Four Reincarnations. Max Ritvo
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2
1 For Crow
2 To Randal, Crow-Stealer, Lord of the Greenhouse
3 Sky-Sex Dreams of Randal
4 Stalking My Ex-Girlfriend in a Pasture
5 Mommy Harangues Poor Randal
6 Lyric Complicity for One
3
1 Poem About My Wife Being Perfect and Me Being Afraid
2 When I Criticize You, I’m Just Trying to Criticize the Universe
3 Poem in Which My Shrink Is a Little Boy
4 Radiation in New Jersey, Convalescence in New York
5 Poem Set in the Day and in the Night
6 Poem to My Dog, Monday, on Night I Accidentally Ate Meat
7 Troy
8 Heaven Is Us Being a Flower Together
9 Afternoon
4
1 Second Dream
2 Plush Bunny
3 Crow Says Goodbye
4 Appeal to My First Love
5 The Big Loser
6 The Vacuum Planet of the Pee Pee Priestess
7 The Blimp
8 The End
9 Touching the Floor
10 Zyprexa, the Snow Pills
11 Snow Angels
12 The Hanging Gardens
13 Universe Where We Weren’t Artists
Acknowledgments
1
LIVING IT UP
The bed is on fire, and are you laughing?
You leave the bed
and leave me without thought.
The springs want to embrace each other
but they’re afraid if they break
their spiral, they will never
be able to hold anyone.
I wish you would let me know
how difficult it is to love me.
Then I would know you love me
beneath all that difficulty.
You are tending not only to me, you tell me,
but to your other child—the air,
and air puts his feet in my slippers,
and air scrubs his teeth on my brush,
and we must learn to share a bed,
we must learn to share a body.
The money is running out.
We will have to split one needle
this winter—one end for me,
one end for air.
THE CURVE
Something, call it X, wanted a body
so it made our bodies.
But our bodies weren’t right for it—
gum around the bones,
a rash of gold or black,
eyes like blisters
leaking fondness.
*
X realized all animal bodies were like this, so it made language.
*
Language forced X into the body
like carbonation into a soda.
When I hear the word rock,
a translucent lump
shimmers in front of the world.
To its right, a piece of glass cuts a clear finger,
and to its left, there pulses a rocky, low, cold crust.
*
Though the images
vary exhaustingly and troublingly,
I always remember
the spoke of earth
cutting into the ocean
we saw from above, on a bicycle ride,
the sheen of the bicycles
spreading over the earth,
distinct from the ocean’s sheen.
The sheens alarmingly similar to one another
to be so close together—like two bodies making love.
*
We imagine a vertical meadow
complicated into our world needlessly
but complication is all X ever wanted for us.
We misunderstand purity. This is purity.
*
I am your lover and X’s.
I am too good a lover
to ever be bored:
Skinny, hairy-chested,
made of pellets of rice,
cheeping in a way that’s
endearing and inappropriate,
confused, surprised at the confusion,
surprised at the surprise,
and so on, very tiringly, so on.
THE SENSES
Everything feels so good to me:
my wool hat,
the cocoon of dryness in my throat.
The sound of burning vegetables
is like a quiet, clean man folding sheets.
But I keep having thoughts—
this thought always holding at bay the next thought
until it sours into yet
another picture of dissatisfaction
that loves to be thought,
another pear, ugly
as the head
of a man who is thinking.
I thought my next thought would be a vision of my suffering;
I thought I would understand the yellow lightning in a painted storm—
the crucial way it disappears
when I imagine myself flung
headlong into the painting.