CUPOLA

Clear solution
seeping from my nails

in Russia I ate
your coagulation.

Mushrooms a soldier's
mother sent him.

My hands in the jar
he watched

them crawl
until I was hungry

for uncaring.
Blue window

use me to see
the forest streaked

with blood and him
for innocence

searching.
Periodically rising

to wipe with Pravda
those nights

could have used deutschmarks
it was all the same.

Tiny blind eskimos
cut off the underground,

no explanation
shot me forward,

my face got full, it wasn't
keeping, it flapped,



I was losing
an election

I drank solution
to dissolve

connective
tissue there were

no Chagalls, just billions
of motes, who burst,

my cells were damaged,
I sat on the first

green bench I found
and started

destroying
everything secretly.

THERE IS A LIGHT

Whenever behind your windows I look
from my balcony down at you you are open,
at any hour among the pyramids
of eggplant and whiskey albanian shadows
drag their shadows, I could watch
this shadow clock for hours and do,
it is timing me, and each time your doors
part my lips hydraulical
silently clatter o solemn untamed
maternal albanian market why
at this fucked time of night are you open
locked within yourself and asking
the same thing of me, small
leaning over the balcony figure watching
your painless hydraulical scar
from both sides open releasing silence,
in silence you have been here
forever since 1993, you assure me
with your calm ancient terror,
you force a man who looks on you
to doubt his sleep and lack
of sleep, o most magnificent
pregnant man, you give birth to things
surrounded with chocolate
and things with chocolate buried
inside them, you give birth to pine-
scented dishwashing fluids, you give
birth to placenta which some people eat,
you give birth to etcetera's
every pleasure in every hour,
o low market wearing the naked dress
of windows lettered with emerald
unmuttered letters spelling
what blue and white flowers should be
inside me telling the story of you
giving birth to me giving birth to my awe
of you at 3 a.m. giving birth to a mother
of her sleeping children young and free
who with pale green arabic music
leaking from one of her earrings looks
up with her gaze and unlocks me then turns
into her drifting towards the opposite
and therefore holy direction

PARK SLOPE

Where far into evening
speculation is
without further instruction
a staircase one kneels,
an always continuing upwards.
Where I inspect myself
for a black and white cat
who hides my sluggishness from inspectors.
His name is Joselito.
Where sometimes a word can fill the sails.
Where I grow smaller
like a view of a harbor.
Where hydrants are painted
hyacinths arguing
point with pleasure in every direction!
glitter slowly
through conversation with windows!
Where into the bitter dust of my mouth
I bring my face,
to stare back at tacit approval,
wearing huge red feverish hands
rubbing my beard
like a saint.
Where one logician
with half an eyeglass proposes
o perpetual attitudes of summer!
light grey sky
constitutes interference
and is proof of a wariness high above clouds.
Where his neighbor
pissing on the low wall contends
it was merely stolen
from thousands of silvery windows
by an amnesiac painter
a jump rope and naked laughter.
Where a silent chorus of blinking sirens
asks if so who forgot us
stretching it onto his scaffold?
Where down at the corner
of afternoon and 4th
children have been invented again.
Mischievous mothers
paroled from daytime
bend among the lounging bodegas,
filling their starry
implications of sundresses,
climbing a few rungs
of spanish without me.

THE BOOK OF PAINTINGS

Dear blossom dearie
just now the announcer
missed the hour by an hour,
and the scratched coronets
of your early recordings
stumbled back into us.
By that missed hour
unnoticed
we did not get up naked
and call him a friend
to summer.
I remember you gave
yourself a blue dress
of not kissing.
You were off
somewhere beautiful
in the same way balancing
a lemonade as she sings
don't kiss me
yet kiss me again.
We all remember
with limbs colored
as a breeze through curtains
you’re an expressionist
full of rectangular nudes,
you have in your eyes
no absolute bookshelves
filled with alphabetical books
of paintings
all sleeping
when you're not sleeping.
Yesterday you won't
be angry with me
in your blue dress
that fits me best,
my remembering.

The Invisible City of Kitezh

Long before terrible hoofbeats approach,
it follows its bells into fog,
and marauders find only a gate of leaves

to slash with their pure hearts.
Every inhabitant goes on sweeping,
as if listening were not the only profession.

Except for climbing the stone tower
one at times wishes to burn,
along with the memory of dark hair

down the pure cliff of her shoulders,
the girl from the next town over
who whirled

into a black pile of ashes and boards.
Or is she still standing,
as we see her, growing older,

blurred in a vestment of snow,
paying tribute to the Gold Horde of seasons?
Like a smooth stone cradled in hand

for a moment then tossed back into the trees,
like a melody that follows
a blind princess into the birches,

is the invisible city.
You will see a belltower rise through trees
if you walk on, without your companions.

"Cupola," "There is Light," "Park Slope," and "The Book of Paintings"
all appear in the book AMERICAN LINDEN by the author.

© All Copyright, Mathew Zapruder.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.