Two Poems

late night television

the ubahn rushes to the East from Schlesi

frau romaniuk lives just above WHITE TATTOO.
I have never met her;
I have not even seen her.
but every night, walking late,
her television flickers at me
from the window
like a silent thunderstorm.

 

a haunting in autumn

the uncle who died a month ago drank country
liquor; brewed just outside the village by
a man; the same man also hacked the meat
for the autumnal feast when we went to watch
the buffalo's neck bellow his last bellows while
the priest dutifully gathered the blood in a piece
of white cloth that turned red red red and we touched
the cloth as holy artefact of a goddess we drowned
every autumn at the river bank—this I remember well.

the uncle who died a month ago had a house—
painted strangely; my mother told me about it
when she also told me stories of his "decoration" in the
living room—a truck tyre that no one remembers;
my uncle had almost raped a woman once—that
was the story I pretended never to have heard because
in my dreams I always saw the blurred vision of a girl,
running around in a strangely painted house where
a man—my uncle—sat on a truck tyre and chanted
strange things, gathering blood from the neck of an
indifferent god just as the autumn sunlight came in.