Three Poems
by Paul Hostovsky
LOVE POEM
I love this poem.
I would do anything
for this poem.
I am not above
stealing for example.
I stole in the past
and I stole from the past
and I’d gladly steal from your past
for this poem.
I would lie
for the sake of this poem.
I would lie in the face of this poem
just to make the poem face me.
Just to feel on my face the hot, sweet, faint
bad-tooth breath of the poem.
I could sink to anything.
I think I could kill.
I think I have killed
for the shape, the sheer
body of this poem.
Look how beautiful,
feel how impossible,
this slender, limned thing
weighing next to nothing,
saying next to nothing.
Saying everything.
Everything.
STILL LIFE WITH A BOTTLE
The empty bottle
the wino left has a beautiful
and voluptuous shape to it,
you have to give him
that. He left it here
on this park bench as a gift for you,
the evidence of his work–
it must have taken him
much of the morning to polish off,
a kind of workmanship itself,
growing inside him as the bottle grew
empty, and he grew more and more
himself, glowing warmly,
the way the light filling the bottle
suffuses it with a fugitive warmth
now that the sun is high
and he has departed,
leaving it here for you
to marvel at or deplore,
depending on your point of view.
ALLITERATION
I whacked off in these woods once.
But that was a long time ago when
everything rhymed a little with
the trees all facing upward and the sky
was full of itself and no one
was around. And everything smelled good.
I smelled good myself. A sweaty,
muddy, musky, burning smell of
autumn or late summer or very early
spring was in the air, and I was so
excited to be so young and existential
and solipsistic, that I peeled off my shirt
and pants and underpants, and stood there
erect and steeply rocking under a sycamore,
my peeled bark in a little pile at my feet,
my head tossing in the wind, my mouth
opening, wider, wider, as if trying
to pronounce all the vowels at the same time
and failing deliciously, and sinking down
to the ground, totally spent and spluttering
a few choice consonants like kisses meant
for the pursed lips of the wind.
Paul Hostovsky’s poems appear and disappear simultaneously (Voila!), and have recently been sighted in places where they pay you for your trouble with your own trouble doubled, and other people’s troubles thrown in, which never seem to him as great as his troubles, though he tries not to compare. He has no life and spends it with his poems, trying to perfect their perfect disappearances, which is the working title of his new collection, which is looking for a publisher and for itself. He is the recipient of such rebukes as You Never Want To Do Anything and All You Care About Are Your Stupid Clever Poems.
COLD SIGNAL 