Eli

by Jonathan Žižák

You beat me up out back, taught me to dance,
stood there skinny and lost
while we grew distant,
and February settled in.

I wrote poems about this before,
they've gone grey.
I think they mock you, like I do.

You were knocked off your feet,
your black blood in the snow
when the word itself vanished.

I was somewhere writing poems
when the smell of iron came in on cold air,
we were both mid-sentence, I can’t help but imagine.

Those days mean nothing,
I'm up against the wall,
it's night and I sit
perfectly round, with a hole in the middle.

Cold lives in my teeth.
The wind finds every gap.
At what point does beauty come from this anger,
I don't see it yet.

The blue hour before anything.
Bark stripped white by something fast and fiery.
Your mother won't embrace me
just because a sniper shot you.

It does no one any good
to stay between the pine resin and the diesel,
somewhere between the siren
travelling flat across your cold ground
arriving in my chest and then the ears.

Why do I even write a poem
about a soldier's heart,
epaulettes and metal bowls,
snowy craters, turned earth in winter,
the color between green and brown or
the particular grey of February
oh how my grief looks good on the page.

Poets in flak jackets,
part of us wanted this,
a bloody pit of patriots,
the smell of gunpowder and pine, together, once
how romantic,
finally something worth the metaphor,
do you want blue, yellow, or black sapphire?
What’s it worth in an elegy?

You're dead and I'm writing.
Both of us got what we came for.
You're a soldier, commando
won't you please, when it's me,
write how my mud is meaningful,
how will you know,
I died beautifully?

Like ice forming at the edge of moving water,
oh do have the light come in low
mean that the day is ending.
Let it mean we had one.

Jonathan Žižák is a Slovak poet and historian. His work often bridges themes of melancholy, grief, and collective struggle, driven by a sustained interest in the development of proletarian literary culture. He writes from New Haven, Connecticut, where he is a graduate student at Yale University.