Flat Bay Collective

Tony Brinkley
Poet

From Gomorrah

At first with diffidence
and then insistence
a slight hunger for the food
you offer, and a reticence
of taste still satisfied
with thirst and wonder—

longing for water but at peace
with thirst, with a pleasure
that the taste of water moistening
desolations will displace—

the three guests resting—pausing, intent,
waiting for the meal their host prepares,
delaying destitutions. I am

at a loss. We pause. I think of salt.
I wonder. Later gold is turned into a powder.

Then Gomorrah bursts the temples.

• • •

Opening heavy curtains in a darkened room, my hands
and knees were crying. Mother wrapped me in wet sheets,

she kissed me and said, “Run.” The sheets surrounded
me with sails . . . the likeness of an energy for which

this is the leading wave—ignitions, midair, birds,
the flaming moisture, washed with glancing tongues—

settling in the glistening branches—while the gleaners’
eyes are calming—dawning, in anticipation cooling

turbulent aggressions, briefly calcuble,
holding to the distance their calamities.

• • •

Although my hands can barely
tremble, she says, “Run.” But
how am I to run when I can sail?

I barely remember—the hillsides
blossoming with laundry, sheets as sails,
the calm the strangers offer as compassion—

cooling—nearing rain-clouds,
blackening remainders—eager
swimming wrestling in air.

• • •

A gray squirrel like
an exposed heart.
Cold among sun-
flowers. Desolate

children climbing in the
laundry-flowering hills—
floating, the wind lifting
the particulates of cloth

like fluttering colors—and
the valley where the angels
are at work with iron brooms
—harrowing the ground—

calling the children down
like swallows into burning
houses on the sudden
clarities of air.

• • •

In Gomorrah your mother
protects you from angels,

the posts of her bed are
crocodile teeth. I teach

you the game of holding
your breath—breathe in,

you are gone—breathe
out, I am there. You

practice the magic that
hides in the dark and

hide in the sheets that
protect you from fire.

In Gomorrah your mother
protects you from angels.

 

From Stalin’s Eyes

Liquid Nights

Sometimes at night I wonder

have we the right to remain
silent?

Running to ex-people

by the back door?

I know the personal counts for nothing

crawling
inside someone’s mind

To feel him with their eyes
to feel them with his eyes

And maybe with their hands.
Wonderful

unyielding—my dear ones—day and night
without rising from his desk, unraveling

he is cutting all the threads.
I sign, you sign, and the rest

will sign with you. The
vigorous treatment is the “natural” one

(the quotation marks are his). Wonderful

and unyielding. My dear ones
the personal counts for nothing.

I know

Running to ex-people

an occasion has been cheapened. In the
end they all get what they deserve.

We’ll finish this off.

They are mistaken.

Maybe the phrase

Just slipped out.
Maybe. But

If it didn’t?

The time has not come for
Biographies.

The personal element is trivial and it is not worth dwelling on trivialities.

Plainly we were friends.

In the place I will build
it will be harder to go wrong.

On the other side of the barrier,
they will stand with bended knee.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

What tongue is perching
outside like a raven?

Near the ribs
the membranes
know.

Wet stones look at us—all eyes.
Dry stones close their eyes and wait.

(Maybe I was being too kind. On no account must we confuse the heroes and the actors. It is only an illusion, but its laws are dictated by life.)

From Boris Pasternak’s Zhivago Poems

Hamlet

The stir quiets. I appear on
stage. Leaning against an open
door, I catch a distant echo
that my century offers.

Through a thousand opera-glasses
night-muddle, aimed like a wasp-
sting, pins me on its axis. Abba,
Father, if it were
    possible to take this cup from me . . . .

I love Your stubborn plot.
I willingly act my role.
But a different act is playing
    now—
if this time I could exit . . . .

But the order of acts is allotted,
the destined end of the passage.
I alone, drowning among Pharisees
—the life I live is not a walk in
    the meadow.

The Wind

I have gone—it is finished—but you
    are living,
and the wind, grieving and pitying,
sways the house and forest—
not each tree on its own,
but all as one to the horizon—
rocked like sailing vessels
on the fluent surface of a tide-swell
—not from daring or from
meaningless, aimless furies,
but for this, that anguish and
dejection—for themselves and for
your sake—will influence and word
    your cradle song.

Poetry by Osip Mandelshtam

Tristia

I have studied the science of leaving
In night’s unbraided sorrows.
Oxen ruminate—the waiting lingers
To the final hour of the city’s vigil—
And I honor rituals from that other night—the rooster crowing.
Under the weight of a journey’s sorrow,
The tear-stained eyes were raised, they gazed into the distances,
And women’s grieving mingled with the muses’ singing.

At the sound of “leaving,” who can know
The separation that awaits us,
The promise in a rooster’s exclamations—
When fire lights the acropolis,
A new life dawns, an ox
Chews idly in his stall—
Why does the rooster, the new life’s crier,
Beat his wings, perched on a city’s walls?

And I require ordinary thread:
The shuttle twists; the spindle hums.
And look: like swansdown, how
Barefooted Delia flies toward us!
How bare the warp of our life is!
How meager its tongue’s bliss! All
Of this occurred before. All of it repeats. For us
It is a moment’s recognition that is sweet.

So let it be: a lucid figure,
Lying across a clean, clay saucer,
Like the stretched pelt of a squirrel.
A girl leans over the wax and gazes.
Divining Erebus is not our labor—
For women wax, bronze for
Us—a dice-roll in battle—
But women die foretelling fortunes.

The Concert at the Station

Breathing is forbidden, heaven teems
With worms—and not a star to testify—
But God sees, there is music overhead,
The station shivers, the Aonides are singing.
Once again, the violins—their air fused—merging
With explosions of the locomotives’ whistles.

An enormous park. A station’s ball of glass.
Once more the iron world twists, bound in a spell.
Toward a nebulous elysium—to a feast of sound—
The festive carriage sweeps away.
The peacock skrieks, the grand-piano thunders—
I am late. Afraid. This is a dream.

I enter the glass forest of the station, penetrate
The violin’s arrangement in confusion, tears, in turbulence.
Shy and savage, the night chorus’s wild opening,
And the smell of roses in decaying seed-beds
Where a dear, familiar shadow spent the nights
Beneath the glass sky, in the wandering crowds.

And I imagine that the iron world is shivering
Like a beggar in the music and the foam.
I lean against the passages of glass.
From violin bows the hot steam breathes and blinds the eyes.
Where are you going? Here, at the funeral
Of a kind-hearted shadow, for us, for the last time, music rises.

From the Voronezh Notebook

And it was here in heaven that I lost my way—
    what could I do?—you
Who are dear to heaven, will you tell me!
Dante’s nine circles—each an athlete’s discuss:
But it was easier in the past for you to chime—
To choke, to blacken, to turn blue . . .

If not yesterday’s—superfluous—if I do not exist
    in vain—
You, who stand over me—
If it is you who pour the wine and bear the cup—
Give me the strength—not empty foam—
To toast the whirling tower—
Hand to hand—the wild azure.

The dovecotes—darknesses—the starlings’ houses—
Blackness—patterns of the bluest shades,
The vernal ice, sky ice, spring ice,
The clouds—warriors of fascination—Quiet!
They are leading a storm-cloud with a bridle.

• • •

I raise this greenness to my lips—this oath,
This sticky promise of the leaves,
This treacherous earth:
Mother of snowdrops, maples, oaks.

See, how I grow blind, how I grow stronger,
Yielding to quiet roots—
And is it too magnificent an excellence—
The pool, the eyes, thundering in the park?

And frogs like mercury orbs,
Their voices coupling in a sphere.
The twigs turn into limbs—boughs rods.
And milky fictions steam.