Название | Match |
---|---|
Автор произведения | Helen Guri |
Жанр | Зарубежные стихи |
Серия | |
Издательство | Зарубежные стихи |
Год выпуска | 0 |
isbn | 9781770562820 |
My lines grow more shameless with time,
I’m the proverbial bulldozer.
Tell me, do you come here
to bathe in pure Gewürztraminer,
and, days later, show the tub ring to your mother?
Mine’s buried three leagues upstream
from the one we’re in now.
You seem a little out of it too –
but by this age, let’s be honest,
we’ve both swallowed villages.
You’d think I’d stop apologizing
and level the field.
Sure, I agree it could never work anyway,
what with your absence of interest
in my bronto-thesaurus, the brass thumbtacks
of my private whirlpool.
The myth of our obsolescence is hardening.
There may not even be time enough
to fling rotini between the bucktoothed canyons,
melt lettuce to lace negligee,
and depart like racing slugs
from each other’s cracked lips.
And I just remembered my mortal fear
of addressing the opposite sex –
it has to do with my aversion
to upslopes, my latent acne of the soul.
I’ll be off now to my hole under the hill.
But if it’s any consolation, I’ll treasure
the might as well you seem to cough to your palm as I go. Seismographs will sense how I scorch all the way home on my own steam at the very idea.
NATURE MORTE
All breeze stalls mid-cough,
so the fumes of coffee
floss the room, and the plume
of Greta’s voice on the phone
steadies like a feather.
I know her voice is the shape of a wishbone
thanks to a third person
who lay still as grapes in a bowl
while intrepid physicians mapped
a diagram of chords
in what could have been anyone’s gorge.
SLIP-UPS
And Brian drops his full mug of coffee from a height:
Shit-whoops-damn! Hot white splinters in a stimulant tsunami.
But he doesn’t really mind –
his bending a chance to ogle Greta’s ankles,
scooting toward him like brooms.
She kneels to read the inkblots
on his jeans, while he gleans advice on their removal.
Everyone agrees it’s no big deal.
The incident bleeds into the ledger
of bloopers, office gossip,
which runs on tit-for-tat to infinity:
Last week Greta made out, as by accident,
with a pucker not her husband’s,
and Brian plucked a nylon string itch
with the publisher’s daughter.
(It was her funnel-shaped breasts.
Alcoves, we are meant to imagine,
like a lick of Manchego cheese.)
But something funny is happening to the puddle on the floor.
Like a dropped object returned to its pocket,
or a skunk turning to light at the spine as it streaks
across lawn, the dark liquid vanishes,
resets to an invisible web of tripwires throughout the room.
I keep very still, hold my place
like something nearly caught by spiders,
or like the would-be thief
of a large and opulent piece of art.
REVISION
Let me be perfectly clear.
It is not a triangle I mean but
three dots.
Rash,
Orion’s belt…
Not
love but inflammation.
Wasp sting.
Constellation.
WALLFLOWER
Near the dissolving edge of the garden party,
a tulip dives up slowly
from below ground, against gravity.
It’s like a little-watched sporting event on rewind
at a bar no one goes to, those pink-tinged feet
a single bullet bound for heaven
while the whole remainder of the universe swims on,
undisturbed, in its habitual direction.
Now someone presses ‘pause.’
Stuck upside-down, a foot shy
of solid ground and wearing nothing
but the wind’s leotard,
the tulip must turn her feet into a head,
her mind into toes.
She begins by rooting her fingers
under the heavy metal cabinet of the earth.
Her torso is as spare as the twine between
two tin cans. Now the other end is talking,
or trying to. Listen, and you might barely hear
the arches of her feet
rehearse the embouchures of speech
surreptitiously to the air.
You are right to be suspicious.
By the time her eyesight rights itself,
she’ll be a periscope spying for the underground.
She’s building a subterranean fortress
lit by multiplying bulbs and
powered solely by the stationary cyclone
of her mental gymnastics.
The breeze is her own personal brand
of highly flammable hairspray.
She’s shrewdly packed her appetite
in one of those green tortoiseshell valises.
When the party goes shits-up, her getaway
car will come on tiptoe.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную