in Minnesota where we lived,
in the state of water mirroring the sky.
But first, Hasan, because of you,
a thousand threads of light
inside the darkness of a little box
preserved this image of her face.
After the Snow Squall
When the crescent
hung in the clear
with Mars and Venus
over the frozen lake,
the dean
in the parking lot
could see
that the darker region
shone from a shimmer
of noon waves
on the Pacific,
so that the lunar lakes
and seas appeared
as brightly Earth-lit
as she had ever seen them,
and she wondered
how she would look
from there,
from the Marsh of Decay
at lunar midnight,
here on the just-past-full
Earth where the edge
had been shaven
into the darkness.
Olm
Proteus anguinus
Salamanders used to live in fire,
but these live underwater, underground,
in bone-cold darkness without air, some of them
for more than a hundred years. They look like snakes
with feet and human skin, the pale snake’s head
without a face, inane, all baby pink
and slippery: no eyes that you can see,
no ears, no nose, no mouth, or almost none…
gills at the neck, branching on either side,
blood red, like lungs turned inside out. The first
Slovenians who saw these wriggling, flushed
into the light by heavy rains, considered them
human fish. Such human fish, they reasoned,
with such winglike gills, they must have been
the spawn of dragons. Near the olm the earliest
vampire lived, a peasant by the name of Jure
Grando, Big George. He rose from the grave
at night to find his widow, whom he raped
while smiling, she said, from the effort
to draw breath. The neighbors wanted to drive
a stake into his heart, and they tried hawthorn,
which is a hard wood from an enchanted tree
blossoming at the mouth of the cave
into the other world, but hawthorn would not
pierce Big George’s heart. The village priest
reminded the corpse, where it lay smiling still
after they dug it up, that Jesus did not suffer
on the cross to make that ghoulish smile
complacent, and a man named Stipan (Steve)
stepped forward, saw in hand. He sawed off
George’s head while everybody watched the coffin
fill with blood. The first book to describe this
was the first to describe the olm as well,
The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola, Nuremberg,
1689. When prey is scarce, the olm chillaxes
sometimes, motionless for ten years, to wait.
His heftier cousin in the subterranean lakes
of Central Mexico is called the water monster,
or axolotl…monster, here, in the older sense
of cosmic omen, a creature which the indigenous
people find, though near extinction, tasty.
Early in the Christian Empire
Constantine had his first son, commander
of fleets and legions, heir presumptive,
put to death by hanging. Also the empress,
not much older than her stepson, he had
choked by steam in an overheated bath.
This Constantine deemed merciful.
His sons by her he placed years later,
all three, on imperial thrones. Soon
they murdered their most eminent kin.
In a few years the eldest brother fell
in a war to kill the youngest. Then, the death
of the youngest, dragged from hiding
in a church by men supposedly his own
and butchered, left only the one most feared.
Half his army died in the deadliest battle
ever fought by Rome, while he hid nearby:
Church historians have him rapt in prayer.
On his deathbed in a fever, having murdered
the next-to-last of his cousins, he saw,
finally, he was to be succeeded by the last.
The Featherbed
in the presidential suite
was the wettest we’ve ever seen
from the standpoint of pee.
Copernicus
After he took his priestly vow, my uncle proposed,
they say, to the rector’s daughter. She bore his son,
in any case, and married another man. Later
my uncle had me take my vow. Men of the cloth
elected him Prince-Bishop. His son was mayor.
I was a canon for life, and his physician. In my study
at the episcopal palace I translated from Greek
a book of poems in praise of moral truth,
and of the prostitutes and beauties of Byzantium.
I dedicated these to him. At forty I moved
from the palace into the tower of a cathedral
in a fishing village. There, observing the heavens
when I could, I managed coin and property for the state.
My housekeeper when I was old was banished
by my onetime friend, the new Prince-Bishop,
who alleged that she was more to me than I would say.
Devotion, meanwhile, to the loving mind of God
made unacceptable the nest of calibrated rings
with Earth at the center and a tiny Sun in orbit.
This, the science of a thousand years, I took
in hand, to measure by its rule my thought,
to set aside the old, ungainly universe, and leave
God’s body true to its own motion naked.
We Could Say Oỷρανóς
Whoever thinks that urinous
has canceled the pun in your anus
needs a clue: with oo from clue
and awss from sauce we could
say oor-a-NAWSS. Homer
said that, and he did not need to see
to call a god by name. Those
who could see Ouranos back then
saw only a speck. Nobody knew
the speck was a planet. Nobody
knew what planets were.
Ouranos was a blue-green orb
spun backwards on its side
with an aurora at its belt and moons
and rings and a magnetic field
warped every which way. Winds blow
stronger there than storms that upend
double-wides in Kansas. Once in a while
a meteor big as I am, older maybe
than the Moon, sails into a wind
like that, and burns, and flashes,
oblivious, under a cloud of ice.
Sea Cave
Beyond the mouth of a stairwell
they may find under the sweep
of their dive lights blue crab
and American lobster, swimming
sideways, swimming backwards,
walking the platform where I walked
among the millions brought and left
and carried away aboard the IRT.
Catullus, Carmen III
Mourn, O gods of love and mortal lovers.
Mourn. My girlfriend’s sparrow, apple
of her eye, is dead, the one she dandled
in her lap, and let hop here and there
with little chirps of joy, sweet thing—now
gone that dark way none comes home.
For this I curse you, dark one, swallower
of beauty: for the dark deed which has made
my girl’s eyes red with weeping.
Catullus, Carmen VIII
Enough, Catullus! No more pleading!
What you thought
