RÉPRISE
There on the wires the birds returned
Out of the south observe the town.
They look in at your window and see there
Me lying naked in your arms,
Your mouth ajar. It’s not a yawn
Or snoring, it is that deep sleep
That leaves you vulnerable to dream.
I kiss your lower lip and tongue,
I touch your chin and throat, the pit
There, and the hard bone of your chest.
The birds observe us from the wire
And pass their comments back and forth.
They hang like notes on staves. I read,
More than reprise, a second theme.
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Michael Schmidt was born in Mexico in 1947. He studied at Harvard and at Wadham College, Oxford. He is writer in residence at St John’s College, Cambridge, a founder (1969) and editorial and managing director of Carcanet Press Limited, and founder (1972) and general editor of PN Review. An anthologist, translator, critic and literary historian, his Collected Poems appeared in 2010.
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The PN Review
He sang /
like a gas station on a black summer night.
you stand a long time /
by the creek, then /
feed it two pennies, /
one for you, one /
for the love /
inside you that /
you can do nothing /
with or about.
A talisman against the agony /
in his knees and hips //
for which he was taking /
black-market fentanyl
I greet your gliding flight O wings of death / But there are other signs too
realizing that the horizon is a line constituting an intersection between at least two systems, the inner and the outer one. Between an observer on the move and the roads within the landscape ...
the story / the two white women will not retract, despite the fact /
that inside each story we tell another writes itself
the intoxicating ministry of dusk, the anchor of daylight lifting, sheets white / like a freshly crushed pill, // the vortex of the body and the clap of the / coral tongue...
Before we go any further, I want to publicly acknowledge //
that I love every person in this room. I mean it. /
We’ve traveled from all over to be here, and I love /
each of you, all of you, every last one of you, except /
Harold
I tithe 10% of my new underwear to my future /
self, the one who has fallen in love.
Along one river fell /
all the luck in the world.
