Europe’s Gate

A red boat sailed on muddy grass
on the bald lawn between the checkpoint
and the rusty dumpster, two mismatched oars
crossed X-wise by the gate.
It rained flags on this side and ropes on the other.
One bird squealed in and out of the blue
mist depositing droppings on your hat
as you were about to step across the border.
A trapped flag clapped
about its metal pole, then flipped violently
like a gunshot, because that’s what flags
do under rain. You looked back,
neither turning into a salt pillar,
nor hearing the Minotaur in the maze
behind your back, where a customs officer
struggled with a pump’s unruly hose
that writhed over whatever sewers gush with
filling the air with blessings of manure.
And while the officer twining with his hose
lost, no hell broke loose.

Foreword

Snow’s first edition, copious and clean:
critics all beat a crosstown swift retreat.
Shadows abuse their chance and sing complaint
of dwindled profit since the reign of rains.
Self-published snow outruns them all the way.
Soon there’ll be left no blemishes, no scars,
no rings around the blinking eyes of day,
no neighbors filing out to find their cars,
no mailman trudging up the nameless lane,
whose smoker roofs, survivors of their times,
will fail to leave a noticeable stain
on this blank canvas innocent of lies.
No ambulances yet, no failing hearts.
No music blasting from the upbeat bars,
no voice from nowhere: “God, this could be Sweden!”
No school bus with its pairs of blinking lights
to pull up to the stranded quarters where,
on our precarious, questionable heights,
wrapped in chilled blankets, we sit up and stare
at the white nothing through the window’s square.

Locked Out

Last night I thought of my abandoned love
and wondered what had made us poles apart
and more aloof than fingers in a glove.
I asked myself whether it was his life
or death that opened a bracket, closed a bracket
on the years 61 and 92.
I turned to the naked wall and pulled my blanket
up to my chin, which people always do
when they can’t find the answer to a question.

In its tranquility and prickly warmth
this winter morning is a woolen mitten.
I vividly recall a placid youth,
his elbows sharply angled on the table,
an empty table in an empty kitchen.
But soon he fled the compass of his cradle:
his suitcase on the porch, his mother in a chair,
he held his cigarette with an indifferent air.

An outcast, poet of the frosty
Karelian Peninsula, he escaped its foil
and fled to Europe to meditate on mostly
unbeknownst things, such as the charcoal-oil
of those West German skies in the white season,
where, once his eyes adjusted to its white,
kilometers of crumpled Russian linen
paled by comparison. And he turned off the light.

But here I am, another spy in from the cold,
investigating angels through the wires
seven Mondays a week, forever young, red-haired,
but somewhat rusty in the spinal cord.
I set two coffee cups on a plastic tray
and shuffle to the balcony, where the organ
of icicles drips silent notes in the alley.
Who’d count on such a groggy guten Morgen.

Let’s face the present, drawing a mental line.
We both foretold this tingling in the branches,
this droning in the crusted skeleton
of ancient rail tracks, crossties’ wooden stitches,
the red, blue, purple current of the cars,
and shall I also mention honking fits
on salt and sand. Surviving this whole farce,
only music persists.

When the poet is finally left alone,
when a lover abandons love, the kettledrums
of winter clamor loudest for the one
who delays joining company with centaurs
and snow monsters. Only music pours
over my ears by way of dripping snow.
I’ve locked myself out. I shake the door.
Two shots of coffee and I’m set to go.