Two Poems

The Savage Curtain

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Kraków, Poland

Through beaded portière curls
pink nails – a shout: chod?

dziewczyny. Giggly Ukrainians,
the stray Pole, line the wall.

From between oak-hard women
I choose the dark, apple-breasted

girl. Fresh, guitar-shaped, lively
eyes that do not survey water stains

and flaking ceiling beneath
the boulevard –

in perpetually overcast Kraków,
I am daily there – delude myself

chocolates and gratuities appreciate.
Once, I remiss for weeks,

and those cheeks I pinched
to teach, Keh-vihn, forgot that

we laughed. I grip her face,
she no longer opens softly

as she does at my photographs
of snow-dusted Kyiv. My city,

she tells me she returns in “just
days” that creep until the women lose

reason to giggle. When I lay beside
a blonde Pole, she demands I be “healthy,”

free from the diseases all blacks carry.
Resentful of her smirk, that she assumes

authority because she has my money,
I tell her, “Yes. Of course I am.”

Aubade

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I. Causa conjugii ab amore non est excusatio recta.
“The plea of marriage is not a legitimate defense against love.”
– Code of Love for the Twelfth Century

– for Oksana

Athens, Georgia

You are slender & doubled –
silhouette against the blinds, before I

place on my spectacles.
You are set to spend this weekend

with the distant husband
& daughter you do not love.

Sun disturbs the pregnant chill
in ripplets over our showered bodies

distressing into congress.
Before the mirror, your eyes’ flutter

signals protest, more lust
than guilt. Will he mistake

my scent as the eight hours from Athens
to Tampa? Your warmth, your rebuke

as the breadth of your marriage?
Halfway between, you ring me,

voice shrill with hatred of highways.
They are too long; not one place

nor the other. We make love
as solace daily & sleep little

in the weeks since you conceded
you are not made of stone.