The first new work in quite a while. Poetry is going slow these days, and I feel exceptionally rusty.


HUSSAR

plump birches out
the window flush with cold,
clinging wet to white air.

autumn
home
I return
to the revelation of
rumpled satin:
you dripping within him
like a spongy child.

I feel like a love-mad russian man;
my bootheels should
thump cannonlike past
the linoleum—the cylinder
would be a shriveled child
bulging at my ribs—

and in the cold abysmal
I should suck the sulfurous air
and listen to
drip drip
racketing down my temple
and think of birches in the autumn rain.
you’ll sit
at the window,
his arm will
cup your hip.
but I have hung
my pelisse on the coatrack
already.

I bend to the kitchen floor
and pluck up the dead:
your jeans, shoes, bra,
strewn like
propaganda leaflets
shouting
she isn’t yours.