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ABSINTHE 10 (fall 2008), US

Photograph C Grażyna Niezgoda

     I-She

This old woman wearing a hat and a mink stole on her shoulders
celebrating her memory
is me.

I watch her at close quarters. I can see clearly
her laugh lines.

She lifts a doughnut to the place on her skin
where my lips used to be.

She opens her face and shoves in a doughnut stuck on her finger.
The finger has thickened joints like a spring twig, like Edith Piaf.

How will I touch your body with her claw-like tibia?

She raises her face to your face. I close my eyelids.
She forgets she has no lips.
I forget.

    For the New Century-A Conversation with Myself

In some pose
the mirror captured this
moment of transformation
when for the first time
the tibia peeked out with all its
literalness.

I didn't think
about identity
or about Emerson's equation
or about the romanticism of burial mounds.
I didn't think.
I couldn't it couldn't.

Only it was or it wasn't
at the tangential point zero or infinity
a simple configuration
of bones.

    To Moment's Measure

A hand
mine yours someone's
on another hand on top of a white glove
a moment's measure.
Several hurried
meanings which barely sound
synonymous.

Suddenly
right under my ring
nail I feel
the accelerated
pulse of
this
other
cosmos.

Translator Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough's poetry translations have been published by Absinthe, Image, The New Yorker, Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, and other literary magazines.