to curl like claws, you will stand straight

      and still and swallow your revulsion back into your throat

      because once he has