Peter Yovu


I’ve found a poem					 


by Lorca to show you.
I’ll read it to you when you come, come 
quickly, a word just slipped out, the one
I thought you might translate for me, 
it’s on fire in the kitchen,
I can feel the heat in the bones
of my hands and in my teeth,
its starting to boil the canola by the stove,
burn the sugar black, the cupboards down,
the whole house down, the house 
is turning into a flaming word with me
inside its final fuel, its last gasps, its

please please please please please



Temporary Tinnitus


In movies when a bomb goes off
a weething whine lets you know
a wire strung tight between 
the hero’s ears has been
struck.

Wincing, dazed, reduced to a thought’s 
version of a man, he barely hangs on, 
but does, until the wire dissolves as  

horizons do at dusk and he falls 
back down to action’s ground, 
strides away from the blood and rubble 
and into the cricketless night 
with no need to think 
anything out.



Scratch							


I had a girlfriend who liked me
to scratch her back. Told me
just where. It was easy enough,
and I liked doing it. One night, alone 
(she was gone by then)
in my room the sheet of blank paper
I’d left on my table (I was going
to write her, beg her to come home)

asked me to scratch it. Okay, I thought, 
I’ll go along with this. I thought 
I knew what to do but 
the sheet of blank paper was not
even remotely like my girlfriend,
it had a lot of complicated directions. 
For one thing it made it clear 
I was doing it wrong. 

Try again, it insisted.
Move left to right. Move down.
Little curls, little angles, little loops,
here and here and here.

A sheet of paper, for God’s sake! This is bad.

I thought I said to to myself, but it must have heard.
Not just any sheet of paper, the sheet of paper said,
but a few square inches of God’s own back.

Now sharpen your pencil
and try again.



Where Does It Come From?
						For Robert Kingston


It comes out of thin air
as a pinnacle of rain, as
a crescendo of spirals.
It comes from behind
music as a fingerprint

on a cloud, along a beach
of haunted tangerines, 
as the color that 
lubricates the spine.
It seeps from seams.

It comes down
rivers of grief, before
water before time
and all the mirrored
arrivals of face.



Poetry


As if it could, or should,  
save you, you have been
despondent, despondency 
rooted in the single filament of hope
you have left, the one that says
something good may yet come of this.

This? No, you must yank that hair out of
whatever golden follicle it grows from,
then knive out the follicle itself and say
with conviction, more than conviction,
say it on all fours, with with your head bent down
to the unmopped tiles of a gas station toilet, 

no good will ever come of this 
and banish, snuff the simpering wide-eyed child’s
upturned face whining but no harm either, right?  No! 
No good! No good! No good! No good! No good ever, even
from saying no good!



A Little Essay on the Moment


A moment is everything everythinging all at once turning with immeasurable swiftness 
into the next. Though it is made of trees, trampolines, quasars, frowns . . . it has 
no parts. If it did, some of them might get left behind. 



When I was a Child


When I was a child there were fewer things. Beetles for example— far fewer than nowadays. 
And there were only 8 baseball teams in the American League, 8 in the National. And 
worries— how many are there today? Only 4 or 5 back then. Apart from that there were 
tigers, marbles, buses, windows and stoops. That’s about it.  And when I was very 
young, there was only Mama. Oh, Mama!



Grace


After much banter the host
surprised me, asked me to say grace
I never had before so
I bowed my head to think 
what it would be
but in that silence
a few seconds in I heard
as everyone did
my stomach’s almost endless
plaintive interrogatory 

whine

no one laughed
they probably wanted to 
but this was grace

I said please
forgive my stomach it
has a mind of it own
I said it speaks for itself

for a body
that has cravings
like yours, like everyone’s
the world over

—I could sense approval—

it’s 
starving I said
it could
kill for something to eat. 

Peter Yovu lives near Montpelier Vermont. It’s going to snow tonight and perhaps it will snow when you read this. Other things will happen as well. It’s all, some would say, weather.

 
 

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