from The Minotaur's Daughter (Seagull Books)

NAKEDNESS

Nakedness like a white whip
snaps about the flat, winged horses
and knickers are inapt, there’s just
plain and simple
nakedness, a bare wall with a shadow.
Knees, pale sugar cubes,
bait for felt-coated
dormice, erupting
from the dark. Bras and feathers
from peacock and baboon, the honey
of an arm. Unhurriedly and completely
poured papaya; furs

and dead grapes. Nakedness
clicks her teeth, blusters

with embryos and childbirth,
with over-ripeness

and emptiness.













  

  A HORSE CAME INTO OUR STREET

That day the air looked like wisps of hay that had fallen from a wagon.
It was hay, the kind used to line gift boxes. From the corner of the street the sounds
of normal life called, that is, the scream of children, the harangues of the married,
yelling of saleswomen. And there was something else, something
which I can't remember now.

Come to think of it, maybe it was the words or their portraits.
Yes, portraits of words that I preferred to hear. There they were, floating
above the blur of dailiness: turned the other way round, walking the other way round,
portraits of words emerging from a camera obscura. Normally they wouldn’t be captured,
but that day the wisps of hay, falling from the wagon, looked like summer air.

That day was a little bit odd. After walking down the street I stopped in a movement,
at one particular moment of getting older.
And I sensed it (the moment of getting older) like a scientist over a microscope:
the precise, split-second border between the former and the future me.
In that borderline, tangible second, I was nothing; only an echo
of a former self and the germ of the future, of the old me.

It lasted for only that one moment. Then the air rustled like golden hay
and into the street a horse came. Klip-klop, klip-klop, with a face like a lovely icon;
he looked at me and put my life back in order: I heard again
the sounds of normal life, the scream of children, the harangues of saleswomen, yelling
of the married - and over all of that, in the hay-like air, still something else, still
something more.