WAKE
The mirage’s voices,
a burning door.
You, a broken TV’s wavering screen:
I’m waiting—
please come back.
I woke and was on a train:
everything past the glass
sweltering, in blossom.
Those younger summers,
we picked blackberries
beside the burnt hulks
that lined the tracks.
I woke and was on a plane,
the clouds lit soft like ash,
while somewhere below, away,
your hair wiped free in clumps
under the damp pressure
of a cloth. Asleep,
you clutched your red cardigan:
cardinal weathering a storm
beneath folded wings.
I woke and you spoke
in a tongue of smoke—
of lotus leaves shivering
in a downpour, flocks
scattering from their roost.
I woke and it hadn’t rained
for a hundred days;
the slatted blinds
combed clotted light,
the ward as warm and curdled
as your breath.
Outdoors, smokers sought
shade’s receding wave.
I reached for a berry set in thorns
and split my thumb,
a thermometer’s single vein.
On the red eye back,
I had slept until the tarmac’s
asphalt sea. Late, afraid,
I waited in the hall
before knocking on the door.
THE NIGHT
Morning in the city we watched the rays
kite counter-clockwise loops
along the aquarium’s
plaster simulacrum.
Stingers clipped,
they brushed our fingers
with their smiles. In another room rank with ozone,
the eel roiled in its globe,
bound to human boredom
by glass and steel.
Twin poles rose
from the turbid murk
to chain its current
while a string of lights flickered each time it smeared
its snout against
the pane. Porcine, garish,
nearly eyeless: the nightmare
or the night. We
muscled to the front
while it cut figure-
eights through the mud, as if searching for its missing
limbs. I couldn’t help
but think of the ink
winding up your arm,
the clockwork scribed
across your spine
by some ex-Hell’s Angel
on the island—how that first time in a room lit
through rain, I saw another us
move beneath our skin.
There, where I pressed
my lips, proof for Balzac’s
dream of the self
as a million memories
burnt into a nerve—so nervous, I almost couldn’t.
All this: mnemonic
for ink, for implication,
for Balzac, whose heart
burst five months
after he first wore
the ring. Your hand
wandered the tank’s patina of past fingers.
I wondered but didn’t
ask your thoughts.
We left, and behind us
flowed the human crush.
Down the corridor,
your grip curled mine
in kindness. The lights flicked on and off.
THESEUS’S SHIP
Summers, they drove us to Steveston.
Even then, he didn’t have a single one
of his original teeth. Seagulls and terns
massed above the seiners bloodying
the Pacific. Each season, new boats
worn older—old boats painted new. Once,
from the corner of my eye, I saw a red bird
plummet through the waves—or was it a white bird
reddened by the sun? Salmon, mackerel,
haddock, sole: they quivered in their beds of ice.
Some mornings they drove us to the pool.
We dived through the lukewarm chlorine
after dimes. Her smile: more gold and arsenic
than bone. I hate to say I thought of this
when I unboxed the ashes packed in Styrofoam,
or, worse, that I can’t recall which of them
first showed me how to hold my breath, make
my body a star, so I could stay afloat.
WHETHER
To speak of the ever?
The never after? Water begging of dry weather
a place. Looking back,
which was less than have and more than lack?
To recall our pity,
recall the fireflies, building their burning city.
Michael Prior is the author of Burning Province (forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House in spring 2020) and Model Disciple. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, POETRY, Narrative, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Poetry Northwest, and the Asian American Writers Workshop’s The Margins, among other magazines and anthologies. He teaches at Macalester College.