Comments for the Czarina, and: Some Human Incident

Comments for the Czarina

That night even the moon was living
in a puddle, a milky, watered down
version of nightscape, flapping
its wings on the margins of murk.

Someone somewhere was
speaking of Cary Grant
in a restaurant dressed in voodoo lilies:
Vietnamien to L'Orangerie.

"Well," said our river-pirate currently
writing a survival guide to small engines,
"It won't always be like buckshot
dropping in a bucket."

Meanwhile, a ways back
in the same line a man was facing
a long commute in colloquial Bulgarian,
this rocket scientist with a

Wall Street Focus to whom
someone was whispering, "Excuse me,
do you know the way
to the rickshaw dealership?"

then five minutes of weather
and the melody of maritime
tragedy on the radio as
the clever-jack-chronicler,

who believes there is no one thing
to which everything corresponds,
cried out in his sleep,
"forbici, forbici, forbici."

Some Human Incident

After the baby we knew more, knew
Better, saw Kafka in the grillwork. An end to the
Cockleshell days, madeleines, pearlstones,
Duded up nights on the town. Hello Un –
Easy, dream barriers, briars in the cornstarch.
Foxholes appeared in the garden.
Genies went jitterbug, even the
Hawthorn was frantic. 70% of our town was
Inflammable, the rest ready as tinder.
Just as the bloomfield was about to blow,
Ketchup catching on as a vegetable, the baby
Left, struck out for paradise on his own, with Teddy
Mounted in a bag on a stick.
Next, please, we shouted after him but felt empty.
Oh, the desserts were just: a hollow
Palazzo, eggshells on the loudspeaker,
Queer baby ghosts that hovered at the periphery.
Right was wrong ever after.
Still, we thought he might come back
To us. We kept his room going,
Underscored his name on the mailbox.
Virtually every night we ate his favorite foods –
Wiener schnitzel and sauerkraut. Eventually
X replaced Y. We became him. We were where he got to.
You wouldn't understand. We don't. There's
Zip in the literature and we've looked it up.