Blackbird Archive“KM4” Poems & Drawings by Tom Sleigh and Michael Hafftka
Lake water
in smooth still sun moves in
and out of synch
with the violin
playing at the villa—
the bow attacking the strings looks like a hand
making some frantic motion to come closer, go away—
it’s hard to say what’s being said,
who’s being summoned from the dead,
from red sand drifting
across the sheen of the shining floor.
The pianist’s hands taking wing to hover above a chord
become the flight path
of a marabou stork crashing down
on carrion, the piano levitating up and up
above red sand that it starts to float across
the way a camel’s humps
far off in the mirage rise and fall fall and rise
until mirage overbrims itself
and everything into its shimmering disappears.
And the ones who died the day before,
blown up at the crossroads at KM4,
scanning the notice board for scholarship results,
put their fingers to their names as the onlookers applaud.
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