I should warn you, I'm going to take a drink of water,
then I'm going to warn you.
I'll keep you in terror as we all are these days.
I have often had organized poems around a conceit
like all ekphrastic poems, all based on artworks and taking
the title of artworks.
And in The Bride of E, I used the alphabet,
so a is for, b is for, and then extended the alphabet
by celebrating a particular letter
and using an alliterative title.
And lately, because I've been working on the translation,
I haven't had time to think about an organizing principle.
So the poems that do get written--
I'm not sure how they cohere together.
But what I've noticed lately is that they
seem to be about the fact that the world is leaning hard
against all of us, and maybe that's enough of a conceit.
So that poem is an example of that.
And what I'm apologizing for is their tone is sometimes sad.
And nobody likes that.
This is called "The Numbers."
"I'm making a strudel of bluebirds.
A Pied Piper is playing a strange song
to the sound of a shredder that's going non-stop.
Each ordinal number's isolated.
Each receipt gets eaten.
Each is made safe.
The dish is hot from the oven.
The mesmerizing sound lulls like a candle on a table
makes a mirror of the eye.
A knife draws a line down the center.
This is mine.
This is yours.
There is no way out.
Every language gets speckled with references
to what it is to be after.
Shredded, sleeping, eyes closed, home-schooled to ignore
what you don't want to see.
Now, down the disposal of the feathers, the unfed, the crust
crumbs, the monogrammed small plates
stamped 'I' for idiocy, mine and yours.
After the fall of the wall, I felt anything was possible.
History would no longer exist.
The mic goes out.
The sound softens.
The books burned down to embers, then ash.
The fever hospital closes for lack of a solution
to the seven deadly sins.
Betrayal for one.
Intolerance for two.
Greed for three.
Cruelty for four.
Large cars for five.
War for six.
Suicide for seven, when it kills more than one."