The Russian of Robertson Street

I don’t
mourn you the way
I used to,
I don’t

smell the same eleven oclock
lawns of those same
scattered houses,
their windows
like the bulky spill
of your foreign breasts—
their scuffed paint fluttering
in the sprinklers’ luminous chaff.

from osgood
came the sound of a train
clobbering the distance,
and you stretched your incandescent throat
from which
I’d so often drunk

as though thumbing open
a can of stars,
knowing that
its effervescent parts
were dead
before they reached my mouth.

Body

your body once,
I think,
was lean,
and hot as horse’s muscle.
I am certain of the way you moved,
your breasts like extrusions of fire.

today I saw you sitting in the sprinklers
at dawn,
the yellow light invading
your flabby peignoir.
the water on your gray face
filled the canyons and coulees,

and laved the skin red, foal-new.

I could tell then
you were pretty once,
with a sharp little nose and
eyes like
two dark little jockeys,

the taste of your skin
like the smell
of wet cedar.

Metal Heart

your phone rang and you answered it.
you spoke for a long time
and did not see
the shadowy shards of concrete,
disjuncted boxcars,
the gnarled silhouettes of cranes,
like stooped
Camels.

And behind:

the black ranks of mountains, dark scaffold of nightmare.
the dark throat of fog
advancing

across
the pearly bay
and my oily heart,
singing the
old world’s
iron hymn.