Brian Henry is the author of six books of poetry—Astronaut (published in the U.S. and England, where it was short-listed for the Forward Prize, and also published in Slovenia in translation), American Incident, Graft, Quarantine (winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America), The Stripping Point, and Wings Without Birds (Salt Publishing, 2010). His seventh book Lessness is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2011. His poetry has been collected in many anthologies and has been translated into Croatian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Slovenian. He has co-edited Verse since 1995, and he co-edited The Verse Book of Interviews. His translation of the Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun's Woods and Chalices appeared from Harcourt in 2008, and his translation of Aleš Šteger's The Book of Things is forthcoming from BOA Editions.
EPITHALALIUM
What was I
but a cell in motion
the occasional collision
river gutter culvert
window through which I see you
the end-
point
at the horizon
to which the I in me
moved
as if there were still there
as if an I
is what I thought
to find there
~
And what was found there
when to you this I cleaved
(by I I mean a we)
(by we we mean a doubling
—no thing halved)
When I say I
we are left to say it
When I see I
there are two there
ABUSING ANOTHER FOR THE SAKE OF
Nothing gets in the way
of the fleas, they're starving
in the vacuum.
Who can blame them for leaping
all at once onto my babies
in the sunroom.
No eating kids
is what I hear lately. No kicking.
No biting. Daddy's vagina hurts,
Miss Donna eats dirt.
I like to touch the where
I bite, to see the pain
on the skin. It's why
my mouth returns again.
No blood yet.
Poor tongue,
you've managed so little
in the past four months.
I've touched you
to grass and sand
but prefer the gravel
that pools at the curb.
I eat the curb song,
can taste the riverbed
it came from, the tractor
that scooped it into a good.
O sun, muscle your way
past the dog's barking wall.
Yellow tractor, yellow sun, yellow dog.
MATERNILIAD
Your polite skin stretches aisle-
ward, immediate horizon,
would turn if there were
a bearing.
The machines work
through the night, cleaning
the air and watering the air.
The glass of ice holds its straw,
the pills in place beside the glass.
Winter digested, the furnace
will not click on, suck moisture.
"The prison of your tongue
within the prison of your sleep
watered me with a beautiful
easy . . . " a sleeptalking thought.
The house splits as it settles,
the carpet shrinks toward
the center. The yard shrinks
toward the center.
—A wasp
in the house clunking against
the walls until it, too shrinks
toward the center. That is where
the broom finds it. The bristles.
Its torn body dragged through
the streets of the house then back
to the center. Nothing of substance
remains.