By Elias Baez
…if you’re leaving home, switch on a new
four-pointed star, then, as you say adieu,
to light a vacant world with steady blaze,
and follow you forever with its gaze.
– “25.XII.1993”
by Joseph Brodsky
(trans. by Richard Wilbur)
I.face
Mandrake’s jar is jostling on the shelf
as he yells orders, lil fists pressing the glass
imprisoning him. He hates his diminution.
Mandrake is my pocket mini-magician;
I thank my lucky stars I’ve got his help.
Though if I forget to seal him in, he punches
poor Pony in the nose; he pinches my ass;
he duplicates my voice to harry Alex,
spewing ignoble gases at my love … !
That said, he promised me a Rolex, golden,
if I invent a sonnet locket for Algol,
the Demon Star, who blinks where God would stare.
It’s rising tonight, northwest of Baltimore.
I’ve spent the morning pestling black hellebore.
II.clasp
like freezing I
bloom the absence
can’t come home
can’t text or call
winter bloom grow
to break the heart frost
frost heart hears how
III. face
I’ve spent the morning. Pestling black hellebore,
juicing wormwood, I feel like Lady Macbeth:
nothing in me but vengeance designed. Payment.
Blood doesn’t spot my hands; it honeys my brain,
dripping down mirrors adream, bearfoot boarfoot –
Mandrake, clapping, wakes me from the Lady.
He coos of pearl bubble baths to come.
Men said Algol’s unlucky cause it wavers,
and nothing spells death like a star bad to sailors.
It dims each third day for about ten hours.
Is that so demonic? They also call it Head
of Satan, Ogre, Gorgon… Jesus. What’d
Algol do to get this rep but flicker?
I thought absence makes the heart grow fonder.
IV.clasp
Mother, nothing
Algol’s ashamed
looking like me
Nothing I
the book,
your son
writing worth
a second winter
V.heart
“He only needs a second to say goodbye.”
(Mandrake’s got my mother on the line.)
“Okay.” Call drops. To me, “She’s leaving soon.”
So it’s us and Mandrake now, and Alex, Pony –
hellebore and wormwood sitting pretty
here in Algol’s locket. A poem’s beauty
is the star’s that watched the poem born,
and what the poet sacrificed to say it.
Algol’s really three stars whose orbits knot –
a bastard of the cosmic trinities.
Its blinking eye, dim as a sleepy child,
betrays its mother’s infidelities.
Algol’s waking. At 12, towers will crumble.
A germ, a generation, stirs in the rubble.
VI. false bottom
the mandrake Father
cruel lead weight
if They gave me
license to be know
you for you
to see it You’ll
I’ll be okay I
write because they’re
always hearing
me I’m writing
to be read to say
only be know too
Elias Baez is a poet and journalist living in Baltimore. He has poems currently out in Mantis, The Bitchin Kitsch, and The Daily Drunk. He writes about culture for GAYLETTER magazine, based in New York.