[Poetry] Two Poems by Julian Gewirtz

POETRY - ISSUE FOUR

The Vacationers Returned

JULIAN GEWIRTZ

Hills like peaches sliced open and bright

and steaming, the hot insides of carcasses
exposed to air. The land below us dark as a sky
until the constellations of the city

broke through faint and we descended
toward that blind galaxy on valley floor.
A line in a song reeled off like an arm

You know I’ve been wanting you wanting you
until the next jerks its
fat hand as a mother swats a fly
off her son’s cheek And wanting

you my guy—It must be a week ago today
we walked among the Knossos
torsos where marble floors wing up

the scent of warm milk but this air cold

as a gloom of manure, tracing the perimeter
of that lagoon beyond the tongue-pink reef
jagged as a kiss caught on teeth,

salt in the mouth, salt in the eyes--
I wonder who he’ll be—your hold
on my hand my bacchus
with its fat grapes and wanting

to make something fine of them,
you with your smile, you, toothless one,
your hand on my hand, the molten

dribble still hissing life into the islands
though they are dark and dead. Even now. Torches that
hooked that horizon together at sunset once--

Triptych

1.   The Escape

In the open-air market the bedding boys
throw open blankets as though dancing girls

might appear from behind them, instead
something like a slab of lard sliding up

dusty sunlight rending looping lifting
like most other mornings or a glance from you

I said to myself, my head’s hurting and I’ll
write an anesthesia to feel nice inside,

won’t be sleeping anyway, the moon is fey
and very angry over the nasty thing I did to it.

The jonquil hills
soft and shit-colored below that sherry fog

and tranquilized as the pits of full-grown plums.

After a long night awake you feel safe and clean
in morning but shouldn’t.

Most car accidents occur
within five minutes of home and at dawn.

2. A Mirage for the Infante

What do you see? A pair of folded hands?
A flamenco dancer, dress flipping up or

her castanets cast down, chestnut shells
gone quiet

because it’s depthless. My kid neighbor
could make that flat laughing sound

couldn’t he? He’s got no hair except
on his upper lip, like the dolomite

entryway to the art library with black
moss grown on its topmost rim and stiff

yellow sprouts flecking. Up in his room
that toy’s running again, isn’t it,

the old dolorimeter, measurer of
just noticeable differences in pain,

tail flick test, hot plate test,
would you rather dull? Yesteryear

hurt three dols that one’s leaving me. We have
better means

now to tell you how much you can take.

And what do you see? Noon. A lot of sun behind
that cloud

a flock of sheep rippling across its

voice a little child purling the pretty fire

I am like a duck it says I have a bright beak I say
quack quack quack

3. Of the Body Reclining and Pale

The meat axe opened her up paper-torn nape
and five long strokes pretty as cracked glass

“You can get another picture but you cannot get
another life—"
All day long the cameras take in the living
women passing through this hall talking of

Velazquez, her head in the mirror clouded
because beauty’s a gorgon secret—Can’t look

and leave—The surveillance cameras whirring
over woman and son holding mirror

peering out leering out here is no place
the spell’s a smell of oils in quiet room
after dark

If you can see her face she can see you there

Axe hitting body over-and-over-stroke and
leaves looking-glass as untouched as this boy

with sashed wings who’s been kneeling here
all day long but still she won’t look back at him--

If you can see her face you can get another

Julian Gewirtz is a graduate student in history at Oxford University. His poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, Denver Quarterly, and the Yale Review, among other publications.