Four Reincarnations. Max Ritvo

2

      1  For Crow

      2  To Randal, Crow-Stealer, Lord of the Greenhouse

      3  Sky-Sex Dreams of Randal

      4  Stalking My Ex-Girlfriend in a Pasture

      5  Mommy Harangues Poor Randal

      6  Lyric Complicity for One

       3

      1  Poem About My Wife Being Perfect and Me Being Afraid

      2  When I Criticize You, I’m Just Trying to Criticize the Universe

      3  Poem in Which My Shrink Is a Little Boy

      4  Radiation in New Jersey, Convalescence in New York

      5  Poem Set in the Day and in the Night

      6  Poem to My Dog, Monday, on Night I Accidentally Ate Meat

      7  Troy

      8  Heaven Is Us Being a Flower Together

      9  Afternoon

       4

      1  Second Dream

      2  Plush Bunny

      3  Crow Says Goodbye

      4  Appeal to My First Love

      5  The Big Loser

      6  The Vacuum Planet of the Pee Pee Priestess

      7  The Blimp

      8  The End

      9  Touching the Floor

      10  Zyprexa, the Snow Pills

      11  Snow Angels

      12  The Hanging Gardens

      13  Universe Where We Weren’t Artists

        Acknowledgments

1

LIVING IT UP

      The bed is on fire, and are you laughing?

      You leave the bed

      and leave me without thought.

      The springs want to embrace each other

      but they’re afraid if they break

      their spiral, they will never

      be able to hold anyone.

      I wish you would let me know

      how difficult it is to love me.

      Then I would know you love me

      beneath all that difficulty.

      You are tending not only to me, you tell me,

      but to your other child—the air,

      and air puts his feet in my slippers,

      and air scrubs his teeth on my brush,

      and we must learn to share a bed,

      we must learn to share a body.

      The money is running out.

      We will have to split one needle

      this winter—one end for me,

      one end for air.

THE CURVE

      Something, call it X, wanted a body

      so it made our bodies.

      But our bodies weren’t right for it—

      gum around the bones,

      a rash of gold or black,

      eyes like blisters

      leaking fondness.

      *

      X realized all animal bodies were like this, so it made language.

      *

      Language forced X into the body

      like carbonation into a soda.

      When I hear the word rock,

      a translucent lump

      shimmers in front of the world.

      To its right, a piece of glass cuts a clear finger,

      and to its left, there pulses a rocky, low, cold crust.

      *

      Though the images

      vary exhaustingly and troublingly,

      I always remember

      the spoke of earth

      cutting into the ocean

      we saw from above, on a bicycle ride,

      the sheen of the bicycles

      spreading over the earth,

      distinct from the ocean’s sheen.

      The sheens alarmingly similar to one another

      to be so close together—like two bodies making love.

      *

      We imagine a vertical meadow

      complicated into our world needlessly

      but complication is all X ever wanted for us.

      We misunderstand purity. This is purity.

      *

      I am your lover and X’s.

      I am too good a lover

      to ever be bored:

      Skinny, hairy-chested,

      made of pellets of rice,

      cheeping in a way that’s

      endearing and inappropriate,

      confused, surprised at the confusion,

      surprised at the surprise,

      and so on, very tiringly, so on.

THE SENSES

      Everything feels so good to me:

      my wool hat,

      the cocoon of dryness in my throat.

      The sound of burning vegetables

      is like a quiet, clean man folding sheets.

      But I keep having thoughts—

      this thought always holding at bay the next thought

      until it sours into yet

      another picture of dissatisfaction

      that loves to be thought,

      another pear, ugly

      as the head

      of a man who is thinking.

      I thought my next thought would be a vision of my suffering;

      I thought I would understand the yellow lightning in a painted storm—

      the crucial way it disappears

      when I imagine myself flung

      headlong into the painting.