Annus Mirabilis


There is the year of the first appearance
of the potato peeler; the year Philip Larkin
finally got laid.  It doesn’t have to begin
with Vesalius’s illustrations of flayed bodies,
books covered with the skin of executed convicts,
a fine brown leather.  Copernicus whizzing
the earth around the sun; a great mathematician
fleeing the plague in Cambridge, sitting
under that tree where an apple dropped
into his brain and he tasted inevitability; 
Einstein shooing light from his study
in discrete quanta, or is it waves,
his daughter Lieserl dead from scarlet
fever or given to the friend Helene
(what is the certainty of two daughters,
the dead one, the living one, being raised
or buried  in Serbia,  both together in the
closed box of his mind until someone looks?)
while at the same time there’s motion, the
speed of light, the position of the reader
looking at this (simultaneity a way of rubbing
hands together) (magnetic fields like lovers
toppling), Brownian movements the restless
urgency of just about everything; the year
of flat prostates and muscular vocal cords,
when the elderly come bursting out of Tosca.
Or come out of newly invented hot tubs
and rub themselves dry, remembering how
they once were like the baby Isaac Newton,
small enough to fit into a one-quart jug.
 
First published in Connotations
 
 
  
Unhappy Endings
 

Depends how many paper sons came
over from Shanghai to work as dish
washers, your sisters called three-hole
sluts in the sex trade.  Depends how
many from Central America crawled
through sewer pipes, run over and bitten
by rats, having to learn. fuck fuck to sound
Mexican among the gringos.  Depends how
happy it is to sell curios, dig ditches, do the
señora’s laundry, watch her children, or
do a lo fan’s bidding in the rain.  But what’s
a bit of soaking, four cots in the bedroom,
when you have a toilet that flushes, no more
night-soil men calling in the streets for
the waste of others.  And then it’s your children
turning away.  The shame they feel among their
friends when you scold them for the lateness
of the hour.  It’s the money they’ll make
without visa or passport, while you still hide
the spelling of your name from the INS man
knocking at the door or on the line that trails
out into the street.  Where does anyone belong
but in your aunt’s estimation, grandfather’s smile,
a lover’s embrace though his dialect is wrong,
his English wobbly as the rear of a donkey
loaded with firewood.  Stop dreaming of the
village where you learned to walk.  Forget
the tramp of soldiers’ boots, the way those
men held you down, with mother pleading,
your sister hidden like a blossom behind
a tree’s wound.  This morning brings more
than the chatter of jays, the whistle of cardinals,
all that red moving along the ground like a
flow of blood that the earth absorbs.  As it will
you.  As it will turn upon itself to bring your
footprints deeper into the heart of everything
you can’t forget.

First published in Wounded Centuries, an anthology of psychohistory poems