Read You Must Remember This Online
Authors: Michael Bazzett
© 2014, Text by Michael Bazzett
© 2014, Cover photograph by Alec Soth (Magnum Photos)
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
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Published 2014 by Milkweed Editions
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Cover photograph by Alec Soth (Magnum Photos)
Author photo by Leslie Bazzett
14 15 16 17 18
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5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bazzett, Michael.
  Â
[Poems. Selections]
  Â
You must remember this / Michael Bazzett. -- First edition.
pages cm
  Â
Includes bibliographical references and index.
  Â
ISBN 978-1-57131-930-2 (ebook) I. Title.
  Â
PS3602.A999A6 2014
  Â
811âº.6--dc23
2014019175
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world's endangered forests and conserve natural resources.
You Must Remember This
was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.
For Leslie
When They Meet, They Can't Help It
The Difficulty of Holding Time
from
A Natural History of Silence
Standing by the water
I remembered
the delicate and confused
dream I had last night
it was bruised
even in the remembering
so these words
can only glance
sidelong at the beehive
that replaced my heart
with all that pulsing
making honey from the loss.
The woman in the dream
said be careful with your cock
and I suddenly knew
in the way one knows in dreams
that my cock had somehow become
a lever that might detonate
a string of bombs riddling the city
in the way blood clots might lace
a body in its final days.
When I realized I was holding
a rooster, I did not exactly
know what to say. Perhaps
I smiled. I don't know.
There was no mirror
and I've never been able
to see myself in dreams.
The story is such a story we don't always stop to think
about what it was like to be there: that cavern floor
packed with pungent dung, dark as the inner bowels
of an animal when that slab dropped into place: how
utterly it sucked to hear the oaf stirring in his stupor
made uneasy by wine mixing with the bolted flesh
of good friends dispatched while we watchedâ
it was just a flat-out bad deal for everyone involved.
Polyphemus messed with no one: a law unto himself
there in the hinterland eating goat cheese by the ton
and Odysseus brimming full of the sauce of himself
after out-clevering all Ilium by nestling in the stallion.
He'd had plenty of time to think there in that hollow
belly smelling of fear and fresh sawdust holding his
piss in one endless clench counting droplets of sweat
rivering cold over his ribs and under his breastplate.
And now here he is again groping for his sharpened
pole in pitch dark using one appetite to feed another.
He lays the point in the drowsing embers and jostles
it enough that the cave appears in a blood-warm glow.
You probably know the restâplunging the blackened
tip through the eyelid, the crackling hiss as the eyeball
burst, the geyser that shot from the socketâthen huge
hideous blind rage: it was easy to get inside, he thought,
the real trick comes in the getting out: words that might
land differently if you are not clinging to the fetid locks
under a ram, knees pinning its rib cage, your hips held
high as it drags you slowly into the chill morning air.
Maybe then you'd feel the warmth of Polyphemus's
wounded breath, washing across three thousand years
as he crouches above you, stroking the woolly backbone,
inquiring why this particular one lags so far behind?
We walk to the edge of town: there
just beyond the wall we see clouds
of crows and ravens, also buzzards
teetering down to pick apart the flesh
that peeks from every flapping shirttail.
See that belly pale as risen dough?