Please enjoy these two poignant poems by Lev Xue.
—The Editors
In the morning, we found the snapped off
heads of Japanese Knotweed, more tracks, and excreta
my dog treed a bear last night
a black fool in the dark clinging
the moon shone behind the crown of —
pine resembling ponderosa pine.
I followed the dog and screamed,
you idiot, you suicide
but it was the bear that fled
an animal that ran from strange
indictments, a friction between loose, incompatible surfaces.
The fresh buds of spring scattering around fur,
a roan hound, with a round body.
These were dogs and people from the city.
They were five or six under a canopy, hungry,
old friends meeting for the first time
after having been apart, a little strange to each other.
So, they talked about the news, ate roasted sausages,
a scent that burned through the surrounding woods.
An animal felt it, and became alert to his hunger.
He has just been relieved from a long sleep.
He has dreamed of feasts as his body exhausted from living.
He was weary of them, but he felt something else there,
another outsider, someone soft and eager, and hungry too.
On the Fear of Dying
When I was reading about death
there was dying all around me.
In the park the bat houses
circumscribe
the stadium lights.
On the floor I counted my moles
the nevus inside my eye.
Like expanding cauliflowers or a cloud chamber
hesitations in otherwise flat affect
benign, brown and flat,
The doctor is silent
during the whole procedure.
The glowing light of the otoscope:
//
The glowing the enveloping light
The vines that drop into the dog’s bowl
The red green blue staircased plants
The grasses that grow the cat swallows in tufts
The light in your eyes the mascara the mask I feared
The green light of the PAX the way you looked
in the bathroom the curlers the buzzer the bath stopper
the dog chewed
To the west the smoke on the fire escape
The tables my lack of rhythm the projector screen
The screaming the walking I became better though
The lady Godiva walking for what purpose
The gingko trees fanning the winter smell
The difficult geometry the crooked
leaves the car the blood on the seat the very cold
dog the being alone so
Everyone is alone sometimes the up the down
The potted road the cold grey art on muddy Beacon St
The rash the distrust the oriental fan
The diving loon the gold parrots the thing in the deep
The names of cheeses the sound of Greensleeves
//
If they saw me through you
If even when someone else is
failing, you can work on
yourself
If I hate poems about women and bodies
and plants
I am letting it go.
//
Our death:
the striking image in the mirror.
My death:
when I first walk the dog after that first night
and every silence is my own.
Lev Xue lives in Red Hook Brooklyn with the dog Poopy Xue, and is learning to fish. He is finishing a PHD on the Politics and Experimental Practice of 20th Century Psychoanalysis at Harvard University.
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Oh, damn, these are good.
Bear poem is lovely. Delicate.