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See the Pyramids


ISSUE:  Summer 1993
Here’s what’s happening: everything. As the yews move, as the ragged cedars
flutter, and the Tigris and the Rappahannock flow, here’s my grandmother
marketing a long way from Danzig. She’s already moved to Brooklyn;
here’s the birdge and Mr. Whitman and isn’t it a warm day? And what a blue sky
Picasso saunters under in the summers following the liberation, and it’s
my grandmother again; here’s her heart condition and also ibis, wading ibis.
Now my grandmother does her laundry, singing, see the pyramids along the Nile, and weaving like a praying Arab, and isn’t that Cod checking out
His green reflection in the glass of Lever House and Pollack splashing rain
on canvas? How the palm fronds sway utterly as the old lady keeps singing,
you belong to me! Next, a flowering pear tree happens, Everyone: drink your tea.

Caroline Finkelsteln

THE ROOM

We lock the door behind us.
As my friend and I kill the old dog,
the grizzled pet,
my lover fingers the silverware.
My friend and I move upstairs
flicking blood ahead of us.
The drops grow huge on the walls.
I recognize the inside of my parent’s house,
think I am dreaming
I must wake up
but we keep on ascending.

The light is on in the bathroom,
so I get up to see if Rachel is all right.
She’s sitting on the edge of the tub,
afraid she’s pregnant.
I sit beside her,
look back through the doorway,
picking out the familiar clutter
of our little room
in the darkness.
She is not angry.
The shut Venetian blinds
carry moonlight as the water surface did,
once when I saw it from below.

Ross Taylor

TOY

Upstairs the baby sleeps like a baby.
Down here I lie and watch trees that seem
stone arteries the bodies have been eroded from,
gone to smoke like the passing storm clouds.
Seeing things that way of course I can’t sleep.
What is she dreaming of to sleep so soundly?
It must be nothing more than the blood in her veins,
the blood that toils for her, the cells that die
and are re-absorbed; she is dreaming deep in her cells.
Only when some toy her brain has imagined alive
comes at her will she cry, and wake.

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