New Poetry From Peter Golub

Latin Parataxis

1.

The day the dictator

was sentenced

to death

I noticed a lot of musicians in the street

they weren’t out because of the sentence

the musicians in this country are typically apolitical

I’m sure most of them didn’t know about the sentence

I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them didn’t even know about the trial

our dictator was captured by another country when he was visiting

his mother

nobody really complained

it was bound to happen

this morning as I walked through the cement square of my urban village

I felt a little sad for our dictator

sure he’d made a travesty of television,

persecuted doctors, writers, thieves, clerics, etc.

but death by hanging?

is a hanging supposed to make us feel better?

I am sure there are those who oppose it

I am sure there are those who praise it

I for one think it’s a little excessive

but only a little

I must meet Codford and finish the piece

I have other things on my mind

maintaining the formal categories of the language

in it

while keeping true to the process

trying to balance the extrinsic and intrinsic qualities of the thing

a double helix of honky tonk blues and Handel

I take a cigarette out of my pocket

and find:

lately I’ve been feeling a stranger in my own mind
walking here and there
up to an attic with growing levels
ladders
I open a box
I funny picture of a dictator in his underwear

2.

I feel my remember God language children

green

green

green

I am the happy genius of my contented universe

The curious child at your door with a bag full of insects

You know that guy over there, yeah, that’s me too

when you crawled into my bed

gene asked me to take you out, and close the door

so I picked you up, recited some Pushkin, played a song on the guitar

when I got back into bed

gene was asleep

I dreamed of a manatee on the beach

a little suspended off the ground like in Ben’s paintings

it’s eating comfort food, covered by a net

I’d like to cut it out

but I’m afraid of slicing her skin

3.

человек с пивом

мальчик с мороженом

обсуждают женщину

-я тебе одолжил 200 р.

(ты мне одарила поцелуй –по щеке.

пошел пешком дамой долго шел.

простудился. подслушивал.)

-ты плохой, но любимой.

-я все понимаю.

я уранил корзинку с грибами.

-ну и что?

уранил так уранил.

они не кому особенно не нужны.

-THE QUESTION OF LIFE AFTER DEATH

HAS INTERESTING… ALTHOUGH

MOST PEOPLE SEEM TO CONSIDER THIS A

QUESTION OF WHETHER DEATH EXISTS.

WHEREAS I HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT

THIS A QUESTION OF LIFE. THAT IS

DOES LIFE EXIST? ALSO, THIS QUESTION

MAKES ME THINK OF HOW WAR

SELECTS FOR CERTAIN GENES

AND GENRES. HOW DID WWII

SELECT FOR PARTICULAR

ALELLES?

4. Africa Mina

Brazil

my death awaits me in Brazil

dancing his skinny hips in your direction

he grabs a martini, nods to the man in the white suit

you’re turning thirty-thirty-three

spinning spinning spinning

creating ice age molecules

a library of paleontology

5.

the bad thing about the English department

is that

it doesn’t reward failure

in all fields?

at least in science

failure is seen as an important

piece of the puzzle.

6.

where is the poetry?

where did it go?

do you know any poets?

I certainly don’t.

the universal grammar though

has an old career

you needn’t fear

the language instinct

the maternal bee string

driving the piano up the hill

dropping it down the stairs

burning your feet on the hot pavement

ringingringingringing

Dave please don’t say that

your lover’s doorbell

hell she might not

not be your prince

6.

Dvorak my queen

what signals are you radiating?

who has picked them up?

how many friends do you have?

what women do you have beneath your tongue?

I am a rather lonely rabbit

I find my situations lacking

my images do not comfort me

at first I was flattered

I am still curious

but who knew that curiosity

like beauty

is an attribute?

or that the old poets listend to

such terrible music?

7.

the dictator shakes his fists

the judge faces another lonely night

starring at the TV screen

watching himself in the dark

his kids play German techno in the other room

he is in love with his daughter’s best friend

his wife is on her second affair

he hasn’t had an orgasm in three months

his friends say he is an effigy of virtue

pan-paniscus: shoa-ecology

pan-paniscus

as always you are the last or first to know

the law of the excluded middle child

I saw this almost phenomenologically

I listen to my friend

it smells like pasta he says

it doesn’t smell like tuna

it’s not stupid

I like tuna

if people don’t laugh at my poetry there is something wrong with them

or me

it’s always a little bit of both

never this or that

like porn

what kind of laughter do I want

like what kind of love do I want

isn’t it odd that most homosexual men are also pedophiles

our country dressed in homosexuals

I really like children

do you like homosexuals

I don’t mean like to tolerate

or appreciate

or respect

or whatever

but do you lovvve homosexuals in the same way you love americanos

or americans

or buenos aires

is your relationship as complex and as interesting

as when my roommate was home and I didn’t know he was home

so when I… and he walked out of his room… I jumped

in the shower I oftentimes study

plato’s republic in my mind

I sing in greek then latin then german

I sing the national anthem of luxemburg

I I I I

it’s all about me isn’t it

well what about you

what about you and me

what about us

we together us together we together break

the wives of the world have foiled the swastika cookie cutters

remember we re-memeber remember

forget the time the phone rang

and you a childish paladin running with your horse head full of sushi

catching the tin drum by the little screaming brat’s pabst

shoa-ecology

10

100

100,000,000,000,000,000,000

when you get lots of people into the same place the thing (at its best)

engineering is always the same

the better it is the more it is the same thing

the organizing principles

what it looks like after the organizing

you have no friends just mates

just in it together

in line

in many respects

lots of things

fucked up

but we don’t boycott mom

for fucking up by buying us crayons instead of a tank

or america for bombing the chinese embassy

where was it

or my friend because he fucked my girlfriend

sorry I mean our friend

my girlfriend

our girlfriend

or my girlfriend’s girlfriend

las vegas is a place of second chances

second comings

and one day

fuel air bombs

fucking up is what good ecosystems do best

they do it in abandon

don’t abandon the bonobo

if it eats too many echidnas

rips them limb from probiscus

with its teeth

with its culture

with its tools

don’t abandon the little nazi in your son’s video game

it’s like puberty

don’t abandon puberty

or prepubescence

or rape

or jabbing wires through the mammilian body

it’s about all of us sea cows

don’t toss billy into the toilet

after you’ve carried him around

under your arm for over 72 hours

when he is six he will fill his foster dad’s

beer cooler with night crawlers

and we’ll all have a good chuckle

like TV audiences

the message being the massage

the massage is the message

you don’t know a goddamn thing

but you don’t need too

if you can enjoy a massage

about what you are talking about

your mother

who is the castrated shell of her father

who was a fat golden retriever who smoked cigars and stank of scotch

who was the effigy of a sea lion or was a manatee

made of $20 bills

the waiter being the waiter

the man who waits

at the oxygen bar looking for air

tired after a long day at the plasma clinic

living off and after and before

pre-Stroika in the bag

living off catholic boloney sandwiches

Contemporary Analytic Philosophy in 5 Acts

I would like to ban the words: machine, fountain, and snow

metallic drinking fountain

truth has an accent

like gook-jews

midget-luchador

redneck-niggers

and some machines drop radios made of microwave parts

lovingly

metallic water

tumbling from a communal bathhouse

bassquiet stands up

Gregor Gregorovich (a favorite character of: 0 users)

pours the last of the gin over the computer

-that fucking does it, he says, and suddently cries, I’m jewish! I can’t

feel my eyes!

-come on you two, says Yassen Gregorovich.

-what are you, the gestapo?

-come on fellas.

-jeez just let us finish our drinks.

-you’re finished; lets go.

-look, says bassquiet, it’s peter.

-what’s it doing up there? asks Gregor Gregorovich.

-maybe he has something to say about a memoir, says bassquiet,

and leaves through the back door.

(Peter, dribbling briskly into position in front of his goal, squaring up to encompass his own destruction.)

When I missed your flight

sitting in a new way

-don’t shoot, cries Gregor Gregorovich.

-don’t jump, says Yassen Gregorovich.

-give him air, says the violinist in bar light.

(peter continues, a transcription without notes.)

not anything about love or poetry or st. leningrad

or hymenoptera models

of roots and branches

standing in oppisition to themselves

-It’s Sibelius’ Violin Concerto in D minor, says the violinist.

(peter sways and takes a drink of water.)

the airport smells like an old couch

the old woman asks you to watch her bag

I think about the impact this act will have on the U.S. economy

the female asks the male

sit on the floor

she puts her head in his lap

he watches the escalator

meat being moved into its places

-I can’t stand it, cries Gregor Gregorovich.

-Oh, the horror, the horror, says Yassen Gregorovich.

-The horror, the horror, repeats the violinist.

(peter continues)

I am hiding

in the imagined thoughts of others

in the fat woman’s conversation with her bags about security

the old woman in the bathroom

siting on the toilet

the ghost of my death

the light of my hour

(peter puts a hand to his brow and falls to the floor)

a gathering crowd:

-there are of course limits

we wait peacefully

like something from a haiku

just like the plane was never invented, mummbles peter coming

tWo…

-somebody give him a bank card, says the violinist.

when I left

when I was scheduled to leave

-take the mean and multiply it by the square root of (t)1, suggests

Gregor Gregorovich.

-are the people on the converyer belt transplanted into sausages?

asks Yassen Gregorovich.

packed into planes

packed into planes

taken back to Africa

fed to my grandmother’s dictator

cluching his nappies

hemorraging –bleeding from the ass

asleep

dreaming of a yellow meadow from a movie

(peter gets up, wobbly on his feet. Mandy Potemkin walks through

the small doors in the back, takes him under the arm, smiles weakly

toward Gregor Gregorovich and the violinist. Yassen Gregorovich

takes him by the other arm.)

Exit

Peter Golub was born in Moscow in 1982. At the age of seven, he emigrated with his family to the United States. He studied Russian and philosophy at the University of Utah. He currently studies poetry in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, where he also teaches. A frequent visitor to his native Russia, Golub spent the summer of 2006 in Moscow and St Petersburg translating contemporary Russian poetry. Some of those translations appear in Caketrain Issue 04.

Peter Golub nació en Moscou en 1982. Cuando tenía siete anos, se mudó con su familia a los Estados Unidos. Estudió ruso y filosofía en la Universidad de Utah. Corrientemente, estudia poesía en la programa de Master of Fine Arts en la Universidad de Nevada, en Las Vegas, donde también es profesor. Un visitor con frecuencia a su Rusia nativa, Golub pasó el verano de 2006 en Moscou y San Petersburgo, traduciendo la poesía Rusa contemporánea. Algunas de estas traducciones aparecen en Caketrain Issue 04.