Robert Sward
AmnesiaSomewhere an ocean of doorknobs,
a cemetary for seaweed.The sailors,
all of them,
walking
at
some slight angle
counter to the angle
everyone else
walks at.
The ships and the rain
slanting
at still
another
angle.
And music
and the woman
one has children by
bears her child
and her belly
every day
at a different
angle.We are underwater
Come up and the surf is filled with rooftops, planes overhead
narrowly missing trees, it begins raining upwards.Things get lonely to go outside.
Sometimes the body gets lonely to go outside.
Sometimes everything and the body also goes outside
at once.Every morning at precisely that moment
the woman asks for his dreams,
he has none,
or forgets or wants to forget or
conceives he is dying.
In his memory
they break up
almost entirely
because he can not
remember his dreams.
On the other hand, she remembers hers
and tells them
compulsively.He reads bed sheets. Imprint of lines. The woman's neck.
The word "Mother" tattooed somewhere. A cluster of red
freckles above the "M." She sits up and yawns.
"I want," she says, "I want."
(from The Collected Poems: 1957-2004)
Bio:
Robert Sward has taught at Cornell University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and at the UC Santa Cruz Extension. A Guggenheim Fellow, he was chosen by Lucile Clifton to receive a Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award. His twenty books include: Four Incarnations, New & Selected Poems (Coffee House Press), A Much-Married Man, a novel, Rosicrucian in the Basement, Heavenly Sex, and most recently, The Collected Poems: 1957-2004 (Black Moss Press). Sward serves as contributing editor to the Internet's "Web Del Sol" and "Blue Moon Review."
