Open End
1
Whatever happens, there is no remorse,
no examination of my conscience,
if I wake up in Kuala Lumpur
with a fresh tattoo on my right shoulder.
The future melts into the now.
Hic Rhodus, hic salta. No
collecting of brave deeds into my life’s
sentence, which might resound in the electronic
corridors of my descendants.
For there are only a few stories:
defeat, victory, continuation and failure.
In whatever direction I go,
the days walk behind me
like obedient puppies behind their master.
In Fargo I command them
to run ahead and track down
where and when the story ends.
2
Like the old New York subway tokens
GOOD FOR ONE FARE, I read on the rattling local
train that life is not a dress rehearsal.
In a moment I change my skin into that of a blue-blooded
queen with rich possessions. In the palace greenhouse
I prune roses, I graft shoots onto the stalk,
carefully tended climbing plants climb up
triumphal arches like ballerinas on tiptoe.
Since a headache is the often unwanted effect of a crown,
or in rare instances, advisors warn, even the loss of the head,
I shall become the pilot at the next station.
A captain of the air in a dark dress, elegantly
I streak from capital to capital, and when
the security guards demand that shoes be removed,
I shall test myself with deep-sea diving.
Where the gloom borders on darkness, moray
eels stretch out their heads from the mouths
of amphoras of antique shipwrecks. Firmly attached
anemones guard the ships’ cemetery. I, an oxygen chrysalis,
hover between a swordfish and a basking shark.
When the train stops at Ninety-sixth Street, I get out,
suddenly not really clear as to what
is the password for my life, which waits
in a jogging suit before the screen.
3
Try it, snuggle up to me,
you will see, every little pore
whispers a story: arguments, reconciliations,
secrets, eternal and rather briefer loves,
unexpected complications, substitutions,
separations, reunions, happy and almost
happy endings, all spin the bigger than life heroes
on the string of the omnisicient narrator.
Sins, betrayals, murders, deceptions,
beauty spots on a heated complexion.
Touch the right place: I shall clothe them
into a verse and knock on the door of a sonnet.
4
Without a word you become flesh, a temple of flesh.
A ribbed casing on pillarlike calves. Step into
the lungs: unfolded, carefully ironed into a forepeak
for the mast of your spine. Breath carries the body,
a live cargo, through the night. Across the whirlpools
of consciousness, which extend into the depths so that
you speculate on the bottom, what might have gone wrong
with the genetic record, why do the cells not line up in a solemn
parade past which you might march off into a honey-sweet sleep.
5
Sometimes I come back from a dream
quite alien to myself: who hung
the assumptions up high and bright like
Chinese lanterns on a cruiser?
Who composed the years into a biography
without a title? Why does my conscience burn,
a forgotten little lamp on the box
of consciousness? I am dragged back
into my body, but needing a moment or two
before I get accustomed to myself.