Milan Begliarbekov
salm 10.22Having been told we were moving to a mountain, I saw a triangle with a house tumbling down its edge.
A little girl named Ruth died of leukemia—I lay in my bed and thought about a lovely portrait weeping in distant dark.
My legs began to ache around then, and my thighs turned the color of an eggplant. After that I hated eggplants and thought of myself as an eggplant.
My astronomy of death then imagined a distant God, whose planet could never be reached, but whom I respected as an element: oxygen and the floor.
On the cooking basket-weave of my mother’s volkswagen, sex was sort of described.
I sat in my own shit as the faucet violently filled the bath, parents looming between anger and fear, asking is there anything wrong? do you need to tell us something?
Language being a peccant inheritance none of us suspected, we all kept speaking, filling the air with miasma. What seemed like days passed.
salm 12.13Riding in the car I used to focus my eyes on the bucket seat and let my vision blur as the sounds of my parents’ voices sank beneath the engine gnarl. My body did not disappear, but I left them and the little capsule carved by their talk and touch.
During the slow, carving climb up the mountain, my father once turned to me and said I always felt I was an angel of war.
I stood in the pea gravel drive, next to the utility pole with the transformer I worried about and stared at a constellation of stones, thinking I will grow and change and leave, this gravel will wash away, but I can remember this picture forever.
Because the soul is there, behind the face, which comprehendeth all unbounded space (Traherne).
salm 2.23 didymus passionI split wood for proof the wound is real, just
to make sure the kingdom of god is within
My concern is like sunlight focused on an anthill
sufficient unto the day’s confusion
that which befalleth ... beasts (Ecclesiastes)
and this morning a sinkful of dishes is swarming with pismires
my concern is like
myself bent over their furious movements,
pinched down and hived into an insect of attention,
a real present, though this is the memory
salm 05.24I was especially alone. I would go to the far edges of whatever grounds were allowed and then crawl through the branches of the unkempt bushes there. In that cool dark, I would watch to see cars beyond the fence, passing towards what I imagined were even darker, cooler removes. Honeysuckle and clean sandy dirt breeze morphine.
Often the need to evacuate rose up strongly almost like temptation or lust. Sitting there, moving as little as possible, savoring it. What was it, not a hunger, the opposite of that, or its obverse: not to be thrown into the world.
Another secret, I guess. But one that obviously couldn't be kept. My own putrefaction. I remember the panic in my parents' voices, with the bathwater rushing: "Is anything wrong?" And I remember answering truthfully, "no, nothing's wrong."
And judas hanged himself from a redbud.
salm 12.15 sigh & groneBefore almost anything else happened, I knew we were naked in the garden. Before that only a bike without handle grips, a plastic-potted cactus, people standing in ritual sadness. We were naked, only us and the objects: a tent draped over a swingset, a sandbox and its toys. The temple within the tomb.
Oh, do not mistake a scattering of leaves for a snake, or if it is a snake suffer it dozing in the domino of shade and sun, its sting turns red and brown in time before falling to be covered in snow.
Your fabrics, your face of the waters, only a thought that may have been had, deja vu between two mountains. A tent draped over a swingset and ill steward, these grounds so necessary to tomb and temple, nakedness the fire of being precisely here for this corn-stalk calm calamity near the others.
Now the wind chime recalls me to a cooling afternoon, duly clothed. One might even say, bundled.
Crisis One
I came here for some company in my sin,
knowing from loneliness how company can
unstick my genius for it -- hence no drinking alone
-- and no one minds my song is stolen
It's the way with sin, with song,
there is no one righteous, no, not one,
to bring others along, to look for encouragement
in the same sewer a friend went.
The more execrable. Not for doing wrong.
For taking comfort.
Transparency
Being seen to show the world one's insides,
to let the sun frankly describe
only the hard things it cannot pass through,
not the window. The window
is transparent. Is said to be
transparent, it's see-through,
a sentence made from clear words,
precisely uttered, accurately heard.
The sentence of death is like a window.
It opens on a drawing of a window.
When I kept silence, my bones roared,
says the psalmist, whose heart also melts
like wax in his bowels.
Lord Cloudy
Thanks to the thin wind, our ancestors sleep sweetly.
In light rain, our pain still mysterious,
we sip more coffee and "that which arises."
Flaked colors cling to the car window.
For the idea of the sentimental dead,
we repeat ourselves, decal on top of decal.
And we need this quilt of birdsong
with a few shadows in the yard,
a manifest coolness down the little gorge,
the unheard lines that lie here
and rain from our drift into sleep.
Else, where should we seek our pale delight.
And become something else
more accustomed to gravity, all heavy cheer.
Lord Cloudy's Fallacies
Cloud prints on transparencies of sky
Some of these, the closer ones, are pulled in and out of view
Today the forecast of rain is being ignored by blue
Who can tell it what is coming, how gentle green
Must be struck, slicked, and stuck to itself and the ground
When it stands so far away, almost nowhere as I understand things
I cannot tell it, I am only listening
To the forecast, the galvanic bird lines kicking into each other,
What cannot be wrong about what lies ahead
And these winds know coming up from the valley
and over the ridge so the trees in between know too,
Flicked into a stir by knowing because they’re green
How can we, being too inhabited,
Say anything to what seems
our too far away, imaginary friend
“Knowledge… as reflected in a mirror”
One magnolia blossom on a low branch,
one swift cloud caught
above the little inlet mudflat (ghost)
in grapevine creeper and honeysuckle --
being lyrical as always, how else
can we be in the afternoon
listening to the neighbor’s beliefs
against the world’s assertion
that it
is real
that voice,
we say, is not the same as what we have
but how shall we compare,
who are bound to respond
but dazed since birth
transformed by degrees
into a stag, a linden oak
A little girl named Ruth died of leukemia—I lay in my bed and thought about a lovely portrait weeping in distant dark.
My legs began to ache around then, and my thighs turned the color of an eggplant. After that I hated eggplants and thought of myself as an eggplant.
My astronomy of death then imagined a distant God, whose planet could never be reached, but whom I respected as an element: oxygen and the floor.
On the cooking basket-weave of my mother’s volkswagen, sex was sort of described.
I sat in my own shit as the faucet violently filled the bath, parents looming between anger and fear, asking is there anything wrong? do you need to tell us something?
Language being a peccant inheritance none of us suspected, we all kept speaking, filling the air with miasma. What seemed like days passed.
salm 12.13Riding in the car I used to focus my eyes on the bucket seat and let my vision blur as the sounds of my parents’ voices sank beneath the engine gnarl. My body did not disappear, but I left them and the little capsule carved by their talk and touch.
During the slow, carving climb up the mountain, my father once turned to me and said I always felt I was an angel of war.
I stood in the pea gravel drive, next to the utility pole with the transformer I worried about and stared at a constellation of stones, thinking I will grow and change and leave, this gravel will wash away, but I can remember this picture forever.
Because the soul is there, behind the face, which comprehendeth all unbounded space (Traherne).
salm 2.23 didymus passionI split wood for proof the wound is real, just
to make sure the kingdom of god is within
My concern is like sunlight focused on an anthill
sufficient unto the day’s confusion
that which befalleth ... beasts (Ecclesiastes)
and this morning a sinkful of dishes is swarming with pismires
my concern is like
myself bent over their furious movements,
pinched down and hived into an insect of attention,
a real present, though this is the memory
salm 05.24I was especially alone. I would go to the far edges of whatever grounds were allowed and then crawl through the branches of the unkempt bushes there. In that cool dark, I would watch to see cars beyond the fence, passing towards what I imagined were even darker, cooler removes. Honeysuckle and clean sandy dirt breeze morphine.
Often the need to evacuate rose up strongly almost like temptation or lust. Sitting there, moving as little as possible, savoring it. What was it, not a hunger, the opposite of that, or its obverse: not to be thrown into the world.
Another secret, I guess. But one that obviously couldn't be kept. My own putrefaction. I remember the panic in my parents' voices, with the bathwater rushing: "Is anything wrong?" And I remember answering truthfully, "no, nothing's wrong."
And judas hanged himself from a redbud.
salm 12.15 sigh & groneBefore almost anything else happened, I knew we were naked in the garden. Before that only a bike without handle grips, a plastic-potted cactus, people standing in ritual sadness. We were naked, only us and the objects: a tent draped over a swingset, a sandbox and its toys. The temple within the tomb.
Oh, do not mistake a scattering of leaves for a snake, or if it is a snake suffer it dozing in the domino of shade and sun, its sting turns red and brown in time before falling to be covered in snow.
Your fabrics, your face of the waters, only a thought that may have been had, deja vu between two mountains. A tent draped over a swingset and ill steward, these grounds so necessary to tomb and temple, nakedness the fire of being precisely here for this corn-stalk calm calamity near the others.
Now the wind chime recalls me to a cooling afternoon, duly clothed. One might even say, bundled.
Crisis One
I came here for some company in my sin,
knowing from loneliness how company can
unstick my genius for it -- hence no drinking alone
-- and no one minds my song is stolen
It's the way with sin, with song,
there is no one righteous, no, not one,
to bring others along, to look for encouragement
in the same sewer a friend went.
The more execrable. Not for doing wrong.
For taking comfort.
Transparency
Being seen to show the world one's insides,
to let the sun frankly describe
only the hard things it cannot pass through,
not the window. The window
is transparent. Is said to be
transparent, it's see-through,
a sentence made from clear words,
precisely uttered, accurately heard.
The sentence of death is like a window.
It opens on a drawing of a window.
When I kept silence, my bones roared,
says the psalmist, whose heart also melts
like wax in his bowels.
Lord Cloudy
Thanks to the thin wind, our ancestors sleep sweetly.
In light rain, our pain still mysterious,
we sip more coffee and "that which arises."
Flaked colors cling to the car window.
For the idea of the sentimental dead,
we repeat ourselves, decal on top of decal.
And we need this quilt of birdsong
with a few shadows in the yard,
a manifest coolness down the little gorge,
the unheard lines that lie here
and rain from our drift into sleep.
Else, where should we seek our pale delight.
And become something else
more accustomed to gravity, all heavy cheer.
Lord Cloudy's Fallacies
Cloud prints on transparencies of sky
Some of these, the closer ones, are pulled in and out of view
Today the forecast of rain is being ignored by blue
Who can tell it what is coming, how gentle green
Must be struck, slicked, and stuck to itself and the ground
When it stands so far away, almost nowhere as I understand things
I cannot tell it, I am only listening
To the forecast, the galvanic bird lines kicking into each other,
What cannot be wrong about what lies ahead
And these winds know coming up from the valley
and over the ridge so the trees in between know too,
Flicked into a stir by knowing because they’re green
How can we, being too inhabited,
Say anything to what seems
our too far away, imaginary friend
“Knowledge… as reflected in a mirror”
One magnolia blossom on a low branch,
one swift cloud caught
above the little inlet mudflat (ghost)
in grapevine creeper and honeysuckle --
being lyrical as always, how else
can we be in the afternoon
listening to the neighbor’s beliefs
against the world’s assertion
that it
is real
that voice,
we say, is not the same as what we have
but how shall we compare,
who are bound to respond
but dazed since birth
transformed by degrees
into a stag, a linden oak