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Stephen Stepanchev |
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NO TIME TO BLEED |
| The first stuttering
and burblings of the mind
Are not the best: consider the lives of the Beats.
Like a Sumo wrestler,
I throw salt over
My shoulder, and if I lose my balance I spit.
A cool death, a continental
divide,
Opens between Bob and me; he's on the eastern side,
I'm surprised by the tickling of his watch -
it still tells time, though his heart has stopped.
It stopped long ago, while he was still alive.
My own demise is not imminent,
But I bleed just thinking of his blows. Oh, Bob!
I apply a mental tourniquet
So as not to bleed to death.
As the Body says, "I ain't got time to bleed."
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FROM LEDGE TO LEDGE |
Doubly distilled,
the moonlight dizzies me,
Sleepless, I trace the pockmarks of the moon.
I get up and eat a roll and taste opium,
I try to sing, but my voice quavers and breaks.
At six a fog descends
and erases the sky.
The broom of the wind sweeps the fog away,
The gray, slovenly fog that shrouds the street
And wraps me in silence as the moon disappears.
James comes back from
his night watchman's job
And wriggles out of his shorts to take a slow bath.
Fresh again, he rains scent on my neck
And reads me a page from Remembrance of Things Past.
I say nothing about
my night-long pains.
He says nothing about the candles of his watch.
We move from ledge to ledge like city birds,
Brooding and slipping out of the Falcon's claws.
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| A BUBBLE |
Like Oedipus,
I killed my father on the road.
The car skidded in the rain
And hit a locust tree. No doctor was near.
A star saw it and looked
away.
It was the color of a wild flower,
A bachelor's blue, on a hill.
It turned the water on.
It was a shock to see
him laid back
At the wake,
Like a sea, beyond all anger,
Decked out in black silk. My mother,
Who is an American, ate store-bought
Cup cakes. I ate apple strudel
Made by my Chinese aunt and drank oolong tea.
Later, on a cruise,
A bubble, a small burst
Of conscience, bloomed in the salt sea.
Stephen Stepanchev
was the first poet laureate of Queens, NYC and taught creative writing
at Queens College from 1949 to 1985. He has published a major critique
of American poetry - American Poetry Since 1945 - ten collections
of poems, and appears regularly in such venues as The New Yorker
and Poetry magazines. |
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