If I were entrusted with this city,
not even the whole city but just this street,
I would start with that shop window
requesting the owner to remove those glossy mannequins
I have never gotten used to after so many years:
whenever I pass by, I think that they are living.

What are they doing wrong? Nothing.
How could they do anything worse?

Translated from the Georgian by the author and Tim Kercher.

Because I was wrong to bring up the past,
I have drawn a version of myself who
does more being subject than implement.
Please think of her hands in place of obscure
innuendoes or unsolved mysteries.
You may have seen her wandering through here
for atmosphere, how she sweetens my grim
introspection. Give her your guilt, and she
will do no harm to the past, your safe distance.
Invite her to recount her evanescence,
even after the writer edits down
our girl’s memories to a pile

Dream the dream called dirty 
laundry & dress me 
as you like: knee-high 

stockings of a call girl, feathered hair 
of an Indian boy pulling 
arrows, his bow strung. 

Remember: point to shoot. 
Tonight, I pull your body 
taut from the quiver, watch it fall 

apart in lost fletchings. Lilacs 
sprout from the small of a statue’s 
back as it bends away from us, 

grasping for the hand of a friend 
whose body, once handsomely 
defined, has worn smooth & round 

Moving houses was no small hill
to climb: the ground a bog, the sky
alternating between soaked towel and  

white flag of chagrin, sad to have
muddied our boots. The hydrangeas  

wanted a trestle; the mailbox wanted
a can of paint – orange, we said,
maybe, like the dawn we could see
and the nightfall we couldn’t, the end
of days hiding behind the firs and

the bulk of the neighbor’s house.
Every dusk its shadows lurked more
craftily until I couldn’t stand them,

Danger lurks in the soft thudding of chipmunk against tire, a chipmunk I never see
coming but pay for nonetheless. Floaters slip in the viscous and there is no swatting
them away. Answers on ophthalmology sites pulse unbidden FAQS to the side
of the screen asking:
                                                               What is

                                                                             Justin Bieber’s Cell Number 2011?

Fighting fatigue he swiveled on        the pickaxe near
the exam light. We wrestled             my face
feebly under its fever                       hinted at metaphor
struggling for the nether position.   we believed
We were the heroes of                      a well-advertised war
the infirmary drawing                       recruits prone to
shivers not blood. For                      an annunciation of
the finale we sweated out                 bullet points to
the forgiveness fallacy.                     grenades unplugged

          That morning he was homesick.
My mother slept on, her neck scored by a slow pulse.

In Chicago before they married, they visited
                    the aquarium to dull that ache

with watery light, my mother’s hair like a long satin slip
sculling when she walked ahead—

          she was always walking ahead.
In the trailer’s hall, my sister and I sailed in laundry baskets

on matted carpet. I had already choked on and spit up
a penny. His life was not what he thought it would be,

So frequently a sound of wind interrupts the part
where I should be gone from the scene. I want you
to imagine a ledge, then the stampede, the country
western where a buffalo calf lies felled, its small
teeth you could hide inside your pockets for so long.
This is what I remember: you opened a fire by packing
the kindling in your hand, taking me with your other.
Beans boiled. I wanted it to be real dirt beneath me.
There is a privacy in tomorrow I can’t stand.
I wanted to write you a love poem, horses pounding

tailed by swirling buzzards I descended
under a sky of cooling steel the geese
guarding the river eyed me like bitter colonels

as I passed the dam and turned downtown
I didn’t stop at Doc’s for a beer or sit
in the bus shelter with the teenage lovers

I was finally old enough to press on
when there was business to be done I came
to the concrete courthouse sitting on its concrete

stilts like a ponderous bug a Trojan beetle
aliens might use to breach the city
and spread my arms as an officer