“Desire and Disease Commingling” from The Prodigal

Desire and disease commingling,
commingling, the white hair and the white page
with the fear of white sight, blindness, amputation,
a recurring kidney stone, the plague of AIDS,
shaken in the mirror by that bewildered look,
the truculence, the drooping lip of a spiritual lout.
Look at it any way you like, it's an old man's book
whenever you write it, whenever it comes out,
the age in your armpits in the pleats of your crotch,
the faded perfumes of cherished conversations,
and the toilet gurgling its eclogues, resurrecting names
in its hoarse swivelling into an echo after.
This is the music of memory, water.

[O Serbian sibyl, prophetess]

O Serbian sibyl, prophetess
peering between your curtains of brown hair
(or these parentheses), if I were a Jew,
you'd see me shuffling on the cobblestones
of some unpronounceable city, you could watch
my body crumble, like the long, trembling ash
of a cigarette in the hand of a scholar
in a sidewalk restaurant, you beauty
who had the name of a common mountain flower
that hides in a cleft of the rocks
on the white-haired ridges of Albania.