FIVE POEMS
STEPHEN KUUSISTO
DEAR JARKKO
Now you’re gone
I could transubstantiate
Become an ethereal megaphone
To tell and ask you things
As we did in Helsinki
Side by side
Bundled in raincoats
Scattered leaves flying
I said “dance”—
You said “death’s butterflies”
We both saw the cruelty
Of money on faces
The solitary pride
Of businessmen
“The city is filled with hearts
That have been condemned
And torn down” I said
Quoting Neruda
You said “can’t build suburbs
Fast enough”
It was fun being poets
GOD
—after Jarkko Laine
They speak of god along with cloud-esteem, sheep watching, plenty of softness. A few raise their glasses to the Michelin Man. Some open and close their hands. And sparks from the fire pop as the men drink grog. Night deepens. The walls of the tavern are warmer than the surrounding air. Outside its snow in May. A little psychiatrist with gold framed spectacles talks to himself about the altered situation which has now emerged.
BLANK 77
I have to hurry the school bell rings…
This isn’t in the news:
Blood traps are real but the one next door stays hidden
I think of the Egyptologist I once knew
Who held a clean mummified beetle in his palm
His true subject was fate
We shared cigarettes
It was the year of Reagan’s Star Wars
People in Helsinki talked about defending the mind
Though few agreed what it meant
Ruinous spoken jigsaws
Buildings erected in haste on every continent
More places for the poor to envy
A friend once wrote
He wished to have a good
Unpolitical cry
Don’t you know it?
In the words of Omar Khayamm:
As far as you can avoid it,
Do not give grief to anyone.
IN TALLINN
I was dead drunk in a bar when an old man told me he was responsible for Strindberg’s belief in ghosts—as a boy, he said, he rang the playwright’s doorbell and hid in the bushes. “At the core of superstition,” he said, “you will find childhood pranks.”
Strindberg’s ghosts were in fact afflicted, “under the weather” like all of high society. I knew the story wasn’t true.
You see how it is: men claim significance when it’s a matter of liquor and nostalgic shadows.
That was a sad winter. My blindness got worse. I drank too much. I kept excellent notes
THINKING OF SIBELIUS
Poetry comes unbidden
Bird-like, tapping
Though the fence
Has sagged
The house
Needs work
The stars
Indifferent.
Orphic trees—
At the windows.
