WAKE

The mirage’s voices,

a burning door.

You, a broken TV’s wavering screen:

      I’m waiting—

please come back.

      I woke and was on a train:

everything past the glass

     sweltering, in blossom.

Those younger summers,

     we picked blackberries

beside the burnt hulks

     that lined the tracks.

I woke and was on a plane,

     the clouds lit soft like ash,

while somewhere below, away,

     your hair wiped free in clumps

under the damp pressure

     of a cloth. Asleep,

you clutched your red cardigan:

      cardinal weathering a storm

beneath folded wings.

     I woke and you spoke

in a tongue of smoke—

     of lotus leaves shivering

in a downpour, flocks

     scattering from their roost.

I woke and it hadn’t rained

     for a hundred days;

the slatted blinds

     combed clotted light,

the ward as warm and curdled

     as your breath.

Outdoors, smokers sought

     shade’s receding wave.

I reached for a berry set in thorns

     and split my thumb,

a thermometer’s single vein.

     On the red eye back,

I had slept until the tarmac’s

     asphalt sea. Late, afraid,

I waited in the hall

     before knocking on the door.

THE NIGHT

Morning in the city we watched the rays

kite counter-clockwise loops

along the aquarium’s

plaster simulacrum.

Stingers clipped,

they brushed our fingers

with their smiles. In another room rank with ozone,

the eel roiled in its globe,

bound to human boredom

by glass and steel.

Twin poles rose

from the turbid murk

to chain its current

while a string of lights flickered each time it smeared

its snout against

the pane. Porcine, garish,

nearly eyeless: the nightmare

or the night. We

muscled to the front

while it cut figure-

eights through the mud, as if searching for its missing

limbs. I couldn’t help

but think of the ink

winding up your arm,

the clockwork scribed

across your spine

by some ex-Hell’s Angel

on the island—how that first time in a room lit

through rain, I saw another us

move beneath our skin.

There, where I pressed

my lips, proof for Balzac’s

dream of the self

as a million memories

burnt into a nerve—so nervous, I almost couldn’t.

All this: mnemonic

for ink, for implication,

for Balzac, whose heart

burst five months

after he first wore

the ring. Your hand

wandered the tank’s patina of past fingers.

I wondered but didn’t

ask your thoughts.

We left, and behind us

flowed the human crush.

Down the corridor,

your grip curled mine

in kindness. The lights flicked on and off.

THESEUS’S SHIP

Summers, they drove us to Steveston.

Even then, he didn’t have a single one

of his original teeth. Seagulls and terns

massed above the seiners bloodying

the Pacific. Each season, new boats

worn older—old boats painted new. Once,

from the corner of my eye, I saw a red bird

plummet through the waves—or was it a white bird

reddened by the sun? Salmon, mackerel,

haddock, sole: they quivered in their beds of ice.

Some mornings they drove us to the pool.

We dived through the lukewarm chlorine

after dimes. Her smile: more gold and arsenic

than bone. I hate to say I thought of this

when I unboxed the ashes packed in Styrofoam,

or, worse, that I can’t recall which of them

first showed me how to hold my breath, make

my body a star, so I could stay afloat.

WHETHER

To speak of the ever? 

The never after? Water begging of dry weather  

a place. Looking back, 

which was less than have and more than lack?  

To recall our pity, 

recall the fireflies, building their burning city. 

Michael Prior is the author of Burning Province (forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House in spring 2020) and Model Disciple. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, POETRY, Narrative, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Poetry Northwest, and the Asian American Writers Workshop’s The Margins, among other magazines and anthologies. He teaches at Macalester College.