[w/ apologies to Nathaniel Mackey]


Potemkin was the name that squatted in my
    brain. A straggle of cottages was what
that meant, but a family was what I saw,
                                                                           moth-
    er and father and toddler daughter
each semi-detached from each, all astray
  from the tour half-hostage on the library
                                                                               steps,
     my widening gaze taking in their gait. Moon-
  walking up to its façade, the student guide 
    spoke of the death of the pale youth 
                                                                                      at
whose mother’s bequest the structure gained 
    its name and form. Foundation, if
you will, followed foundering: Harry had
                                                                                      gone
     down with the unsinkable, one carved date
  thus coinciding in cliché with cata-
    strophe… And on the left one read 
that birthday that he shared
                                                                           with
 an I that was still on level terms with 
the sea, yet to be salvage. Savitribai dis-
  mantled the rot of this day with us both
                                                                            and                                                         
      Kesarbai’s keen reached for alien need-
les through constellations beyond our collective 
   ken. Golden meanwhile the toddler drew 
circles around her nuclear near, the wheels  
                                                                                   of
      her soon-to-be-outgrown pram for brush 
and for paint the very mirror she disrupted:
    puddle in whose face the façade of
                                                                            libra-
 ry and sky lurked inverse. And from that 
    turbulence broke the memory of 
the promise of an art beyond the politic,
                                                                               once
      again Potemkin... the baby carriage 
  clattering down the steps in Odesa once
    and every time the battleship is seized from
whose eminence, whose domain, whose name
                                                                                         how-
   ever fast the wheels now reel me off into the 
     bobbing, doubling spheres in which a Fleur and 
a Rocky fake encountered my catlike call. Forever and 
                                                                                                        a
    day, sublunary we manifested each other 
      into wreathes of tritones, horny and ragtag 
  intimations that the blackened circle on the 
                                                                                        cheek
      of the night, laminate leaf of the night, re-
constituted tic-tac-toenail of the night was none 
    other than the injunction of our meaning-
                                                                                    less 
    disjuncture. Missing me with the 
  cowpat caking of my onetime dealer’s 
   makeshift screens, you found yourself 
there too, protective, dispensable, emblem of 
                                                                                    law’s 
    urgency. Sackler, you whispered. Scalia,  
      you all but whistled, into the foundations of 
the pit into which I fell. And then Petushkov, Pet-
  ukow, Schuwalkin, Potemkin. Naming stairs, villages, 
                                                                                                    pure
       potential of bursa and bursary, of toppled poten-
  tate and Holocene haze, grass implausibly 
         green just before Angela and Jacinda, impossibly
green just before unsoundable invitations rescinded
                                                                                                  or 
not. Who knows, what gives, if not the obscene 
work of sprinklers in the dark, passing from pole to metro-
   pole, passing from how many Summers to which 
                                                                                                    West, 
sprinklers ignorant in the non-
          stick pan, sprinklers like lyrebirds
mimicking shutters mutable in the night                                                                  
                                                                          rain

QUIET COMFORT 


I was what I was. Now I am a bomber jacket. 

Become? Hard pass. Too much too soon.

Elsewhere comments may or may not 
           seize upon a monument’s 
disrepair—but here for more than a moment 

every border is golden, every person 
           a girl, every girl one of those Writers Workshop books 
(think the Purushottama Lal imprint, no apostrophe)

which is to say—extended simple—that everyone is sari-
           clad. Each sari is brocaded with zari, each even thread
the gold-leaved edge of another kind of leaf 

ripped from a crowdsourced encyclical, informing us of its 
           deployment in garments of Bangladesh, of Pakistan, of 
India. Garments of days past graves. What governs 

days like this, for what, days for days, like legs 
           in French braids, particular, universal? I am on the phone 
with a baby. A person, torso printed with a predator’s face, addresses me 

as older brother, I want to say in Korean, which I cannot
           speak. Am I single? What is it to you? If 
this is a dare, does that mean 

                           you chose it over truth? 

Meanwhile my sister mistakes a headscarf
           for five rivers. (“Hi, Pun! Well met!”) She is on the phone 
with her baby. These breakers, this breeze, these braces,

                          are younger than I will ever be. 

Who’s the gull now? (Hyperbolic honeycomb by Haider 
                       Ackerman or not, tag yourself.) 

A pronoun’s face, almost.