Two Poems

Richard Deming

Shall I Read from the History of the Battle of Thermopylae?

Now that there is nothing left, for instance,
the taste of fear dries the upper lip.
Wood-doves rustle coppery wings along city 
gates. What I want is to not want,
not you, not the scent of mango, not the livid 
faces of fashion models, their necks
arching perversely upward. 
Not a single moment. 

The cigarette smoke’s shapes auger thirty 
mornings of fraught 
silences, cold tea, that flickering anger 
of morning 
talk shows and an empty table set for three: for you,
for me, for the polite ghost of intensest 
manners. 
  A quince no one will eat rolls 
behind a stove cold
to the touch. 
When things go bad, it gets like this.

Where’s the gift of sudden continuity? 
Dare say no
into an open well or we’ll all drown of 
such falling. 

The field of middle distance is dry.
Sepia-colored 
cornstalks strewn
all around, pointing a given direction. 

Sing out the measure

of a narrow pass. I’ve been lost here

before. With thumb and forefinger, blot out
the sun, 
Pilgrim. So as not
to turn my back, trembling, shine towards
the unspeakably insistent. 
With the lights
out, it’s not so far. In the movies, it’s called
day for night and I will open
my eyes to a shadow cut in the shape of your mouth.
In the pattern of ten stars and three thousand 
times three thousand
pearly eyes of gutted mackerel, 
the map home is a logic of longitude and shame.

What if you were a Persian king, ashes covering
your forehead, your eyelashes, your scarred
right cheek, how would you arrive 
across a trail of broken 
leaves, mercury poisonings, the ocean’s 
systemic threat and verdict? Would you
take the shore 
born aloft on a dozen strong backs?

And when articles of faith fashion
a loosened garment
the disheveled will not return. 
In the days before now, before this one stretched
so wide round us, 
I wanted a direct address,
in something else I wanted to say and 
yet
I do not know how to ask for fresh water, 
for a ripened date, for three 
pomegranate seeds. 

On the last night of the sordid republic, 
a soldier’s wife
waves goodbye as
the right nipple thickens in the 
cold, pressing
itself against her blue t-shirt. 
A bright proximity is a wrong kind of silence.

In this garden of unregenerate narrative, 
see words but think:
arrows darkening the sky

for the unseen
read: loss;
for every comma reckon the ways 
hope can pierce the sternum
in half. A rose leans near
the open window and thrushes play 
at voices. 
The world thus put under
by verb and noun. 

A husband runs headlong towards the river while
over his shoulder the cottage window
brackets the wife’s face in an attic room. Drapes
stir, then she’s gone as each promise 
he does not keep 
drifts down
past the walls, 
           along the paths
to the sea, there where 
children and old widows 
heap up driftwood and dried seaweed
and this is, so please it, where I am loved. 
There are such Spartas.

After Kurosawa
—for Patricia Willis

In Rashomon the rain
does not sleep, sounds
like ink-darkened pages, turning, then
unwriting themselves.

In the unrecognizably literal forest
likeness is like falling,
like catching,
like falling.
          It is human nature to fall
into the middle of things.

What matters is that in this tale someone’s dead,
murdered,
tied to a post and things unsaid.
Some arctic continent of unspeakable
names opens wide round.

Mifune conjures close a relentless ghost, deeper than you think,
and who’ll speak for it?—That’s where you come in.

Remember me remember
what is here
what is white what is true
what is heat.

As you turn to go,
the weave of threadbare scrolls goes slack—
the day becomes a draft of distances
no one can bear.
Still, it moves:
Look/tell, look/tell, look/tell.

In the coming dark, everyone left until the room spun
against its own
unblinking. Not even the story
owns its own
moment.

And, later, who would not wish

in the want-nothing light
to wear a face
just like
the rain in Rashomon.