Who writes this is faced
with April
Who writes this is faced with April
Framed by maid’s quarters panes,
In six rectangles of rained-glass.
No names, or identities need impress
Upon the grey-flat mane, the clouds
That break, close, and regain, filling
In the claim with aerials bent past
Recognition in the past-due light, sun
Making do with what it can, enstormed.
To take this room you’d need force.
You’d need to be a personality. See
The upper limits: shingles, like sea-
Stones at a beach, spread, shining,
Touched and untouched ceaselessly
By the water as it goes and returns.
How the light’s recession sub-burns;
It is lightning as a formal request
To involve ozone in a dance. Sill
Is white-restrained, dry, the counter-
Sky, upon the inner side that stains
No pattern nor pulls back. It stays
And stands up in the shy room, seven
Or so of night, like the maiden once.
It wears reticence like lavender
At dusk’s throat, enhanced. Outside
Is cleverly different, pink-dark, less
And more of dark and light as night
And day interplay like sea and horse
Riding one another as word and wave.
The bricks are octaves in an autoclave.
The music is the stonework debarred,
Thrown out and remaindered, splayed
In the salmon-coal light, that glamours
As it stone-sashays across sky-scene,
Rewiring lines as if it knew its place.
Clonmacnoise In Winter
The smooth belly of a virgin — callows
prepared to be lost in meadow-flood,
taken below eskers, new winter’s rise.
Grave slabs, Irish crosses, command
spaces expectant with more invasion.
A smashed-out polygon of north tower,
church-like stones unable to line up,
abbots ground down and altars prone,
shaft fragments, ruined in the full sense,
recall to me a woman wanting her lover
back from his war-zone, a cold burn
where green rage warms and warns
her man’s allied now with another
who will not release, all but vows over.
A spring child from this, small plunder
promising, under water, fresh-laid land.
Be
It Resolved That
In my first novel let me be a boy debater,
A thirteen-year-old in a grey suit,
Roget’s in my smart black valise.
How I admire the smooth Prime Ministers,
Their lips, which I should like to kiss.
Be It Resolved That Desire In Puberty Is
A Bicycle With Training Wheels.
Should we repatriate the constitution?
Death Penalty: pro or con? In green
Cafeterias, over Sloppy Joes, on plastic
Trays, we manoeuvred, as best we could,
Tight in uniforms, assured of our power.
The judges watched us match wits,
Flushed under the neon in front of them.
How they rustled uneasily as we came
To adulthood over question time, at
Chest-high podiums, that girl fainting,
Some guy diving for the wastebasket
To upchuck. Shit out of luck,
we’d say,
Before sneaking a fag with our partner.
Leader of the Opposition, that was when
I first met you, all dressed in green wool.
Love’s a dizzying school in one lust-rush.
How many in Brazil, how few in Japan?
The soft drink parties, after, were in high
Homes on long hills, and someone got
To go upstairs with the one they had beaten,
Earlier, in Room 302. Never me.
I was unresolved. You said: take up
Kick-boxing, but I was rather shy for that.
The rhetoric of sex: thus is regret defined.
You learn to love Cicero, aim for politics.
Total Film
Excitement and Entertainment
Are nearly the same word, I suggest.
Point the Swiss Binoculars.
Let God’s eye do the rest.
It’s not my fault if Miss X
Takes off her clothes so I can see:
What’s it to her? Total Film to me.
While there’s a light to cast a shadow,
Who needs the glossy page?
Every window is a wannabe’s stage.
I’ve come close to parlours where
Dress is in a state of disrepair. I know
To watch is not to do, that’s sad.
Hamlet spied on his mother, another,
And it was doing that was the bother.
I blame this talent for observation
On my father. But it may extend
Back to the origins of animals and men;
In caves when it was hard to make
Things out. On dry plains where the prey
Looked small and far away, but came
Closer as you squinted, shaded by hand.
What you get is what you see, running
In the opposite direction, overland. It’s
Retinal, no skin, the stock-in-trade regret.
Monsieur
Pigeon’s Best Machine
I would like my cemetery to be shaped
like the one at Montparnasse, bordered
by Rue Froidevaux, Boulevard
Edgar-Quinet, Raspail, and,
on the fourth side, lit apartments
whose small square windows look out
on the graves of Aron, Bainville,
Belmondo, and Cortazar, among others.
In November, the “happiness of melancholy”
is everywhere, but especially here, late
afternoon climbing the exhibitionistic trees
full of a need to show their all.
Autumn makes sorrow smell good,
gives one an appetite to go after tombs,
those tall, dark statues of stillness,
handsome stone brides married to sleep
or that different eternity, stopped clocks.
They fill me with comfort, because, after
so long, they are still here: the names
kept (Sartre, Man Ray), and the low, flat
trays left out, to put small gifts on, as if
thanking the dead for their hospitality.
On Baudelaire’s grave (shared with
his mother, and a stepfather no less):
a folded slip of lined paper a student
might have torn from her petite notebook —
a guilty love-dart in blue ink sent to her guy —
lies semi-wet beneath the edge of a flower pot.
Pried loose, opened, the note is brief
and in Spanish. Translated, it seems to say:
Thank you for having given me the scents
and sounds of Paris long before I could be
here myself. A good gift for a poet.
On Samuel Beckett’s seamless slate roof,
so close to the ground and plain it could
be mistaken for a path: some candies
and another letter, this one cryptic:
I hope the end came out better
than the beginning. A work reference.
Playing games with the dearly departed
and their words is fun, treating them
and us to a spectrum: tragic to comic.
Mostly, it prays: may I also get such
lively attention from nice strangers
when gone — indeed, both ruined and
disassembled: melted into whatever’s next.
This narcissism is not perplexing in context,
who wouldn’t want treats for bones?
So, this cemetery is a dramatic restaurant
(dinner theatre more like) feeding many
hungers, amateur — and professional:
Nature’s, that consummate glutton.
It is also a great stage with a proscenium arch
upon which a rambling audience gets to meet
its makers, the better to enjoy creation,
its loss, and a curious restitution.
Organists, singers, actresses, Peruvian
writers, aviators, political men, photographers,
flautists, astronomers, physicians, and
the founder of Club Med, are all here,
not to be ignored; conveniently at the centre
of a great metropolis, but not quite in it.
The clearly mapped avenues, with signs
for each Division, the 19th century lamps,
and the guarded gates, ensure that this
is a city in dapper microcosm, and that
its guiding trope is one of clever urban
planning: the suburbs, on the outskirts
of existence, close to Heaven’s countryside,
where there is more room for lawns, love.
Speaking of which, my favourite tombstone
belongs not to an industrialist or chess
champion (though they are here in numbers),
not even to the Mexican President Porfirio
Díaz, but instead to a homely inventor:
Charles Pigeon. I have no earthly idea
what his contribution to patents or gears was,
though his grave is topped with the most
nostalgic and grotesque figuration of sentiment.
We come as voyeurs to his last resting place
beside his wife. It is a large, green (the air
did that) bed, and in it, there they both are:
he doodling new mechanisms in a little book,
completely dressed, down to the detail of
a pocket watch and vest; she, more relaxed,
also clad (in a gown better designed for a ball
than dreams) is turned slightly aside, humorously
grimacing, one hand put out to his thigh, as if
to say: Turn out the light Charles, let’s make
whoopee. This scene of merry, married life
is Monsieur Pigeon’s best machine: one which
carries all who pass by it, immediately, from
their louche century with its discontented values,
back to his, when such peace and contentment,
between man and wife, was a basic right.
At any rate, he thought so, and put the thing up
(in the path of texts, revolution and economies)
over their long-term absence, to cap their night
with a fixed ornament I would gladly die under,
for I too believe that tenderness is a monument.
Berryman
In Paris
1.
i think, walking home
from lunch, of john berryman.
how he put his glasses
in his shoe, before bed.
he had so many wives
he was practically a king,
indeed, henry. now, too, historical,
a figure who can no more dance
to the edge of a bridge
or tilt his glasses on the bridge of his nose.
he’s gone, not leaning in the door, about
to say or do something hilarious or sad,
play out some inner drama on a college
professor’s varsity stage — play out
on coeds or fawning poetry buffs,
or any chicken farmer with twenty bucks
to buy a lecture. instead of them,
the not here, we get debris;
which, in cases,
like these, is both
the losses of others/and poetry.
affairs seem likely in a university town,
by degrees of lust and luster are lost
so many campus sweethearts, and ph.ds
tossed from aleppo to princeton,
various ambitions circling honor and desire
with achievement’s alter side, sickness
at the dagger-minded, incarnadine price paid
by profs who want to write and get laid
and keep a family drama politely on ice;
the crux of any text or life is corruption
when the folio is separated from the author
for too long; when the words shift, wicked,
from page to performance, from politics
to partisan reviews, martini afternoons
with deans’ concubines and matriculating ingenues;
complexer the circuitous fall when plummet
measure’s grace, that especial favor, with past-times
that, curvaceous — that singular eye — pleasing deceit
of motion — miss the king to kill the thane.
crane and lear — rush jobs — not the three poems
necessary to enthrone one’s glint of genius...
2.
i wish john a. smith (his name
before his father predeceased him
purposefully with a gun to the temple in florida)
were here with me now.
i would like to buy him a drink
(regardless of consequences
or what this forgives)
and talk of cal, delmore, yeats, rp, randall
(that opinionated dandy, cruel and gentle
who hurt his peers into excellence or pall)
or girls with paprika in their veins —
how a well-curved bum sits well with us
august gentlemen; we’d rank his pals
in a boozy canon; and i’d ask him to pray
for me, as lowell did, most famously.
advice from such quarters
unlikely to be forthcoming,
i plunge over the past
and into the cold, quick-running
future — a mississippi — to consider
what time stores ahead for myself,
let alone those i might love.
how that joyless block
crawls into our fullness
and yanks us through
to be words, less read.
for him, berryman, to be dead
how, possibly, could it go better
for a later man? worried
by all the equally different
women, cigarettes, alcohol
and intoxicant all all all of life, and
who thinks too often
of first, last and interim things
that dance a limited evening
in paris, of the moment, where
eileen (his wife, remembering, no
mistress bradstreet she, a flesh
and bloodied rival to the unamused
obsessive of more maternal music)
was, with a second husband, diplomatic.
3.
after the first, poetic,
succumbed to succumbing.
creation, which is never a hero
to its muse, slavers —
child/animal — his letters being
opened in cafes while he, dizzied,
made very many minor breaches
in the closing fields of indifference,
opening mortal absence to arrows
of art that hit the head under armor,
wounding open day sounds — which
open organ grinders and spring
into rooms off — here — saint-placide,
a rue no longer entirely closed
by winter reading; that is to say:
a poet’s close, living,
even when presumed the opposite
when re-opened properly, just so —
at the page that’s bright with flow
and spring’s longing — that dumb compulsion
to grow a birth from nothing which breaks
by precedent with death’s preeminence, abroad.
a split wrist that feeds us paprika-stained
blood, to revivify, in loss,
what voice was nearly us,
was THEIRS, can only now be OURS.
this transmission, substantiating much,
underwriting more, the blank check
in his pocket identifying him,
river-dragged and sodden
to the ambulance, then home...
is the palpable reason — the placid heath
ripe with copulation and forgiving kin —
deserved and not derived,
that can be pardoned
for seducing us away
from lovely full-on fear, the argument
we have with life, which terminates.
what’s after is shook out,
that silver shock of light
from the unlockable book,
not always good, or polite.
Paris, March 27, 2002
After The Orient Express
After the Orient Express, eighteen hours of sleeping car,
I disembarked in Budapest, passed the Zimmer Frei
ladies and their ham-fisted pitches, made my way to our
old address, looked for a sticker, with the name reversed:
Egan Sara, the custom in Hungarian, but it’d been
peeled
off; tried the door, knowing it would be locked now.
Something small gave, likely broken, then I was inside
the long green-grey hallway with its retrograde air.
I took the elevator to the fourth floor, memory allied
to base curiosity: we never knew who had followed us.
To read other lives through a blank door requires skills
I am not allowed: it presented exactly the remembered
image, the same cracked version they’d built you after
the more elegant one had been kicked in one morning
by that junkie looking for more pills. Nameplates on
the other three doors of the landing were each new;
I couldn’t ring. The entire area, carelessly, was you
and not. As I rarely did, I took all the stairs down,
stopping at a calendar with its magnetic red square
around this day, two years from when we were here
last. Nothing to relate in all this, but that well-worn
sense that love is most a presence when it’s moved
to a shelf we can’t quite reach any more. So, I cried.
It was as if you had already died and gone to Heaven.
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