something essential about dreams, and: Love Poem, and: Together 1000 W, and: Preparations

Something essential about dreams

Love Poem

The little wooden horse no longer rocks. The garden gnomes have fallen facedown.

We met when the fruits were ripe, with hands folded like a fan.

My sad gaze passed by you, by your face, and invented a part of the sky, some hills, a herd of horses, and a shield of fog— so you won’t leave again,

my face remembered everything about desire and its violent perfume, fumbling in the darkness, in soil and roots.

The peacocks were sleeping as you waded the lazy-blood waters at dawn.

Phantoms dissipated, clanking chains on slippery rocks.

On the other shore, raindrops found shelter under the birds.

I welcomed you to my house with a crooked roof and wrapped you in a key.

Together 1000 W

  For Andrei Dósa

“However high they will raise it, they can’t raise it up enough for you,” I hushed while they adjusted the mic for you    to give a short lecture on Croatian poetry. You wanted to teach them about famous failures in astronautics— Gagarin was long gone, and Werner von Braun had been history for a long time, and I thought a little spaceman might drop from the sky, in a spiral racing toward us with arms clenching wonders made in China.

We puffed cigarettes on the scaffolding together. We stole ashtrays from the hotel together. We blabbered at the smart asses talking to us       about systems and combinations together. We charmed bored women in the beautiful city together. We unjammed their stubborn zippers together.       And they didn’t care to notice. We laced Facebook with anthrax together. We commiserated like a pair of bums together. We ate Bosnian meatballs, looking like we       knew nothing together. We smashed bright light bulbs, charring our jackets together. We made them notice us, green with envy, together. We took their money and ran off to the sea together. We didn’t mind that we each had a different mother tongue together. We searched for Punker Eddie together. We helped old ladies descend from the ceiling together. We gave them nougat and ointment…we helped them        the only way we knew how together. We saw Croatian cowboys, healthy, and revving       their engines next to a crucifix together. We found new platforms in the air and we passed        over markets and white-bulb terraces together. We dazzled them with our education, with our stunning charm You and I were two knives thrust in the grass together.        glimmering in the sun before the storm resumed.

Preparations

Then she told me for the first time that I write in a baffling way, that she does not understand and does not wish to understand something from my poems; she threw everything in my face with the humiliating slenderness of turning the skin of a young turkey inside out. In the courtyard of the clinic, interns and doctors, nurses and orderlies, the crippled and cancer stricken, all looked like mannequins forgotten for eighty years in an underground warehouse, sliding now, in their robes and ragged pajamas, back and forth with their nonsense. You could have guessed that a ball or a brutal exhibition was being prepared. She looked at me and burst into tears, then asked me to walk her to the gate, where an ageless man waited for her with a hatchet in his hand.