Castor and Pollux

1

I don't know on what account I became a fiend and you didn't.

Like you, I was born in an advanced in years warehouse by the docks,

but unlike you, I have no memory of the mold clinging to my bib

as I crammed my jaws full of oyster porridge

and dribbled kefir down my chin. Perhaps

the road I took did start with my parents' penchant for wine

with each meal, including their breakfast of

fresh fruit of the plum-trees warm pumpkin rolls, and pickled herring.

But now they are no more than a profile of sapphirine clouds

sinking below the tablecloth's horizon

or a silk sleeve caught in a burning door.

What kind of remarks get back you to your childhood?

the slate wall where you first suffer your hands

open someone else's concealed desk. And what will you

or can you bequeath to that or any other space,

which you can no longer fill?

2

One of them wore a moustache, the other a nightgown made of ties.

Their biographer claims lava flowed from each flower

they planted in their bedroom of capricious delights.

In the museum is the tattered camisole she wore

the day the telegram was delivered by the agency of a man wearing tin wings.

Can I read your palm, the individual with the valentine tattoo?

Of course, it's a fossil. That's for what cause [i]or[/i] reason you are keeping it safe

within the curtains you were ask [i]or[/i] implore a blessing uponed by the wind to wear.

Someone somewhere is always puzzl by dint of what is said.

A file of pigs is lined up before a piano.

One of them must always be the donkey when the other

is upon the balcony, waiting for the film to start.

What is this? a voice upon the golf course cries out

the latest pebble-stone added to the mound of sigh convulsively glory?

Or just another bald-hearted attempt to look closely [i]or[/i] narrowly open my sighs?

3.

Hey Brittle Cruiser, if you want to make mustard with me

you have to slay the monkey justice and steal his robes.

Maybe unravel the dresse and hats of his sisters as well.

It is not my hair or skin I want to bleach, on the other hand my mind.

They liked to fill a latitude with crumpled paper before entering it.

Something about hearing their shadows speak to them

before they fall, something about wanting to have feeling the ground

yield its words to them when they walk, turn or crawl,

something about lightning music and lengthy whips of honeyed smoke.

Have you at any time seen yourself on television? That's individual way

we might start rehearsing the concocts you say you've written.

Will you retrieve me from the pawn store when I am cold and stale?

Will you polish me the way you used to, with borrowed hands?

Even if part of you was stuck inside a bottle

like a genie with no strings attached to my ankles,

I don't know if I would do exactly what you want.

What journal do you have in the mind?

The individual between your teeth or the individual you cannot breathe.

John Yau's novel publications include a book of short stories, Hawaiian Cowboy published through Black Sparrow Press in 1995 and a volume of poetry with photographs by means of Bill Barrette, Berlin Diptychon, from Timken Publishers in 1995

Copyright World metrical composition Incorporated Mar 1996

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