Blossom
You can change
with your last breath
and you can change
with your last breath
writes Bertolt Brecht
and in the book of change
you turn the page and turn
the page until there you are
a bus a train a short walk
into your life but what
you feel is that you might be
dying as whatever it is
that desires in you
that hopes that moves
has slid the brightness up
on your morning window
a cloud down on your mind.
With a whistle
only you can hear
an invisible
leash and collar
fit for your neck a label
for your name you are
its dog now up too early
now somehow on a run.
A run?—you who hates
to run asks—me?
Feet beneath you
resembling yours
and ouch that stings
the dribbling sweat
in the eyes it is
everywhere you can
barely see as the sun
paints the sidewalk’s
bright flicker-book
with your slap
-stick figure and gait. You
the bobble-head the dark
disc the traversing rock
of the Pulaski’s
endless arc. Up
and back.
Up and back.
Brain me brain you ask
your brain. Fall
on me building you beg
one passing building
tall and made of glass.
But pausing
at the top
after a few laps
to catch your breath
you gaze
over the railing
at the light wrinkling
the water below
and what you see has nothing
to do with you. A beauty
strange
as the previous feeling is
irretrievable. A bit
of litter drifting downriver.
Snatch of white
against a tilt blue-green.
It’s a good
few minutes between
the relief you feel
from the rack you felt
and a new note
of anxious anticipation.
You are a turnstile after all.
And what’s answered your prayers
was perhaps only half-listening:
having doused
the flame you were
but left like a cigarette
in a sleeping hand
this ember burning.
As when Zeus
slides his god-eyes from Hector’s
beveled nipples
to admire the mare
-milkers of those distant
horse-groomed hills and many
of the wrong army die
—even the gods who turn
attentively
from something else
turn away. Which is to say
the gods are terrible
at what only they can do.
These errors we call ways
the ways we attribute to error
and other gods a wheel
from dim to bright orange pain.
But the olive trees
blossomed. Therefore
the olive trees
blossomed. Nevertheless
the olive trees
blossomed.
Delicate clusters
of cream-white flowers.
And so you make
like a blossom and turn the page.
Portraits
1
As if bygone and therefore all-the-more.
As in pluperfect, as in had.
As if swivel-headed and slipping
between the colored flags of traffic—purloined
yet intermittent—as a figure is
inside a kineograph, cleaved to a few skipping particulars.
2
As between the body
and the mind beneath it
is a kind of gossip: as much saying
as gainsaid, as if unsaid:
an erasure or Sous rature
( ) a beveled surface.
3
No cameras, she raises her hand
as if her hand withheld the image, she looks…
As if to say I am not her face
her eyes do not.
The image a carefully tied knot of
not, not, not.
4
An inflection of look: a rupture;
the bent reflection, split
as on storefronts, car windows, stilled
then silt-washed—one moment into the next
a pre-chorus:
Of, of, of.
5
As a person is what can’t be
in one vision, of course, you are
—or were—in pieces, even the edges
have edges. You turn
I turn—as at a waltz—I orbit you
orbit me.
Grayson Wolf is a graduate of Hunter College’s MFA program. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Four Way Review, Diagram, Prelude, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn.