Askold Skalsky

Cinq poèmes

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Cemeterid

 

The yellows of October stain the air and crisp 

the wind around my collar as I head for 

the bright garden of death, some oak hill cemetery 

guarded at the entrance by a vertumnal angel 

 

from marbled pasts. I’ve come for serenity, 

turning reflexive at every tree, wanting to 

weed and sweep the tombstone patches 

of their dirt, to clear a piece of sod 

 

with a marker on it, arranging flowers or some 

photographs into an archive of mortal frills, 

like primping crows. I’ve come to dance 

secretly between the stones, ready for 

 

the body’s tumble, wanting the spice of a well 

ordered death, a vulture-free decomposition 

with all the gimmicks of the crypt, the spacious 

alcoves underneath the altar slab or just 

 

a hibernaculum of boxwood and cedar scents. 

I’ve come for marriages, all set for a picnic 

of sugar skulls and corpse-shaped gingerbreads, 

for laughter in formal wear, for lascivious 

 

bodies eager to resume their enterprise. 

They’ve been here too. I smell the traces of their 

pores and pulsing thighs, a place for jaded lovers, 

mindless like leaves clinging to the plotted earth. 

 

The Return 

 

 

In the old house on the pike 

my parents bustle in the 

kitchen light, while others 

wait amid the jubilee 

inside the living room, 

the Strauss waltzes on 

extended play behind 

the sliding doors that never 

shut over the patchwork 

floorboards of my boyhood home. 

 

Downtown I exit the frail 

brightness of a lounge 

into the rutted street. 

Someone walks up, lugging 

a wooden box he tries to shove 

into the back seat of the Chevrolet.  

 

No boxes in my car, I yell. 

They'll scratch my sleek 

and wonderful machine—

 

and drive away down Main Street

across the slow arch of the bridge, 

feeling the left wheel wobble 

on the puckered stone. 

 

The tire is flapping like a slit 

balloon. I surge forward past 

the liquor store, the cemetery gate, 

then stop before an auto shop 

with layers of dark ferrite on the walls.

A man in overalls appears. 

I've had a flat, I tell him, and 

point to the incision gaping 

crossways on the threads. 

He pokes it with a wrench. 

 

Maybe tomorrow …. 

 

I stare uncomprehendingly—. 

this wait will cost me happiness, 

will cause me sharp, bewildering despair.

 

Hagtime

 

thin faced and tigerish

she’ll crush your bones with her stone breasts

 

her nipple-piercing tongue 

then bake you in a mortar-pestled stove 

 

whisking the blood 

away with her great broom 

 

a baba-babe 

and mama-moll with smoky breath 

 

a broad with savory tastes and wicked teeth

licking her plate  

 

soufflé of child flesh

pink-cheeked papilottes 

 

drumstick thigh and apple hips 

in her high house 

 

her feathery sty

from which she swoops with iron spit 

 

and on her picket fence 

stand skulls 

 

wobbling with lighted candles 

in their eyes 

 

After the After Journey 

after Ray Bradbury 

 

You can’t get to paradise from here—Mars is first,

like that paperback cover I once saw on the swivel-stand 

at Corson’s, at the corner of High and Pine, in early mid-

century, the booster rockets ready on the sunless sands 

 

and pointing at the stars. We are old, so old, yet still 

we make this pilgrimage into the stuccoed hillsides 

of dark cratered plains. We’ve waited long enough 

on the preclusive earth, pushing our years before us 

 

like blind hogs in their primordial pen. There’s nothing 

for us here, so we have come to the blessed space-station 

of the real, the red planet’s jumping off place, where locked 

up seers fidget their eyes on heaven’s holy rocket ship, 

 

chasing the shadowed heart’s experience, the ultimate 

secret of joy’s extra-terrestrial ache, to sample a fresh world—

then we can die, free of the mirrored carnival of mazing 

corridors and rock-hard shadows jangling their bangles 

 

in the summer rain amid the motionless engines of solidity. 

We mount this towered needle, battened with unknown dust 

and bulging with sublime vents and tubes of glory from our 

new home, dry like the August pods of Jersey heat. 

 

The kettled rocket climbs, leaving trails of incense from its yellow 

fire that lifts us even beyond Pluto’s ken into the multiverses 

of Elysium, where God surely abides in his bright helmet 

and the cockpit’s swiveled seat, as I explode in powdered light, 

 

flung by velocity’s shining blade out of the hole-blown hull, 

screaming toward the Lord and sailing past darkened candles 

not yet ripened into sight, a thousand-headed aeronaut 

with golden palms spread out in centerless, immobile flight.   

 

Changelings

 

Kidnapped at birth by evil 

sprites, who left their 

split-lipped, lame-souled 

spawn in place, with holes 

inside their backs 

where guts should be,

 

marauding the wide planet 

with their bitter lives,

flaying each other’s skins 

and turning on the spit

while we grow up 

in spectral exile,

kept in monstrous pens

 

and hope that maybe 

sudden laughter

(or more pain)

will sway them

to restore us 

to ourselves again.

 

Askold Skalsky has had poems appear in a number of magazines and online journals in the USA as well as in literary publications in Europe, Canada, India, and others, and recently including Poetry Salzburg Review, The Decadent Review, Modern Literature, Amsterdam Quarterly. A first collection, The Ponies of Chuang Tzu, was published in 2011; a subsequent collection is to be out in December. Originally from Ukraine, Skalsky resides in Frederick, Maryland with his 3 cats and 3,000 books. Bienvenue au Danse, Askold.

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