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Creative Writing from
Fairleigh Dickinson University
Sacrifice
Andrew Condouris
After,
we share a cigarette in bed
and I gab about the women
who no longer come and go
--no, none of them talked of Michelangelo--
and how these women made love.
Some stupidly, eyes closed,
lost in the strange touch-and-go of skin;
some bit and flailed,
puckered away like pistons,
full of a moon-spun madness;
some sat on the edge of the bed
afterward and asked me questions,
avoiding that maelstrom within
by throwing into the ether
enough chin music of certainty,
their hands like the knot
at the end of a liverwurst packet;
others stood in the corner, watched me
make myself unfold, dither, and bloom
with that bloom just before death;
some take me in with dry lightning
clenching their hearts and loins,
and their eyes diving into mine,
diving for my sunken galleon
filled with ancient treasures
and riddles and soft puzzles.
But they find only the sea bed,
or else a ghostly fish or two,
or just more depth, more darkness.
None of them did what you did, baby.
None of them were smart enough to drown.
Rilke's Variation on Solitude
Andrew Condouris
Is solitude the love in which the world
must burn? Our lack of patience is cruel,
ornate, a season of neglected dreams;
our muse relays divine communiqués,
but we're unhinged and deaf to all her songs.
We're focused on what heaven will defend,
how closely it resembles hell again.
But I am not of you and you, not me;
Perhaps I've seen it all aslant, with greed,
for want of metaxu, its golden beams
connect us one to two to three to four,
until we're past division, past all thoughts,
until we lack divinity, yet still
become its very act,
its apple core
that sits upon the windowsill without
a single notion of its life or death,
but gravitates toward joy and then returns,
because it can, when autumn comes and sits
upon another windowsill,
enjoys,
because it can,
its absence of a soul.
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