Matvei Yankelevich
from A WINTER NOTEBOOK
***
Some mouths don’t match, some fingers
roughen me too much, some breath
is constantly of chips; things
never quite right. Keep on? Your
teeth pull on my bottom lip,
wine-plied, wind-cracked. As though it’s
17 AD again.
On the avenue below,
winter sun strikes windshields blind.
***
Keeping it 100% real,
I launder shirts in the bathroom sink,
remark upon the fog to no one,
empty pockets of conf’rence handouts,
bring back old records to make them spin
for they’ve been too long silent... Silence,
part of me regrets its passing. Naught
I need less — a new book of poems.
Throwing dice won’t rid us of the cards—
dripping roofs crust over overnight.
By one o’clock in the afternoon
my mouth’s on all your open places
closed to winter’s rusted knives of light.
***
The neighborhood has changed. I live a floor above
another tax bracket. I take the staircase
a thousand steps at once to fly past envy
to derision: their clothes are pressed, breath easy,
and still time for daddy’s business as Plan B,
smooth shoulders. Sketch the dog, hire a walker.
A bumpy road — a back rub. A house on a hill
in poor taste, I gather by Prime cardboard boxes
nestled to their warming door. But who am I —
unable to relieve corn syrup suffering
of convenience stores where I’ve acquired cheap
this arrogance that’s tailored to the poorly dressed
and uncle with a villa I’ve not been to
where swallows plait the dusk light in coiffed evening dress,
care where words take me, tardy to appointments,
my worn out soles like pickup trucks on gravel
only earth remembers when the mortgage comes
due south of comfort. Dependent on their market
for safety’s wave-torn net, I’ve signed away my rights
against their law; their psychic battle overwhelms me
on swept street, in print. Economists preach futures
I won’t reap. In farce of uplift nations weep,
while I persist at my syllabic rattling
and scratch at blue holes in the air where air should be.
Help me forget their world and come the fuck over
already: fourth floor, the last door on the left,
where records spin on earth’s wasp-waisted axis —
their melody breaks sense and few words reach me
as at my window winter whirls around dead leaves.
***
These odes to chance keep choices out of reach —
this or that, you stand aloof already
when you wake. Here, let speak intent, drowning
in the cartoon count of drowning. We looked
for chance, but couldn’t find it where we looked —
under the bed, in a glass of water:
expect the worst, as nowhere’s near at hand.
Who am I talking to? in exercise
of choices I claim to have been offered.
My tongue, what it may do. My accident
befalls you, another’s falls to me, not
meant to be this way, yet it was meant to
be; to briefly bend another winter.
***
When through grit and scratch of Amtrak pane I go
there or go back again: the red of maples
over harbors, herons in the golden marsh,
and the broken smokestack bricks in reflex blue
in orange light of sun’s westward expansion
slouching low into my eyes through seal and smear
of tempered glass, air-tight. The rich marinas
seethe, sear the Sound; Ford-built trucks at foreign boats;
a white sail skins a clapboard house... and all this
window beauty saddens as it soothes. What light
is there that will not touch garages, bridges’
girders, attorneys’ offices whose brutal
turret windows mirror it, the tired backs
of warehouses and boarded theaters, useless
balustrades atop old banks and temple halls?
Wharves half-rotted, half-developed, crane their necks
at co-work lofts or water-view apartments.
Further out of town: low-income brick, white trim,
wild fields of stunted trees wearing vines’ mantles,
power lines on pylons, suburban vinyl...
Light touches everything — careless, judgmental,
yet undiscerning light bares what has outgrown
time: decaying homes, degraded plastic chairs,
soft logs submerged in pond scum, mosquito wings,
the Polish Citizen’s Association,
“Dad’s Clam Shack,” “Cousin’s Pizza,” a lineage
too long to list before light goes, which is when
the city will appear in that bright darkness
of its introspection, where I’ll disembark
and somewhere sleep, standing in a wooden box,
without the solace of a conversation,
dream same dreams of seamlessly repeating worlds,
in whimpered rhythm, familiar to weeping:
these linked wheels’ back-and-forth retreat, like the rub
of winter’s weary eyes with fists, weak-fingered.
Matvei Yankelevich is a poet, translator, and editor whose books include Dead Winter (Fonograf) and Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook). He is the editor of World Poetry, a nonprofit publisher of poetry in translation, and proprietor of the small press Winter Editions.