Mark Conway Ren Char, in The Formal Share, wrote: "Every poem is married to someone." The six poems here are from Mark Conway's series of sixteen Sixteeners, which use as their primary navigational saint the work, of course, of John Berryman. And Whitman, and Celan, and Lorca's duende, and James Wright--autumnal, midwestern. And James Brown, the hardest working man in showbiz, of course. The original provocation of Mark Conway's Minnesotan Sixteen began as an address to an elder brother, born in 1950, who lived for only a few hours. Conway didn't know about this boy until years later, the dark mark of the Other, the someone Else. Octavio Paz said that poetry is a search for the you. Conway's poems continue in their prowl for that ever-shifting thou--the inevitable and elusive: lover, liar, diaphane. . . . He is subversive; he does not address his reader artlessly. In "Before Alexandria," Conway writes: "By this I mean / memory . . . / When what I meant was, When will it end?/ Troy burns endlessly in the library / therefore the pictures stay the same . . . / Bracken burns in Turkey / boats are lowered for new books. The elders / look for me." When what he meant was: How I've missed you--all this time, whoever or whatever you may be. When what he meant was: even now, because it is written down, a city is on fire and will always be that way. That once a thing is written down, it will go on being true, in perpetuity. Mark Conway's poems are lean, bullying, worshipful, muscular, tender, armored. Armed and a little dangerous. And disarming, fathomable. --Lucie Brock-Broido Before Alexandria There is always the river and then a rise from a white bed. Trees turn to elders limping at night, singing through cleansed streets, the night-scent of needles. Out- riders play as shadows on the parapet to punctuate the rain. By this I mean memory. I asked, Will I remember this? When what I meant was, When will it end? Troy burns endlessly in the library therefore the pictures stay the same, always burning. Nothing else stays the same. God and all his firemen, red-faced, resume playing cards. Bracken burns in Turkey, boats are lowered for new books. The elders look for me. I'm hidden in the bedroom, pages like smoke in my hands. The Way Back I'd be more guarded if I knew you were watching, leering, nearly naked, stylishly at rest. You're wrong if you think I want to be known utterly, you in your angelic homberg fogged in reticence. I talk to myself in our own special voice. You hear I know by the quality of your indifference. I rave about others, halted on the road, insist you and I were never an item. You ride alone I know what you like by the way that you leave me. We're never going back, are we. Whisper to me one more time about home. Numbering the Thunder Sitting in a single canto of torchlit May, earlier than insects, almost spring, I'm not sleepy. I'm not anything but outside, vaguely alert to pleasure, inside of a day that will soon be forgot. And then the rains come, the air green in a pre-tornado stupor, the baby crying at the calm, the pressured hiss. The eye of the storm stalls around us, bringing sulphur to the surface of the skin. All the windows are shuttered, the chores finished earlier in a premonitory fit. I look into the distant city, patient beside my wife. We watch the wind boil, waiting for the unavoidable: a broken barn. Then the cold. Then the gathering in. Any Holy City What will I call you, brother, before I send you off forever? I call you mine but not yet me. Stripped cord, odd lot, you fake hunger, mumming for the widows. I know you want nothing, are nothing, suffer a fallacy of pain. Put my envy aside; you'll always need my yearnng. You need me pleading to be peeled from my wet suit, hovering close to those I love. No wonder you're distant--my clinging is so crude. No wonder you're dead. I'll ride with you through the market of Tyre, oh, any holy city just until I press my face against the children's sticky shoulders. Until I know that you won't lift me. Until what you lack is all I need. Notorious At the end of the evening famous for never ending, where we stand together, unable to remember, I saw her, here, at the very end of darkness, where it turns tawdry, shrunken at the seams. Who was she then or now, my overweight teacher is furious to know, how dare she be mysterious, elusive in the way she loves, liar, diaphane, weisenheimer. The eyes live only in their lying. And so they see. How rude not to deceive me, refusing to rearrange her face into another burst of Russian, a feint, her notorious grin. It's time she put me on, naively, in her native tongue. The liar's diary lies empty. I'm certain she and I go way back in the dark. I move to close the book, her face. We open it instead. How I've Missed You I clamored for you, drunk on Jesus' glamorous wounds and made myself cry, praying to the lip-shaped gashes. "Strip us, Oh Lord," the neighbors prayed, "Of all our sins." "Strip us and take us, Oh Lord," I whispered because I knew the gods visited from time to time and we killed them or they changed into barnyard animals and slid into bed because now their wives wouldn't recognize them and who knows maybe I too could wash their feet with my hair, afterwards.