Before I Forget

Thanks to my friends Utopia and Dystopia who published this on their Viennese zine at https://www.unitedqueendoms.com

Twenty years before, James had given
lectures on exoplanets at Meiji U
in Tokyo, which was a kind of heaven
for him. What particularly drew
him to it was how this mosaic
of simulacra was basic-
ally and utterly itself: a French cafe
detailed down to a Cinzano ashtray
replete with aproned garçon
(sauf qu’il ne parle pas français);
bookshops in a language there was no way
to read. James loved the foreign.
Tokyo was a place to find it within,
either the foreign itself, or its twin.

A young colleague at Meiji,
whom he told he’d once tried
Aikido, asked him if he’d maybe
enjoy the service of a personal guide
to the headquarters, the Hombu Dojo.
James would never have gone solo.
He was eternally grateful he did.
Aikido took, so amid
his abtruse models of planetary
formation, birth and death there arose
a  paradigm of throws and blows
turning around balance and ki.
One reason James liked linked verse:
its goal was to persuade, not coerce.

*

The Old Observatory is a renga-fiction about James, a retiring professor of astronomy. https://alteritas.net/pastis/the-old-observatory/.

At least Stalin had fat wormy fingers, not little penile ones ;-)

(Yes, there’s maybe a parody in the offing.)

I scratched my wrist, a wound you salved with spit.

It was not yours, of course, just Russian,

a patch of thistle slant over the cold sea

coursing like a river whose floe has cracked.

of the one who wants you?

She’s chaste: you say she haunts you.

She’s not: you demean her.

..

Another redondilla from Sor Juana's Silly Men (Hombres

necios).

o

At a conference in Budapest in 1976, I fell in with some young Slovak scholars, tentatively, I imagined, in love with one of them. I wrote this poem recapitulating their description of their lives, trapped in Iron Curtain domesticity.

Later, back in Canada, I glued a copy of Sylvia Plath’s latest collection into the covers of Alice in Wonderland and, per instructions of the one who had caught my eye, mailed it to Bratislava.

First stanza of Gabriele D'Annuzio's Rain on Pines.

A haiku.

the slopes we shared, only limbs

bared in the sweep frost ungirds,

cold which leaches light away,

loss no beauty can allay.

Thanks to Steven Knepper for hosting two poems of mine in New Verse Review: "Québec" and "Early of Late.