DOUGLAS K CURRIER

 

 

Sleep or swimming

 

She is never dead when he meets her.

 “Infidelity” Jack Gilbert

 

He always seems to be asleep or almost.

She saunters in, checks his pulse as if

she were a nurse, a doctor, his cardiologist. 

He can hear a beeping, a buzzing – is it

the clock radio, his cellphone – perhaps

a monitor.  He’s asleep or almost. Is this

what it will be – death a familiar face,

some woman from his past – living, dead,

lost to time and memory?  He thinks

perhaps death could be like sleep

or swimming – surfacing, diving, drifting

in an ocean no colder than he can stand,

no warmer than credible.  She is never dead

exactly, but then she is waiting for him.

 

So Beautiful

 

La muerte es tan bella que nadie ha regresada de ella.

Gustavo Cerati

 

It’s true, and who knows

if it’s just beauty or death’s

infectious, sarcastic chuckle,

or her sardonic half-smile that

greets those who would like

to strike a deal.  Who knows

if it’s her self-assured demeanor

or perhaps that time is on her side.

He has her back.  Maybe it’s

the way she looks – remaking

herself, dressing up for each

encounter, to become the girl

of your dreams or at least someone

you knew and might have loved.

 

Fault

 

It is our fault we love only the skull of Beauty

Without knowing who she was, of what she died.

 “Scene VI” Paul Bowles

         

Of all his faults, sins great and small, mortal

and venial, omission, cowardice, indecision,

his inability to live with consequence – always

thinking only to the next time, the next day, the next

three minutes, his ignorance of love was the worst.

 

He understood, and then late, only what was over,

out of reach, spent in the telling, exhausted, long past. 

He is all of us given a shiny bauble and gleaming

translucence, any living thing, to play with. 

We never know who she is, nor of what she dies.

 

DOUGLAS K CURRIER

 

DOUGLAS K CURRIER holds an MFA in poetry, University of Pittsburgh.  His work has appeared in several magazines and anthologies in the United States and Argentina.  He is the author of five poetry collections in Spanish: Desnuda parada sobre un techo (1989), Vida prestada: poemas con sabor a Tango (2021), Regreso (2022), Exogénesis (2024), and Nuestra Senora del Sueño (2026) bilingual with Marcos Kura. Señorita Death (2022), Death Studies (2023), and Conversations with Death (2025) are in English. Peach (2025) is the author’s first collection of short stories. Currier lives with his wife in Winooski, Vermont, and Corrientes, Argentina.