Free You Must Remember This by Michael Bazzett

© 2014, Text by Michael Bazzett
    Â© 2014, Cover photograph by Alec Soth (Magnum Photos)
    All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
    (800) 520-6455
    www.milkweed.org
    Published 2014 by Milkweed Editions
    Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
    Cover photograph by Alec Soth (Magnum Photos)
    Author photo by Leslie Bazzett
    14 15 16 17 18     5 4 3 2 1
    First Edition
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    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    Bazzett, Michael.
    Â Â Â  [Poems. Selections]
    Â Â Â  You must remember this / Michael Bazzett. -- First edition.
    pages cm
    Â Â Â  Includes bibliographical references and index.
    Â Â Â  ISBN 978-1-57131-930-2 (ebook) I. Title.
    Â Â Â  PS3602.A999A6 2014
    Â Â Â  811›.6--dc23
    2014019175
    Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. You Must Remember This was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Friesens Corporation.

For Leslie



After Machado
    Standing by the water
    I remembered
    the delicate and confused
    dream I had last night
    it was bruised
    even in the remembering
    so these words
    can only glance
    sidelong at the beehive
    that replaced my heart
    with all that pulsing
    making honey from the loss.

In Vladivostok
    The woman in the dream
    said be careful with your cock
    and I suddenly knew
    in the way one knows in dreams
    that my cock had somehow become
    a lever that might detonate
    a string of bombs riddling the city
    in the way blood clots might lace
    a body in its final days.
    When I realized I was holding
    a rooster, I did not exactly
    know what to say. Perhaps
    I smiled. I don’t know.
    There was no mirror
    and I’ve never been able
    to see myself in dreams.

Cyclops
    The story is such a story we don’t always stop to think
    about what it was like to be there: that cavern floor
    packed with pungent dung, dark as the inner bowels
    of an animal when that slab dropped into place: how
    utterly it sucked to hear the oaf stirring in his stupor
    made uneasy by wine mixing with the bolted flesh
    of good friends dispatched while we watched—
    it was just a flat-out bad deal for everyone involved.
    Polyphemus messed with no one: a law unto himself
    there in the hinterland eating goat cheese by the ton
    and Odysseus brimming full of the sauce of himself
    after out-clevering all Ilium by nestling in the stallion.
    He’d had plenty of time to think there in that hollow
    belly smelling of fear and fresh sawdust holding his
    piss in one endless clench counting droplets of sweat
    rivering cold over his ribs and under his breastplate.
    And now here he is again groping for his sharpened
    pole in pitch dark using one appetite to feed another.
    He lays the point in the drowsing embers and