julia kolchinsky dasbach Poems

"A year of marriage counts as three" - Soviet proverb

Behind us, the Caribbean surf thrums, palm trees clap
their fronds against its wake to dull the edge of familial conversation.

My grandfather raises his shaking glass: To the way you love your husband!
He swallows mouthful after mouthful and motions all of us to drink.

His tastes have changed from vodka to cognac to red Chilean wine
he gulps as though this drink could be his last. In 1962, after three tries

he made it clear: I'll never ask again. So grandmother said yes
because he wouldn't drink or fight or cheat or raise his voice.

She liked his quiet manner of pursuit, that only one hand
could make a fist (he'd lost three fingers as a boy). Lost too, his ancestry

during the war; she liked that hers would have to be his own.
They married in the only way they could: a courthouse wedding

with a Ukrainian shawl spread out beneath their feet, a world
woven between them, salt and bread for luck, no rabbi or vows,

and only one picture. She's captured there against him, her eyes
near-closed, in half-sleep maybe. His arm wraps her shoulder firmly,

under his grip, shadows of her skin giving in (the hip would have been
too forward) and her linen dress is wrinkled and yellowed by light or time

or their early means. Together, they weathered: fifty summer swims
under an aging sun, until it grew too dark to see each other's movements

underwater; thirty Soviet snows when the trollies and buses wouldn't run
and he walked her three miles to the night shift, sat waiting on a snow bank

to take her home; nineteen years in a country that stayed foreign, where their bodies
became immigrants to one another; three languages (none of which were home):

Shut your mouth!
Xvatit' Lyubanka.
(silence)
You know your mother always hated me.
Goteniyu tayer! Again?
I'm not the idiot you make me out to be.
She's dead now. Miortvoya!
But you still love her more.

They raised two children; took one pilgrimage to the Holy Land
and one to the promised where they found a house with room enough

to sleep alone, him on their queen, her on the foldout, so tradition
looked unchanged. Now, they vacation with the family on annual

lush white beaches and request a room with two beds, waking
hours apart and lying under separate umbrellas, staring far beyond the horizon

where sky and ocean blend to an indiscernible blue, a thing
they both called beautiful once.
...

Last night, I tried to hear the way you do, pressed
my helix to the contours of your ear and waited, pressed

harder and waited, but the pulsing never came.
I fell asleep against your skull and then it came on

like a blood rush rusting through, like dream -
you wanted me

dead and used your hands, with knives, toothpicks
and hot tomato sauce (because in dreams the world

makes sense like a kaleidoscope of senses) and there
we had two children, girls I think, (Joy, I called them both)

but you blamed them, (for what? I did not know then)
so I begged, (hands outstretched as though you'd feel them)

begged, that it was all my fault, begged you spare them,
cowered, fell to our pearl-made floor: everything around

white in echo, (please, please, forgive) as the words repeated,
but you still couldn't hear -

with a butcher's knife,
claw-curve of some unnamed beast, you marked

my back, and kept on striking to the stroke
of heavy sleep-rhythm. Awake, I hear it,

like the rocking wave, like the whisper of a hammock
barely moving in an unknown distance: I hear it -

some darkness, bare and beating, a darkness
all your own, dull, hollowing your heart's

unsteady pulse: an echo fading in and out of touch.
...

Metaphor: compares an apple to a spoon and fork to death and then unlinks them from the sunken contours left on sheets when dinnerware shaped bodies take to air

I burrow down into your pillow
once your head is gone and bury
dreaming under the scent you've left behind

incomparable to silver stirring tea.

Meter: measures just how long is left, forgetting to account for breaking

your lungs are spider webs
and I have lost translucent
count of tear and tether

when one line ends, the next is never certain.

Metonym: chains vultures to light to god to augury out of lexical ligatures

you don't believe you'll live
to see our children grown
and I believe you'll live
but doubt those other lives

a future of metal made un-precious by what has touched it.

Mimeses: imitates at truth, an oak out of an oak out of a smoking valley evergreen, and continues miming, signing, acting out

I forgive you your sickness
forgive the anger lodged
in your stomach like a worm
forgive the desire to cut it out
as though your flesh were apple
and fingers made of knives

once nothing stands but a ghost of what was never there.

Modernism: wishes for return beyond knowing

I'll hold you like a winter leaf
imaging you are not made
of snowfall and rot

that romantic gesture contrived out of the body's certain absence.
...

These are not the parts and poems of the Body only… "I Sing the Body Electric," Walt Whitman

Take history, this moment, study it
through webs of skin
that link us
bone to bone and silence us
away from body.

The heart worn
inside out, the lip,
a clef that won't make music,
the bone,
return to it again, and find it
unconcealed,
find it white and broken and
not yours.

I. the drop and tympan of the ears
is silent is autumn
leaf-flesh
is the growing and the root
the part of you
most different from myself
is all the color
of a season you can't shed
is being born(e)
is music heard inside
but echoed
out of salt and water
and the belly.


II. waking or sleeping of the lids
give us dream-language.
i wanted to hear, you said,

the Milky Way in winter, your voice,
floating by us, slow
and blended, I wanted to say,

the forgotten part of dust, goodbye.
I knew you kept it, i'm sorry,
an extra vessel, black and slowing,

i've thought this through, your rhythm,
I even knew just where,
i'm too tired, across the edge of a word

I can't repeat, you're better off
without me, its sibilance wound
winding my wrists to yours.

i am sorry, you sounded out, sounded
out of body and of sleep.
I begged or maybe prayed

that you would wait,
wait out the night, i'll try,
and in the morning, i will,

I came and kissed them
your waking
or sleeping lids.


III. Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth
are out of order. We don't kiss

this way. And the breath?
That too is missing.


IV. The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud
: It's easy to love you,
My answer: but it's hard
to be in love. How naïve then
to place all that weight
on difficulty. How young.
And years from now,
I'll hear your slow steps
struggle up the stairs
to bring me water.
I'll measure time
by their approach.


V. neck-slue

The head hidden
behind its iridescent
watercolor spill
and soft white feathers
breathe against the wind
or chill or I imagine
they're still breathing
because there is no blood
no sign of struggle
no joy in it
this gaze at wings
unbroken, or the pink
and childlike claws
stretched out
as if to catch a secret
they once carried.
No joy in it, I must repeat:
no beauty that's not stolen.
And so, for days I watched it
stay against the pavement,
a dead pigeon, its neck
bathed in bone-white slues
of unbroken sunlight.


VI. and the partition
I cannot find it.
That hidden place
you never had a need to hide.
Show me, my love,

that imaginary horizon
where your body
ends
where mine
ceases to begin.


VII. the ample side-round of the chest
the glute and thigh, cheek and cheeks and
paper? love—
we don't write letters anymore.
so what will they find
of us? these words?
how ample: a pay stub, the trace of voice,
your worn carpenter's glove, some sunken
places where we wrote each other
in voiceless, bodied language.
And then that blot, browning
the shape of an eye
you can no longer tell
was blood once, was yours—
an ink
you spilled too sparingly or not
sparingly enough.


VIII. Ribs, belly, back-bone
clocks
without the hands
to tell the time
your body has remaining,
and you have lost
the right to want

to end it all, no right to take
what is already being taken—
that pulse and ring and tone
inside your ear—your skull
a drum of wooden bone that cracks
and counts the cracking, measures

just how deep
to burrow past the flesh
before the marrow's reached
and you
are nothing more
than sundial,
blank and waiting
for a shadow to be cast


IX. all the belongings of my or your body
let's hold them in the way of water
cupped and risen slip-spilling
from my hands to yours


X. The circling rivers
tell this story—ours:
if Prometheus stole breath
instead of fire,
he would have taken yours

and in exchange, he'd feed you
cooling, risen wind-light,
and lift
on your sweet air, your

body bound
onto his own,
as gift, as last
redemption—
...

it will always be your fault:
his nose running
after that first dip
in the Atlantic,
his bruised elbow
and scraped knee,
his hair, too long,
always in his face
and his face, too much
or too little of yours,
his hard hands
slapping the animals,
unclear, misshapen
words, loud and large enough
to fill any public space
with unintelligible language,
and then that birthmark,
high up on his glute,
that one's especially
your fault, from when
you were so scared
you grabbed
onto your belly—fear
seeps through the fingertips,
your mother said, down
into thick, pregnant flesh,
down through fluid
and layers of your body
protecting his, down
onto unknowing skin—
marking him afraid,
the history he comes from,
in perpetual, dark bloom
...

"It took the herd six hours,"
the Blue Planet voiceover explains,
orcas pushing a blue whale calf
under. Keet, our son points
at the screen, naming them all
one whale, from the greek kētos,
water-monster, "The seas bathed
in calf's blood." More, our son
asks, More okean, watches the red
beneath them spreading, More ocean.
"Killer whales," the voice reminds,
the blue calf's heart bigger
than all three of ours, its blood could fill
our son's bathtub for weeks. The orcas
only eat the head, let the rest sink
to the ocean floor, but no, the voice
points out how body born six thousand pounds
lands on the skeleton of a full grown blue,
"Nothing gets wasted in the water."
Look, our son staring, Look,
learning how the deep devours,
blubber separates from bone,
even bone won't survive long,
eaten by water worms and salt.
Spicy, our son calls any intense
flavor, tears in his mouth, but no,
not over this, the calf's
blood or its bones, the orcas
swimming through reddened salt,
but over desire, he wants
what he cannot have
or doesn't want what he is
given, a calf's heart
in the teeth of a hungrier mammal,
because what else is worth
that much salt?
...

After we make love and you are asleep,

I try to hear your breath without touch, spilling



out of a closed mouth, or maybe see it

in the stomach's slow lift or the throat's



steady pulse or in your pupils,

their shifting under lowered lids.



But when the room is too dark, your exhales

too quiet, I fear your body



has grown hollow, life has fled,

and the sheets shroud both of us.



I press the dip between your collarbone

and neck, that suprasternal notch



where skin is thinnest, where I can almost

feel your heart and lungs, follow



their measured rising. I wonder if I am

like Madri to her Pandu: a wife



tempting a cursed husband with her naked shape

and feeding Ishvara, Yahweh, or the sky



his breath? I hear the call of wives and mothers

of all mothers who had faith: A wife who dies



with her husband shall remain in heaven

as many years as there are hairs on his back.



These offerors of anumarana, jauhar, sati sing:

Dress in your wedding gown and turn your body



to his body. Throw it on a blazing pyre

so you can rise with him. I imagine holding



your statued hand in mine, reciting vows

we made once, and we ascend together, ghosts



on our unlived journey. Again, I hear them

calling: Join us there. Silence your soft whistling breath.
...

From house to house we drag

our tired, unlived-in things:

the half-filled photo albums

where our childhoods twin,

Midwest with Eastern European,

your flattened fields of corn

where thunderstorms roamed wildly

down from a gunpowder sky

over pale plains, and my black

earth-born wheat, growing far above

where I could reach; and then

there are those unforgotten relics

full of brittle petals, guiltless poems,

and lingering smells of lovers we lost

or regret or naively thought

we loved. From room to room



we carry each other, our bodies:

these weary, changeless things.

You watch the same woman

unveil her same nakedness:

her aging, growing curves;

her hipbone, less prominent now,

still casting a kind of dark, sharpness

over thigh and dip of stomach,

over those places you've overlooked.

Here -

can we still find the curtainless

windows where we will make love

so late only streetlamps keep witness;

the goose bumps around my ankles

and your chin, their suggestion

of saccharine, grain-like stubble,

finding its way to the surface; and

the steeping stairs, where we will stumble

after too much wine or too little sleep?

Here, can a freshly scratched

outline of a shoulder blade remind us

of beauty: the sliver of daytime

sent to highlight bones or

the living room walls where

our future children will paint?



Or are we, in leaving one place

for another, creating more duffels

to lug from house to swollen house,

ignoring our unremembered,

but God-like things.
...