Lewis Warsh

Swept Away

All the other mornings
of your life passed in slow
motion, & like an angel
with steel wings

You evaporated into the
silence of the damp machinery,
the innards in which sleep
was consciously reappearing

Without knowing why,
trumpeting the same theme
over & over again in your head,
until the repetitions themselves

Were a lot like falling,
though the air of another morning
tasted different, & with a normal savagery
that eclipsed what had gone before

You opened a window onto it all,
separated the leaves from their cells,
& disappeared into a hole
that wasn't there when you last looked

That had never been there,
a hole in the sky & in the ground
a crater where everything was silver
like broken crockery

Heaped onto a dustbin or into the
jaws of a crane, to be taken away
from all this as if it never was
leaving only a stain, irreducible to nothing

After I Was Born

After I was born in the Bronx (but it was only a dream)
A light snow fell on the parkway beneath my window
And the parquet floor was covered with linoleum tiles
My name written in the frost on the window

When I wake up in the middle of the night I'm lying on the floor
It's easy to open a door into a room which is almost empty
Once she came to me in the afternoon & my heart filled with light
The floor is cold but I want to rest here for awhile

(First we will study Whitman with his long lines stretching to infinity;
Next we will study Dickinson, her shortness of breath, like a cat 
         wheezing in the dark)
The center of the universe is not myself, not my parents in the next room
Nor my sister sleeping in her bed
But the bathroom tiles & the cold that seeps into my ribs

It was forbidden to touch another person's body but I did it anyway
My own body was off limits, the trees in the park covered with snow
There's snow on the collar of my coat, a single crystal
(I stay home from school & wait for you to call
Maybe I was born for this secret assignation?)

---

Lewis Warsh's most recent book is Ted's Favorite Skirt (2002). He is co-editor, with Anne Waldman, of The Angel Hair Anthology (2001) and the editor of United Artists Books. He is an associate professor in the English Department at Long Island University in Brooklyn. contents | previous | next