Blackbird Archive“KM4” Poems & Drawings by Tom Sleigh and Michael Hafftka
Here the body is the sheared-off wing of the Transavia plane
lying in a scrap heap
like the knocked-off arm of an old Grecian figurine
of Winged Victory pacing down the deck of Athenian might.
Here, you can let yourself go in so many ways—
the bomb pack strapped to your waist and detonated
by pushing Send on your cell phone.
Or the eternal aesthete in his eternal pursuit
of just the right moment to see
the splintering of light passing through tent mesh
waking you to the unambivalent hate you’ve always craved.
The rivals walk off to where the broken pediments
of the cathedral still brace under the weight of the rose window.
And the body barters for the ghosts pinned down by the shadows
to come rising at this moment from the grave
telling the body it’s too late, it’s always been too late
passing over the ocean’s dry whispering wave.
Tom Sleigh is the author of eight books of poetry, including Army Cats (Graywolf Press, 2011), winner of the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Space Walk (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), which won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His new book, Station Zed , is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2015. He is the recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. He teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College. Photo by Ed Robbins
Michael Hafftka’s paintings appear in the permanent collections of several museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, the McNay Art Museum, the Housatonic Museum of Art, the Arizona State University Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, Yeshiva University Museum, and Chapman University’s Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection of Art, among others. Hafftka lives in Brooklyn, New York. Photo by Yonat Hafftka