My Hand Was Made Strong
in various voices
-a poem containing history for Ezra Pound
I.
My hand was made strong squeezing
the necks of chickens, the blood running
down my forearms like rainbows.
And we stopped, the three of us, in front of every streetlight
reflection of ourselves in shop windows to pose
for virtual pictures of the moment.
Andjela’s hip poked into a lingering exhaust.
Her hands squeezed her hips like a lover’s clutch.
Ivana arched her lower back into a crescent moon.
I engaged the shutter. And for that 1/60 second, we lived
in an ideal photograph that simultaneously burnt away in fire.
We walked for sometime recreating ourselves all over.
The Cyrillic characters throughout town resembled mascara
smears. The neon was bright lipstick on the collar of night,
yet the village was in the air of suckling pig on a spit.
My hand was made strong running fingers through
a daughter’s browned hair, curls bound tight by that nervous finger,
curls like an extinct alphabet, the characters resembling
an aerial view of erratic deer trails; made strong brushing
the manes of mules, pulling quills from Argos’ muzzle.
As I sucked away deeper into the night. As I sucked away deeper
into the night a hand was made strong on a riverbank,
lifting the long necks of brown bottles to lips across two seas and an ocean.
All I need is a good boat and a good woman. The rainforests
will part like luscious thighs. He said he would sail that fucking boat
across any river if he had to use his palm as an oar and he meant it
even when the sun came up like a bleeding fist that had
beat the hell out of night
The shores here are no different than the edge of Marat’s bathtub.
A draping wet linen furrowing into divisions of land and bodies of water.
A leaf green pall spread over a continent. A hand
was made strong driving a knife through a chest, a spade through crust.
Cigarette to lip, a hand was made strong clutching quill and brush.
There is such ecstasy in the gaze of the wounded. I
have only held a dead multi-colored bird in my hand, beak slightly
open like a sunflower shell. Up until that time I had followed the sun.
Now there are only the subtleties of contrasting light
on the waves of Marat’s brown bangs, lulling. I am the man
that painted this picture and row, row, rowed the boat. Gently,
burning dissipates into a thirsty sewer brown, feathered with
traces of your light. As I step back to look at this Balkan city,
half the canvas is enveloped in a pitch sky and both are beautiful.
My personality is not gone, I am at the bank of a river now,
listening to the breath behind a cello. I can’t say the rhythm
of breath and bowing are synonymous. Sometimes one heavy exhale
equals at least ten draws over the strings, other times
one draw makes the musician breathless. The only consistency is
the inhale, always at a pause when the bow stops, the pink of lungs
expand into an internal cumulus dawn. Never
have I heard the exhale at a pause, there is only retention of all that.
A musician must be engaged for fear of being spent. Fear faded color.
A pink bloated belly of a carp is at my feet pushing
back and forth on the leftover wake of barge. My hand
was made strong waving to and fro through the Doppler shift
of a retreating orchestra at moondown. Goodbye to milk
and a thousand adolescent dreams of women with bold fingers
pressing clitorises as if pointing blindly at stars; with eyes closed
there is the painting's infinite vanishing lines of liberation.
II.
Train. We were so hungry. All we had was salted fish.
I was thirsty. At night we licked the frost off of the screws.
We sang songs to our men in the boxcars behind
us who had already been killed. Orchestras devoid of conductors
would soon be assembling themselves into circles to show
each musician was equal. How does everybody feel? More
clarinets said the violinist. No, more violins said the clarinetists.
Play louder goddamnit, no one can hear you. My hand was made strong
drawing spirals— failed attempts at circles—
and sewing birch bark sandals for neglected feet that swelled
like pink lungs. Someone’s eyes sought a corner to cautiously see
all that was happening. They -ied back to tell but failed. Don’t
you see I need you rock. Wherever I ride there shall be
mountains by my side. Pray louder goddamnit,
no one can hear you.
No one can paint you when you’re moving like that. You’re moving
like that again. Like a feather at sea. An exaltation of larks. Train.
The cries of birch, divested of opaque gowns like women
undressing. A hand was made strong pushing a spaghetti strap
off the bluff of her shoulder. Divested like chalk from slate.
The air transformed into a thick dust. The grain
no different than that of old photographs. I haven’t
cried enough over the absence of the angle of your elbow
in the morning while you sleep. A mortal hand.
In Pancevo 2 1/2 families’ hands were made strong picking
swollen cherries, višniacu from the branches of crowded trees.
Grandmother loved once. She loved a man
as she did a country. 1995. Oh Jugoslavija, Jugoslavija, wer stehen sie.
She thinks I may understand, but all I know is language fails.
Her whimper is crystalline. It was heard by a deer
hunter, Mr. Adler, my sixth grade geography teacher
whose greasy hands never got cold. It was in a doe cry after the bullet
missed the heart. Followed erratically. He said,
“I heard a doe cry and gave up the hunt.” The blood crescendoed
against the snow. Oh that angry pigment and waveless screams into a void
white. 1939. Oh, Grandmother and that first
penetration of her lover. Crystalline. The elusive body of east,
long legged, and a brief trickle of vishniac forever staining linen.
A hand was made strong scrubbing this bedding, wringing it
and beating it on the line in stiff August. She had removed
a piece of lint from the brim of his blue
hat before he left. Kissed him three times.
In the daytime it is very nice and pleasant and even
rather pretty in a wrong-headed sort of way.
The angle of your elbow, drawn from this. Listen,
before I get, I need to know a couple of things. Do you know
how your grandfather was killed? Did Grandmother get to see the body?
Tell me a little about that. Tell me a lot about that.
III.
A man who walks by day will not stumble, for he sees
by this world’s light. It is when he walks by night
that he stumbles, for he has no light.
My hand was made strong sitting chivalrously defending a king.
I can say it now, that I masturbated once behind a tree
when my commander thought I was shitting.
I squatted and wrapped my left arm around the trunk. My fingers
grasped a crevasse in the thick bark. With my other hand I removed
your picture from my breast pocket and placed it
on the ground between my legs and stared at it. I began.
I stared hard but my eyes wanted to close. I continued,
gritting my teeth all the while. The whimper, I remember.
The dizzying jerk. There we were behind my eyelids, making noise.
But there was only one whimper with no direction. There were tears
and then a Partisan. And then a shot in the heart
after loving a country. My Death. All on that day. But as soon
as dusk falls, about 5:30,it is really quite dark, these peculiar
ghostly iridescent lightings come on here
and they’re making very bright places and leaving dark ominous
ones and a dry smoky mist appears, like in the back of a pool hall.
A hand was made strong. My hand was made strong.
IV.
Grandmother, 1997: I’m going to shit in the middle of the floor
and you all can sit and smell it. I can’t wait till they leave.
Nobody wants them here.
If you have to ask your grandmother, then do. If there is anything
she repeats when telling please let me know about that also.
I need to finish this poem.
This morning all was reduced to talk. The writings became sounds
as the deer faltered over fences and mascara ran down a cheek
to the corner of a mouth. Love sounded
like a rock being dropped into water.
And for me, memory was a song sung
in a language I didn’t comprehend.
I can’t wait until they leave. I can’t wait until the angles lose
their edges and my mother loves me at the bank of a river,
skipping rocks until the moon comes down. Until the angles. Rebecca’s
hand was made strong skipping flat stones off the surface
of water ripples running together spiraling on two dimensions to shore.
Andjela, your round hip; Milovan, your round hip. The lip
of a tub. The tub an open scream, an unvoiced “O”. How deep is the water.
V.
About your poetry, I am not really talking to my granny these days,
because she made curse at me and tell me I am not her granddaughter
anymore and she will dig my eyes and my nose out.
She apologized tomorrow morning but I couldn't forgive her.
That hurt tremendously me.
And all the places (or trgs they’re called here) fill with people and many
of the streets too, all of them looking dark and sort of ominous.
It’s not a depressing city really, but on the other hand, I have yet to see
any place that looks at all cheerful except the outdoor in the sunlight—
and even that gets very harsh and blinding at noontime, like looking down
First Ave,for a cab in the sunshine after it’s snowed.
And the ship, the black freighter disappears out to sea. And on it is me.
O.