A Summing

That's how it is on this bitch of an earth.
Beckett


I. My First Forty Years

Farouche dreams pour down like rain
from yesterday’s Kuala Lumpur.
Dear Doctor: these sessions
are a one way ticket on the Trans
Siberian railroad, the longest hearse
ever ridden. First, Vladivostok, then de-camping peasants
who revel in the morning near Novosibirsk.
The Ob River surges near its aching banks.
My family lacks this history. My uncle, from Kiev,
collected E.A. Prescott Pistols
and Eustache Le Sueur pencil sketches. He said,
inside the small box, two circles
of blue wheel near each other. In the middle
is a small statue of a minor deity,
her breasts tossed like falling snow.
The background newsprint suggests Serb, mid 30’s,
but I know better: this is page 217
of my autobiography. A small band of soldiers climbs a hill
looking for ammo and better shoes

II. Two Weeks Last August

After three years what gifts do I bring?
Plucking the strings of a Guadagnini
and watching the flies gather inside
my glass of port, you fully expect
these routines, darling doctor,
like old school assignations with louche men
smelling like miracles,
vacationers to Ogunquit, semi-coherent transitions from
one bleak morn to blasé eve. You cannot strike
this from the public record. The campanili are shrinking.
How can I keep waiting? It is predictable
and endless, like children, or chickens.
This is the Age of Federalism and, it goes
Without saying, seems like hell—
Carpaccio on a Ritz, the moon finally out,
her teeth gleaming, something elegiac, but soon
erased, like Geronimo befuddled by blood
oranges and skies of rosaries. All my friends
have names that are palindromes: Lon Nol,
Nisio Isin, Revilo P. Oliver. This irritates me.

III. Puteum Abyssi

Near Rouen, the Festival of the Ass
has ended. This is my last trip.
I am surrounded at home by relics
from Venice and medallions of St Fellatio,
patron saint of gag reflexives. You ask
if I have a good memory. I remember
Nothing. No thing. Just last Tuesday
my butcher asked me my name. I replied:
“Rabbi Jitters, I presume.”
You have asked me repeatedly
to write down my fantasies: Well,
Meinem Kinde, I have none,
purged from me by you eons ago,
callipygian ideals long lost. It’s OK.
I have no need to explain.
But in the last locust-free spaces in Brooklyn
I maintain one final desire—iron
braces for my callow cousin’s honied vagina.