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Baffler Archives: Poems

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From “Depths”
November 03, 2015
Swimming could be an extension of the desert palm trees exasperate her calm and stop life from moving on like the rider on the dog who said don’t compare me to the rider on the horse because I haven’t a sword or sheath, not in my belt and up till now I hadn’t ...

Tomb of the Unknown Celebrity
  You were sexy.I mean, you must have been. You must have stirreda noticeable need—neverin a majority of the audience, of us,but in a sizeable plurality. For real,as maybe people saidin those days. Whichever they were. For real andfor a while. It was a charming ...

Something
November 03, 2015
Drifting across the page that I’m writing on. Is it the drifting ghost of the cigarette smoke From back in the day when I smoked? Is it the voice, Unbodied, speaking to me, that “fantôme sans os”Ronsard rising up from the grave tells us he is?Is it ...

Yo Mama
November 02, 2015
She loves him, because he cannot be eaten. Then, she tries. Half dead, he resists. His late flinch entreats her.   Pale little legs, that pod, a few hairs, almost no eyes— this least is what she craves yet cannot have.   Keep me, he asks. She bounces him from paw ...

The American Academy on Mars
Techno by necessity, classicizing on a glorious whim, our buildings house the persistent idea that no stretch of terrain anywhere in the universe cannot be balanced on a fulcrum placed midway between wilderness and city, the howling emptiness and the whisper of a weary and ...

Bitter-Berry Daybreak
October 06, 2015
Bitter-berry daybreak bitter-berry sun a mirror has broken between me and him   I try to find the highway perhaps to run away but everywhere the footpaths of his words lead me astray   Pinewood remember pinewood forget however much I lose my way I step on my ...

Aram Ilyich Khachaturian
Free time for whims is what makes age alluring; the aging Khachaturian grew to like touring: Rome—Paris—London—Berlin. He conducted, shook hands, represented the State, gave many an interview, enjoyed his fame through and through. Glory, after all, is ...

Sergey Sergeyevich Prokofiev
I’m walking up Bolshaya Dmitrovka, what is now Pushkinskaya— walking up from the station at Okhotny Ryad— and I find myself stopping in front of the Operetta Theater, stopping and whistling the first few bars of the “Classical ...

It feels nice
It feels nice To sit under a tree. It leads to The internal world.   In the internal world Is the internal forest. Roots and more roots, A forest of roots. Roots growing out of roots, And more coming out of them.   On the topmost branch Of a root Sits the internal ...

New Life
From the fields of a calendar, its snow packed firmly into squares, I farmed you.       Following some paperwork you shipped west       and I flew home ...

School
        I’ve heard the helpless crying of men, I’ve seen a woman wailing over a little dead body. I’ve met many whose eyes suddenly become springs, whose shoulders shake as when they cough. And believe me, nobody does it ...