Canto of a Morning Bat and other poems
Olesya Mishechkina
poetryUnBound 2014
a
poetryUnBound series “Canto of a Morning Bat and other poems” by
Olesya Mishechkina 2014 www.undergroundbooks.org
poems
1. Sex of Stone 2. Old Maid's Cupboard, or Melancholy 3. Canto of a Morning Bat 4. untitled 5. 4am after a hurricane 6. 2 unfinished haikus 7. Unfinished Duet 8. you put your feathers on, cupidon 9. This morning the palm trees 10. poem_don't_kill_poem!
(11. bonus e-book poem:
kings are still)
The Sex of Stone I We erected a God two years ago; a horseman. He made the earth tremble creases in rocks—rocks sharp to cut barefoot flesh if provoken late in the drunken night. We have proven slaves to stone and to our village. Her sons have helped the monument stand, made balance a pallid platform. So, salt and water are: our arms sore; lips sour; heads sick with strength. if a stone sweats long legs of tears, it is the monument of a revolutionary Tyrant sword high, ruthless, almost brute length and passion. stone so cold in his eyes, burning with the same fire once used to mend that metal to the shape of tyranny, now alive with stillness.
The villages no longer live. No Boyars to tend for them, like in the olden days. Time, it seems, has gulping, forward-facing eyes,
making places a temple Often times, places are the body of bodies of people. One’s body degenerates once the fleeting, meager specimen who made it live are searching…urbanizing, like caviar born to search for distant lands. Only the statue of the infamous still stands, but the mother We hid, put away like an old Rag in a closet—her sons. It is so like the sea To vibrate shells smooth, but forget the sharp-faced Fish.
II Two years later, we found her dead Like that village of straw. After the snowfall of The sweet white season, birds dare not Intrude on silence. A tasteless blanket, after the blue tint Of numerous snowflakes. A mummy gorged in dust. Half rocking in an oak coffin of a chair, Decomposed like the flesh of her black gown; A blue apron like once her eyes, now maggot Swimming. (Usually, the villages had self-service funerals—old moths in front of supple furs with no wings.
They would not let a man be Christened rest—the Orthodox way—until Far from place of death. In a forest, they held it, Stuffing cotton In his nose, ears, mouth, really any weak hole So the dead senses would not bleed fresh decay) Even those were not here for this mother. She grew empty Mold, moss. One hand on her stomach, the other On the armchair, as if she was about to stand up and Dance. That mother: her arms broken violins and fingernails Peering out—under-fur latex strings. Those hands Tired many a thread, winnowed many a color. Not stone-iron stiff of a great man.
III We erected a God two years ago, then left. That village is only seven hours south of Moscow through a long Dirt passage, weeds worshiping the edges, envious, lusting for space. Lone trees and kin at their toes. The sun shows he is several hours past gone—oh it is a bronze age —this drive—a primal age. The green barely reflects feelings of coming darkness we are anxious to touch,
smell the old termite-infested wood and knit, square red patterns of bread and musk-scented cloth. We pass by the eternal monument of the Rider. He says the darkness, an insected time, has not come. We look out the window And wonder a fire. If you drop a match, how will the moist skin of leaflets burn? How will her skin burn—the mother of the stone skin —unsuspecting ignition? It is a dying season—this fall. Past pyre and twice a Year long, stiff nuptials.
Old Maid's Cupboard, or Melancholy Sunflower oil, mud in cupboard for cooking skin. I should sizzle that solid tonight Instead of dirtying myself with them. She lost gold color on my windowsill —that butterfly—all brown, crinkling pollinating twigs. …reminded me of a hoard Of June Bugs that flew in yesterday. Ceasarly stroving toward lamplight, they conquered. Then wings settled On my carpet, bedspread. One even flew up my dress, and fell --he didn’t like it there. I gathered them into an old wine bottle And they, like six-legged cannibals, Started eating each other; made a working proletariat Of insects, striving for a piece Of light breaking through one small opening. Then drowned in the scent of Bugandy: old Georgian…
Today, the sun is hidden. Lamplight, sirens whistling, Offense in everything while legalized Thoughts differ from some Haze With shoes fitting four—little bones; little thoughts. Not far, A man waiting. Picturing, structuring an image. Durer loving wet soil, the coffin now Bluntly open, torn under like an old beer can --him drunk on dirt. The paint is dry now. Tonight, I see his coffin nails in My cupboard. Sunflower oil, mud To cook my fingering, fingerling dinner. Coming over (to love) my partner— An ocean smell in air. “No salt,” he says. It stays in my cupboard. We have dinner. I still hear The June bugs grinding in August. That brown butterfly Long Gone.
Canto of a Morning Bat You, morning bat, drag through the air on a musical page; undulate on high and low notes. Has Isadora Duncan lost her left shoe, stumbling home to America after a performance? What, Bat, are you blind? Can’t you see Yesenin hanging off the noose of a brighter day, as the same sun usurps tomorrow? You are the poet, bat—one black dot funneling a white sky With your revolutions and the visions of today on a dry, Mist sky, barely silhouetting black, slender trees. You aren’t far from the light; you aren’t far from the truth! You’ve eaten the fruits of the eggs at dawn, pretended to be a bird to a nest not your own. What if you cheated? eaten all of their eggs? the birds would fall out of nests in grief—the sun won’t be pulled through the air by a rope of hysterical chirp. You could stay out all night! But their propaganda tangles your blind heel and disorients you, doesn’t it?
Bat, are you a woman or a man? Have we robbed you? Stolen you from a Hungarian castle—proxy to Eastern Europe. A Dracula amongst your castles and coffins, your traditions! You look like a load off your own back, limping through the air, a bag of fool’s gold over the shoulder. The bum with two Connected bicycles behind, and strapped-in possessions (including a miniature television. A television, of all things!) You are also like that television— a small blind screen static and the noise of its screech. Morning bat, you are poverty. Before you go, bat, pick up the trash. Go back to Slavic Dialects, a note lower, a tone deeper, and a throat wider. Why are you trying to drag American syllables, they come out high-pitched and nonsensical! Can you carry that sweet nectar of sound on you shoulders? Are you dazed from capering spots of a Polaroid? Russian girls,
Check girls, Polish girls—>mail order brides photo SNAP! —like an eggshell cracking—all the hatchlings of poor, war-worm countries breaking through blue-eyed blind, streaming with placenta, pink and tender fleshed, atrophied limbs. Their first cry is for you, "Bat, come take us to America!" Bat, don’t you recognize me? I’ve been the girl waving my arms high at you, staying up late to spot you at dawn —you were my plane! Bat, you carried me on your shoulders as I slept. I didn’t know, bat, I was smiling, I had a dress on. I wanted to get out. My cheeks spilled on the ground and my eye sank in, bat, don’t you remember lifting my chin with your wing? In the morning, the stinging, deep kiss of your claws swept me away by the shoulders. Was it fate, bat, you took me that morning? Your Airy trace less than a shadow holding me by the
hand! I’ve been spying, thereon you. I’ve watched you carefully pierce and lick the flesh of a barn pig one phlegmatic night. But bat, he was no better. You’re only a vampire on the screen! (Bat, movies again!) You could not wake him with all your vampirism, and he slept all through the night, putting you on a two-year waiting list for a green card. You begged him to hurry before the sunrise. And you bit deeper! Isadora, go away, go feed your mud-country orphans, mother-fucking charity! You don’t have time to give: the street lamp light is almost up. It will snap and shut as fast as the beat of your wing or a camera, and it will be morning. How about that, bat? The New Day has no place for you. Light is a tangled red scarf that seeps through closed eyelids. And the sun is Isadora’s accidental cab, dragging the scarf. You’ve been cursed. Oh bat, you must have done it to yourself! You’ve closed your eyes to reason; you
cannot see the very country you fly over! Over promising slogans and lights, your image is right side up, regrettable, as you sleep through the bright, curling your claws around a branch, the tips of your ears pointing downward! What a sight! You witch! You upside down third world. I’m sorry, bat, the new morning isn’t for you; the sun burned Icarus And it will burn you. The sun is cruel. The sun isn’t glad. Go back, bat.
In the days of yore, things were easier: When people were so poor, they had nothing to talk about; a long distance was walked, the calf muscles followed, especially women, obedient and mellow. I went into a jewelry store two cripples bought diamonds; they made it past the door and they reminded me of us trying to hold onto a grain of whatever was present, between them, kept constant, but it turned incandescent ripples in water from almonds. If only we were to live on an island, you in your mind, and I, on another; so that although both of us live on an island, we can't see each other.
4am after a hurricane I remember sleeping not far from Moscow, in a village, in a wood house. My father woke me up, to show me the caprices of a hurricane who danced through the settlement, at 4 am. I was hesitant with eyes sealed by the pressure of the water, wind, and blown sediment, but I opened my dough-stuck eyes and went out barefoot to find him. Each toe was cold and the wine of my sweat rolled down my chin in a harmonious deluge, to a nightgown as thin as a bird's nest, protecting only from the stillness of the room; my heart came to slowly, like an animal thrusting its pelvis into a female--against a ribcage. He was outside, standing on the porch, with a blanket around him. A stubble shone through, trapping the clumps of a mist between each minute hair. I came to him and he opened his blanketed arms, like a magnificent bird protecting its young and wrapped them around me. We crouched, listening, on our bent toes, testing their joint stamina, and the slight pain removed by excitement--A thousand bird! chirping like bells off trees. Their many breaths made the mist! Their
beaks drew holes in the ruin of sunken-in roofs, fallen table posts, and out-house toilets resting on their sides like tired animals. They drew the spring into place, flapped their wings, mate calling and roll-calling who survived the storm.
2 unfinished haikus Fog promised rain comprising a glass of water you left for work, I heard you stepping in the water, it woke me up.
Unfinished Duet Up high, the river runs deep and even like a light that never goes out, and mountains lactate snow and fog but dissipate if someone screams aloud. How the earth is like that, with breasts protruding unapologetically over houses and under lost Roman cities. Debauch bacchans lost a thousand citizens and the whole city rolled down in sin like a tin can down a hill while a hot lava palm covered the yawning. See how that girl dips her leg in the water, whose daughter? was it, Eliot, you voyeured, with extending white calf into the navy and then baby blue, dissapating clouds, as she saw you--screamed? was it H.D. that Had Done Helen in Egypt? massaging her overstocked clitoris, lesbian and demonic unseen by human eyes. Sailowrs swim back to sweethearts on leave. You melt my fingers when it grows so hot in the summer, you don't know what to do with yourself,
like ants crawling up a skirt. you've been sitting like a monk on an anthill waiting shyly for something to happen. But you have the focus of scattered birds and distraught horses. You swim back to me in the summer with a gingerbread face and hairlets peering from the temple, working under the steel sun all day long, smothered in its honey. You've gained a good light brown on your cheeks, yellow teeth, and if you stop drinking, will turn pale. The Master's yellow flowers are stolen from his novel. I drink margaritas and cry salt. Pure gold encrusts the leaves of lips, making the softness of smiles much like dough. The face grimmaces thence, in metaphysical cordance. The storm that night broiled in a skillet crackled the ribs of a dreamer. and the mountains and rover sat thinking.
you put your feathers on, cupidon you put your feathers on, Cupidon and leave me Psychotic in naked the window thrust spits and cherry seeds back at me from the street, and jumper cables maraud a man whose heart stopped on the road expression, eyes, and sky sole tint of hazel i’ve had it up to here up to my years, up to binary electric battery extensions a pair of earrings from the earlobes to the engine a dog’s bark skweaks under the bends of a helicopter’s tail, blowing his fan upwards—where the music’s always coming from—he cools the air under the sweaty armpits of birds and harangues their singing then antistrophe: you open the door, the sheets, and the season with sly, silent keys svelte standing to the bedstead, blockading the catapulting there is no work today, crawl back in bed you shake them off like a dog droplets.
This morning the palm trees This morning the palm trees laden with silver and diamonds shake like firs in the sun, pines on christmas orange taggers are there with a menacing sleeping pit bull dozer ululate at skirts like pink tulips while your teeth turn black And you work fortuitous and forging god-like under a sun that is like a coffin, digging graves for the life of a family buried in a coffin that is not shaped a coffin, but a house. It's like that to be buried in poetry. Scream for the life of this heat scream yourself ruddy shitting scream like a newborn in a waiting room draped in irreverant music. Poets believe in the archtype of living that is fast and clear, sins bouncing marbles in the sun jacks in the stars, Gustave Auschenbauch strolls on the silky riviera in love like a plague Lovelace lacerates lucasta
You mother is the Great American Hen, and as women go, I in my prime benediction of leg, have sympathy. until empathy of a certain stopping of life force sucked out like a hot air balloon filled with blood catches up to wind-blown whiskers on the nose of my nipple. I will rip through clouds and throw my eggs at strangers so that they crack and open futile gleaming at the air with children's laughter falling neverborn. They wouldn't get to fastening my wrists because I would have sewed my mouth shut.
poem_don't_kill_poem! (metaphysical love)
among apache cow murals, grazing on the negative space fresco off an adobe highway support, black, stick-figured heifers are burned into by the sun that is like a sliced apple. you light a cigarette the car trails off the road you hold marijuana in like a cow; roll your eyes we almost hit the rim of a thin cement bridge that has orange markers, seemingly vulgar someone climbs the wrong mountain every day. if only you held my wrists like a steering wheel kissed in the park seismic with children, drawn out breaths from the houstonian power plant and albino rainforest humidity,
high off into the air, black and burned black and burned the ashes graze on clean air and fall flacid in soaking regalia, rushing the smoking butt of patience. your smile is that of the puss in boots and your nose is long, elefantile, conjuring the wine cork infrom its stubborn well. macbeth's naked witches thundercloud sandwiches, music ROCK-N-ROLL la Fun! curvs to the helixed highway exit home is forboding the end of a journey behind jocose green trees and houses in plain dresses; and lawn chair ghosts that smoke and gaze like cats from steppes;
and junkies crying like human beings in public. your eyes are still kind and your mouth is a languid well whose affection is a bucket on a string or on the devil's three hairs laughing laughing reverbarating off the the dark water i love you and i stare back with the eyes of innocent dogs looking down the well for frisbee floating atop dinner dish bowls, small smidgen heart; of a long record on ennui; of simply knowing how to drown the pure, primitive fright of big-pupiled death engrossing over high cliffs although we are not architects, on the rocks every night,
kings are still eating rare dishes, of the black pupil caviar watching from their plates a mountain collective: refugees hiding machineguns in wooly flocks others only have hearts to swallow, tasting the sour of eggshell and acids pillaging their own village revolts leave bones of the street, sausage on the scaffolds pyres and stakes begging, barking crackling fire americans walk with tubs around waists like hyrants. basic needs met? dotard at five fun in the blood
like stars raffled in the cosmos eat all day long in impregnable dulcitude sleep all day long buried under ruins christian phesant served on platters, win the lottery you lucky dog
a
poetryUnBound series “Canto of a Morning Bat and other poems” by
Olesya Mishechkina 2014 www.undergroundbooks.org