Dire Solitudes: Bruno Shulz Poem by Patti Masterman

The flesh, the raw reality of you

confounds description- from another time

and place, your photo looks straight through me,

though I feel I know more of you than any map

or contours of a continent- great, sunken eyes,

slight body hovering just above the middle-age

of years, inscrutable countenance, corrupted

by your dire solitudes.


So far ahead of your time, yet

I found you here on a tilted plane; out of the

ancient foundry of Genesis’ hot anvils

and the spinning lathe of singularities,

matter from tombs and unknown persons

mixed freely in you, like mysterious vials

of plasma'd genetics;


A febrile fever of incontinent histories,

tottering above the malnourished factory

of human body, that is our perihelion

of stark majesty and repugnance,

presided over by the seedy dreams of a drunk.


How does one love the dead,

how does one come to love,

having never known nearness, breath..

no, you are not corrupt

you are merely missing a body and a head,

hands and feet and fingers;

in short, everything a man needs, but somehow

I breathe out in my beautiful dreams the prayer

that your preternatural brain was spared,

magically cut free the corpse at the last instant-

perhaps rolling away, as though a door-stop

rotating its third-eye, surveying everything-

even after death, you contemplate

like one of the martyrs now, forever

upon the loci of your untimely demise.


You were bigger than life, bigger than death;

as long as I live, I am the victor in shadow

of the foreknowledge of you.

Even though is found no resting place

for you, there are words of yours saved up

inside others beings, where none may displace,

now that time's the only strata of substance left us,

and in time you may become the ebullient book

of all your worlds and seasons,

spreading your minions starlike,

rich with the expectation of eternities..