[w/ apologies to Nathaniel Mackey]


Potemkin was the name that squatted in my
    brain. A straggle of cottages, I could
have thought, 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 lyre-
birds mimicking shutters mutable
in the night
                  rain