Two Poems:

After Party

                                 After Horace

Helena, when you froth with the names of stars
I wonder whether it's a star's kiss, a star's trace
from last night's after-party that perplexes me.

You can't buy the tears that adorn my eyes
on eBay or in the diamond district. Those
bruises on you aren't temporary henna tattoos.

Some star put them there after the after-party,
before he made you taste the back of his throat.
I know what happens at those after-parties, where

Absolut sponsors everything. Everyone puts a drop
of honey somewhere up inside their body and
the game is, where is it, who can find my honey drop?

Meanwhile where is your Horace? Home, as always,
translating some poet's thousands-of-years-from-now
agonies into his frantic, ancient Latin.

Peeled Horse

                                 After Horace

Helena, now that you have moved away
to a patrician county in New Jersey,
there's a horse under your ass, where I once was.

I would like to make that horse into
an anatomical drawing of himself, all
bone and tissue and staring eye sockets.

I've studied the masters: Battista Franco's
cabinets of femurs and knees, and
the banana-peel exposed skulls of Lucas Kilian —

how would you like to ride that peeled horse,
its bone saddle rattling all day, turning
your ass to bone in the New Jersey afternoon?

Dan Chiasson
TriQuarterly 120
Guest Edited by Joshua Weiner

Copyright © 2005 by TriQuarterly.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

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