Lispector
Hen: animal I can
never understand—warm blooded
with no navel, inventor of the oval,
that shape that asks, Is the world
infinite?
~
Pizarnik
Hind quarters
half slunk, pacing
on the other side
of a name plate,
the wild dog
isn’t.
~
Hikmet
I didn’t know I loved bats—how they
hang by an ankle’s stem. One hobbles along
a branch on the bone hooks of its thumbs.
I love its dissident biology—
black, well-oiled eyes it can live without,
wings that are webbed hands. All fur
and foreskin, private as the little thing
between the legs, it preens. It fans.
~
Svevo
To every passing woman
the ass says, We’ve met.
Do you remember? You rode me
into Bethlehem.
~
Baldassari
Outback
her hair in his harelip
Australia was admitted
except for Elmore
~
Larkin
When carrion’s your business,
You piss on your hands
to sanitize them. Your
bald head you call
an exigence of cleanliness.
The condors lunch at 1:00.
Note
“I didn’t know I loved . . .” is borrowed from Nazim Hikmet’s poem “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved.” “[T]he little thing between the legs” comes from Hikmet’s “Trousers and Skirts in Our Time.” See Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk’s translation, Poems of Nazim Hikmet (Persea Books, 1994), and Saime Göksu and Edward Timms’s biography, Romatic Communist: The Life and Work of Nazim Hikmet (St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
