Pysanka
The recurrence of myth is perspective, never reached.
Talking about eggs, none were happier balanced than
those in Figueres, without beeswax, or “Maeterlinck’s
batik-wrapped metaphysics,” ready to jump from the
parapet of the red cake. Sanctus cactus sanctimonious
soiled fingers slop-slurp-sleepy on the chimney sweep
of the slippery blue-green satire. What is the Purkinje
effect on that tree of life and swastika? The soil of sol,
so-solitude that takes light from the medicine cabinet,
and displays original sin on a rack of crumpled soles.
First, the disappearing act, then the Phoenix raptured
by a suicide bomber’s desire, except that wasn’t quite
it in the long tub of aphorisms cheating death as well.
To reinstate is for ‘is’ is to erase the misanthropic folk
lore, word for the curious wonder of an apple obelisk
reaching smoke, babbling about the efficacy of doubt.
No! That is impossible. Your genius is self-aware like
a mosquito, and your conscience as clear as ejaculate,
but there is nothing canonical about a dye turning
on stone. History is a leaf that latches on thatched wind.
Takemitsu’s Kitchen
The curtain falls, light falls. Dough balls on the kitchen bar.
Outside, leaves are falling again. They were once light, like
feet. Like the universe, they expand. The dough will expand
time and time again. When I turn into salt, an ocean churns.
Natural for you to lift the crib, but when leaves knead light,
it is natural to leave. The divorce lawyers can squat quietly
under the bridge. Soon in expanse, the undertaker will fail.
The pacifiers, Lucifers, and subterranean plates can endure
the crash onto a different earth. We are expecting the baby
to like carrot juice. And leaves evaporate back to the trees.
Stars turn into magnets, which turn down bourgeois trees.
Turn without shaking light. Did you expect turtles to turn?
Their hard carapaces sometimes sting red. You need ovens
to bake your future. My dough is unashamed of blown-up
dolls. Today, I will call by a different name. I will wait by
a different mirror. My balls will rise, and my toes will rise.
Turtles will rise when nails fall down in sea’s imagination.
The curtain will fall from discontent. Night falls. My head
opens and leaves slither out. Light expands in filial piety.
Petty officers who fail us. Do not fail in your imagination.
Nicolas chien d’expérience
Disagreement is no parley when behind your dentures
the scream is a snore, and nowhere is home to flattery.
Utopia burns at the seashore, and men in suits feed on
a bone of fettered cine, as the waves riff on, doggedly,
like numbers. Do we count on the paunch and paucity
of deliberate tulips wading about their hospital beds?
I’d contrive many wicked jaunts on and on the bench.
The knob-white palisades lean over the burning bush,
while the knife is appalled by the cupcake’s appliqué.
But the stray dog sleeps atop the cliff at Yoros Castle.
Those views of the Bosphorus and outlying Black Sea
are home to him, and he calls them the Unmanned It.
He sits on a precarious stone and licks his undescended
testicles and dreams of a woman descending the stairs,
on repeat, on repeat, then rewind, or the shah walking
down a spacecraft in all of its cardboard glory. I want to
touch a dog, not just any dog, in a park where the sand
spits on his face and that doesn’t bother him as much as
the bitumen roads that claim to curb society’s contagion.
Where I end up on consignment is none of your business.
Moonlight
for Sharanya
Lost, we search first for our bodies, then ourselves.
You glower under the lid. So what. Lights flicker on,
cut the entrails of our universe. In your wake, we collect
dust, insects and footprints. Found the orbit of trees
like us in mourning, incantations bristling ladder-like
so you’d rise to climb down, kiss our starry speculations.
Maybe trees are apocalyptic, but a rabbit waits—it fears
death on your second coming. In reflection, even a witch
seems fairer to marry. Beauty nails us shut at the other
side of the coffin. You are beautiful so you lie within,
while we hunt the wolf down by looking hard, though
looking hardly makes us visible. Without you, doubt
betrays a dead rabbit. Light survives by convalescence.
But so do you, periodically. And that beauty must wane
before it returns steadfast in its wet, whispering urges.
If angels’ wings bind, then your swaddles must peel off
in our unseasoned brine, this secret love where you find
yourself flung free into a ride across oceans and deserts,
for wilderness is your only home, and sad courage is but
a pasty darkness, mon petit chou, a briefer form of light.
The Other Line of Détournement
Night shapes the espaliered pear tree at the Cloisters. It is
medieval times served on a platter, a lame duck braised in
honest tea. If militancy is planned by a mouse click today,
you’d rather plant sweet marjoram in a gulag, or Thai basil
to flail swiftly on a burning patio. There goes the partridge
hidden in the candelabra. Late summer repetition seeing-in.
As brief winds rest on the stony artifact, you see the map of
Acropolis framed and hung sideways—a violinist, his face
and bridge of the violin puckered into twin amphitheaters.
Beauty is colossal and deaf, as in that Picasso who painted
a blue hipster, turned it 90° to the left and called it The Old
Guitarist. Oh, you must be drinking water from Duchamp’s
shithole not the world. If I furnish my house with discards
from the alley, and high society swings by to tell me O yes
those mannequin legs by the TV are sizzling hot and pretty
ironic, I’d be quiet about her invisible pair of peasant shoes.
The world picture-frames itself before our words and deeds
suffer from rogue meiosis. As you drink beer at parties, and
resound your reading as a howl of sublation in a tin can, all
cats double over and drown drinking their blood from a can.
Para
He considered each piece of sloughed-off furniture
a lost Picasso painting. That trick of nature, when all
was damaged in the garage, except for Christ’s beard
hanging down your chin. Now, his life was dismal as
you walk through the peepshow, septic from memory;
his deep-space sofa bed, newly purchased, turned out
crankier than a slave robot. You succumb to the lonely
temples of the earth, bathe yourself in vinegar to know
what not to feel. In this museum, something about the air
tells you that birds fall from trees in their sleep, and Hobo
Clown was La Sagrada Família melted down and built
without the mistakes of clay, as it understood the province
of color. Which is more emphatic? The sun or the heat?
Gaudí couldn’t tell if Allison Schulnik was his original.
I spend my days alluding to Neo Rauch’s paintings,
living for the ghosts of Leipzig Baumwollspinnerei.
If you know the word “pastiche” as useless, you will
have known his great games, and not dismissed my para-
taxis as frolicking in the shadows of some cotton factory.
And he, you, I, and we came, undone by summer-rain.
Zhou Sivan was born in Malaysia and lived in Singapore and New York. He currently resides in Chicago and is writing a dissertation on the transnational and multilingual networks of socialist realism and modernism in the literary archive of Malayan communism. His poems appear in anthologies and journals such as Lana Turner, Asymptote, The Salt Anthology of New Writing, and The Columbia Review. His collection of sonnets, Zero Copula, is forthcoming in 2015 from Delete Press.