By the Numbers - James Richardson

Скачать книгу

      They were right,

      those alchemists.

      Anything—

      tin-cold

      eye of salamander,

      a fly’s

      green shield and styli

      on your wrist,

      distinctly six—

      anything might—

      mutterings in the wet,

      two-packs-a-day

      brass of sax, bright

      tears pestled,

      or your hair’s backlit

      (same as the rain’s)

      slender metals—

      anything might flash out…

      *

      Surely one sip,

      mused Midas,

      gin and silver,

      surely her fine engine tuned

      to a dial tone,

      surely her famous sway,

      gone Gold, gone Double Platinum,

      Rare Earth, gone Transuranic…

      *

      Anything slow,

      slash-black and copper

      monarch settling,

      the shy key’s glint and turn,

      sunny-cloudy

      brass-and-tarnish fruit

      paused at your lips, reflecting.

      Any velocity,

      water under the bridge

      my leap

      like dropped change rings on,

      or seen from a train

      chicory’s blue

      extrusion to a wire of blur,

      the train itself

      (of thought)

      on its track and track and track,

      your soft, incredible metals.

      *

      …surely these vast reserves

      (Midas, that treasurer, surmised)

      I must address

      with a safecracker’s

      listening touch.

      I’ll be the anti-thief

      slipping certificates of silver,

      the slim faux-platinum

      yen of credit,

      palms flat,

      over and over into her skintight pockets.

      *

      Eyes, blank or deep,

      a lake

      gone bright dark bright

      (on thin ice giving way—

      one: roll up the window

      two: when the car fills…)

      the fatal-in-seconds

      keen cold of a mirror,

      the blank bright blank

      that any word might,

      any word might not.

      *

      No one my touch

      (that treasurer says)

      can bear and tell

      (apparently did not touch himself).

      *

      Wine so cold it’s nails,

      rings in the glass, poured,

      your ring and its click

      two-three, and click,

      the bar awash

      in digital and silver

      whispers of the disc,

      yes-no, yes

      yes,

      and This

      Just In:

      incredible metals

      the shifting of your silks

      imagines, unimagines,

      the thought-blue

      alloy of your lids,

      the pistol

      chill of your lips

      my lips might freeze to.

      Flashing vehicles, unurgent lounging

      tell you what it’s too late for.

      Don’t rubberneck.

      Don’t look down the front of death’s dress.

      Don’t say that white oblong on a gurney

      looks like a bobsled, looks like room service.

      Don’t say it looks like a man,

      all bright days jarred from his brain

      like droplets from a branch.

      Lest he could not make out my name tag,

      I signed that I was a god, and would eat.

      He brought me, as was meet, utensils,

      but served, Lycaon, pans of scorn: sauté

      of which of the human muscles I won’t say.

      No problem. Nothing I had not imagined

      as vividly as its happening. Whereas a man

      concocts strange sauces for his cruelty

      that he may forget what meat he feasts on:

      thinner and thinner his wife, his pale subjects,

      his guests, ghost-thin, and at last,

      in anesthetic dark, painlessly he tooths

      the sweet flesh from the bones of his own hand.

      All this I knew, without what you call horror,

      but since he meant to horrify, I chose anger,

      and thereafter, it is true, he was a wolf.

      All one to me were his turns and swervings,

      confession, lies, indifference, remorse.

      Say that I showed him heavily how I saw him

      from above: no wanderer but a map, unmoving.

      Though a man thinks he can hide in changes.

      Shoulders and faint sheen

      of lotion, torsion,

      loose

Скачать книгу