I
Reader of books.
And listener and looker.
These also.
The bustle of the afteryear.
And all the birthdays.
But the old calendar
and the new calendar?
These also?
II
A piano out a 4th-storey window.
Concerto for sidewalk and drunken
soldiers. One shove, one passion.
Why stop with the crockery?
III
He described possession as a choice.
A matter of the devil keeping
his politics to himself.
Punishment loots the sideboard,
goes looking for its crime.
Match made in heaven, but
whose match? whose heaven?
A million stars fell down.
The insult was much polished.
Worried over, even.
Taken out and looked at.
Put away again.
IV
He depended
on his wife’s
means.
To go out
of the city
and climb
up in the rocks.
The leisure
to hear
the big god
mumbling, day
in, day out.
V
Another god, or was it the same one?
Rapping gently on his oak desk.
Edelweiss, snowdrop.
His country had made a virtue
of watching its neighbors die.
VI
A treat for the children,
when the headaches got
too bad. Back and forth
under an island sky,
circling an island tree.
Solemn and black-coated,
cravat dappled with marmalade.
The donkey’s ears sticking
out of its daisy hat.
To prove the rider was human,
his critics said.
He inserted himself in his fictions,
expecting to be recognized.
Loin-clothed youth, speaking
to the animals.
Stare at the book jacket.
They are sleeping
but they are not at home.
VII
The city of the swallows
is named after someplace else.
I do not know this for sure.
It is based upon a commonplace.
My assumption, I mean.
New this, Nuevo that.
All the old places given
the chance to start over.
One would need a third,
a fourth hemisphere
to get the job done right.
Wouldn’t you agree?
And even then?
VIII
Already the dictionary
is waking up, the encyclopedia
is rubbing its burgundy eyes.
Negotiating the ramp,
the black skirt struggled
to contain her hips.
I saw it. I was there.
It has nothing to do with anything.
IX
Suicide by epaulette, suicide by cholera,
drinking straight from the tap.
The why of the deed is often asked.
The answer is the same, even when not given.
X
Already the wall is full of repetition,
although it is not yet repeating itself.
His mother sitting sideways and I was
shocked to learn.
But she’s very famous for that very pose.
Strangers would be disappointed if,
upon opening the door.
I can quote him by heart.
Not in the original. One phrase
only. Everyone knows it. Or did
I mean to say I’m surprised
not everyone knows it.
XI
His wife was bad news. Which is, I suppose,
why I like her. The word freckle, for instance.
And gold. And black. Dressing up to pretend
the world he was singing of and from and to
would continue to exist when he was naked.
Which he often was. And maladjusted,
to top it all. The sin of his being here
to start with. Not what he was best known for.
That would be hunger and collaboration.
Which could mean something else entirely.
Something enchanting. Like pluribund eyes.
In a painting where high society laughs
at itself and shows us a hundred years later
why the joke keeps changing.
XII
I watched
as he folded
and refolded
the list and
diagnosed neurosis.
Pearl is the
one-word clue.
And cage.
And clogs
to keep them
from running away.
Away out of
camera-range
and onto their page
of the encyclopedia,
the page where
it is always raining.
I promise
to name names
next time,
only because need
will begin
its metamorphoses
out of desire.
XIII
A barbarous look, out of time.
Unhinged, and that’s being kind.
A wolf whistle exists outside the wolf
but here he is, silent for once.
She’ll be an early closer unless
the saints intervene.
They walked past, laughing about
an ugly church, plump on its rolling
hill and then the racketing bus
drowned their voices.
I didn’t know them
so I didn’t look up.
Will the next candidate tell me
I was wrong, using ‘inform’ to
show he means business? I’ll let
you know if it happens.
XIV
Not, after all,
so unlucky
with women
as he made out.
Clappered with
them, in fact.
Which makes
the artful misogyny
look very
significant indeed.
Which bigotry
shall we
look away from?
Our time
is limited
and the question
a sincere one.
XV
When I was a kid
that ultimate apology
was horrifying.
Now it seems merely
benign, though still
unexpected.
Suicide by snow sled.
Oh laugh
till you’re sick.
She and the
other one, I get them
mixed up.
Which isn’t helpful.
Except to show
something of myself
I hadn’t
perhaps
meant to
reveal.
XVI
Here for a reason.
With bells on.
Prancing every
finer list
as well and
taking it all back
while still lucid
and who cares
about the reason?
In this instance
the words count
and who he
spoke them to.
XVII
It was never clear to me why his fame was inadequate to his salvation. Exile would have been cruelty enough it seems. But in the heat of the moment. Fear pestilential as tadpoles. A studied ruthlessness in the aftermath and disposition, you will grant me that? From one eastern margin to another, all with the illusion of following the fickle sun. I wouldn’t know where to start in my examination of my own pleasure at his stagelit error. Not seen as such at the time, though much discussed away from the unclubbed ears of muckers and cubs. A certain devil’s advocacy in even his more humane arguments. Man to man, lay of the land, but let’s try harder and perhaps our grandchildren will live to be decent. Or did he say perchance? No, not even in the memoirs of his enemies, and the fallers-away as his big dog self went
awkward and mangy, defending one victim at the cost of spitting on another.
An oversimplification.
Yes, the airborne germs of black and white. The risk of complexity will be best observed when truth looks pale and carsick, hunched over in the weeds and choking the many spluttery sorries! of the proud and borrowed and beautiful. A credit it took ages for anyone to claim. And there are many still would unclaim it, swollen early bird or no. Old man at a ping pong table, and the nude assistant paddling him close enough to lean out and inspire the electric breath of cardiac arrest.
XVIII
A light nobility like pollen,
never to be seen again
but dear to many hearts.
A pastel age where one could
dwell forever, at the price of
total loss of touch.
Where is he going?
To Dreamland, to Dreamland.
To the huge gates, locked upon his approach.
A woman calls down to him
in perfect alexandrines and he waits
there forever, gently mocked.
XIX
There was a raft, I remember.
And an escape through a rattlestorm
of arrows, stepping on comrades’ corpses
as though treading on shifting ice.
He knew from the start that truth
was the color of night. He left a record of it,
from scroll to paperback, with someone
explaining constantly into a dying ear.
XX
His size, his voice, his vanity.
Separating the reds from the
ever clears, the many hairs
of many dogs, morning broken
over the park like a vial of perfume.
I always thought gaudy and too
much but touching only that aspect.
The glossary distrusts me now,
sees me choosing favorites where all
ought to be equal.
Art presents its two faces:
the one to fall in love with,
the one to pursue to the ends
of the earth.
Or the end of the garden.
XXI
I heard a funny story the other day.
The portrait of Mr. Serious
flashed by mistake as illustration of
heresy and dabblement in the black arts.
Sum up the world, would you?
And in your bathtub, making waves
for posterity’s sake. Relics tossed offstage,
keys and panties catapulting up from darkness.
XXII
I know his reputation.
The sledgehammer ego,
the rapier wit, crafter of
phrases designed to set
the teeth on edge, grind grind.
Caught in his pajamas
on the balcony, as the town crier
drew near. A bicycle wheel
in a ditch or a flushing toilet,
productive of the one big idea
and the first of many litters.
XXIII
Of him I know nothing,
though I read the standards
and was dutifully bored.
The frontispiece port
set him in my mind as a
young man, turtle-eyed
within his pince-nez.
And he lived to a fruity
old age, was happy
one hopes, would never
have guessed how badly
things would go.
XXIV
Touchy, and stubborn, and local
(how those feelings got hurt,
itemized in sprung rhythm
and snowclad feminine endings).
Not the first to put off an exile
that might have saved his life.
To die, gasping in thoughtful fury,
on the steppe-skirt, the many unlived
regrets in double-trot parade.
XXV
With the jury still out this long since he blew
the day shut is it safe to guess he’ll live forever?
Figure of division, vilified or hail-fellow’d, but there?
Fine as mist on an empty ski slope, a drunken nurse
whooping it up where the moonspill reaches down
to snap her garter, wrap her in a bear-hug on the
wrestling bear-rug, fireplace crackling like hunters in a panic.
XXVI
The godly language moves at an animal’s pace,
glimpsed alone at pond’s edge.
These numbers and the oscillating horns,
bull by shadow, to set the footmen running.
And it peaked in a tower’s sulfurous tip.
XXVII
Rehearsing his conversations with
himself in a mirror, brother whose
seminary letters he prized so highly.
Those midnight dashes across the border,
no more silent than the mobs who stank
in their hounding.
He may have exaggerated his profile,
prodigious getter-about
that he surely was.
An astounding piece of propaganda,
larks the cherubic stand-ins for the angels
of war.
Sea otters drumming the multilingual rhymes,
and squirrels, rabbits,
at daggers drawn.
XXVIII
An extreme case, alternately etonnant
and risible. I seek acknowledgment
of his sins with every mention of his
name, shut the book if there is none.
In her arms what balkanization of his
brain took place? No point in marveling
at his heart, assume red passion only.
XXIX
A cliché and yet, apparently,
still widely read, celebrated
for the Ur to all he was not.
Prose at once vague and as
descriptive as a plumber’s
manual, can you imagine?
More fluent than many, artful
in his modesty as if he knew.
Leitmotif of cowgirl galloping on the
same chauve upthruster,
digits tickling the Milky Way.
XXX
A fanatic abandon, crawling the surrendered compass,
the rhymes the final touch, raisins spooned in
while the virgin pastry steamed.
Guilty of beauty so adorable one dreads its end,
and a legacy of subtraction till the whole world
lies charmed to laughter.
The opening line for which many thank yous.
But familiarity breeds contempt.
And worse. Here’s the keys back, the sexy sonnets
will be returned by unhurried post.
Car-rider, commending some unwritten commentary
out of habit. For pity’s sake,
a dutiful looker-twice. Pornography at its most efficacious,
foreign-sounding squeaks and shimmers.
Bring your own veils. The famous trunk, or was it
a mover’s packing box,
what now would seem a dumpster? I met his fan-
base once, was unimpressed,
though who, in all quietness, am I to judge?
My prejudice travels widely,
hikes blind through every landscape. He himself
is quoted more often than his
look-alike characters. Once, this much I choose
to remember, by a Marxist
on a heath, although he flubs or barely tries to guess.
Saxophones and a pageboy bob.
Oh, and something about the night kept at bay by
champagne and neon.
XXXI
The images too rapid-fire.
Each one selected broods the dozen left out.
Gravel peppering the waterlogged moon,
the hat tossed round the bullring,
the running massacre of the nuisance rabbits.
I think I know why.
Would gladly speculate, but not today.
A minor defeat in the annals of the
class struggle perhaps.
I did in fact explain this once,
did I not?
Was animated, indicating by way of nervous laughter,
the seeming importance of what I hoped and
needed to convey.
I failed, did I not?
The ocean roaring in its monotone seashell.
XXXII
And I see a way through,
not that I was looking.
The antidote to the popular madman
and the relentless synthesist.
His pessimism seems at times a pose.
Or was it courage, a refusal to accept
the rules he was steadily, stolidly laying down.
A disconnect, but an ancient one.
The river was only a canal.
Much later he spoke of that particular skill
exhibited by some human beings.
The ability to hide what is manmade.
XXXIII
Trains abandoned, and where did they wind up?
As state’s evidence or confiscated toys?
How his accent improved to our admiring ears.
And complexities by which he kept himself exotic,
willing libraries and trinkets back to an adoring public.
Solitude granted, at the last.
XXXIV
A common trick, to double
one’s painted ranks with the
deft deployment of mirrors.
A fern and an antimacassar
and ringing from another room,
a transoceanic voice, ghostly
in its brotherly love.
XXXV
One gets the distinct impression
that for all his time in the pantheon
he hasn’t bothered to unpack,
an announcement regarding an
embarrassing mistake shortly forthcoming.
Along with many others
he looked into the trees for his decision.
To swim across or remain behind.
XXXVI
Drive back through time and he’s the one you’ll come to. Beyond him all is strange, the freshness of change has not begun its creep and stealth. A mama’s boy who set the world in its tilt towards the flattening out of shadows. He tapped the final page
and said that this was where he lived while where he lived showed its ribs and collapsed in smoking rubble.
Frightening children into laughter, at which he was very good, selecting out the facts which might trouble or bore. An impish sense of fashion which led on more than one occasion to mistaken identity and wards against the evil eye.
Panthers guarded his wheelchair, a face the whole city recognized, shocked into
admiration of its proud and horselike ugliness. A magpie who majestied everything
he stole, who made the puppets weep real tears, let loose stray melodies down to the gondola waves.
XXXVII
Of him I would repeat myself.
Many might now benefit
from his ferocity, claim some
shining fragment of hatred
from his overturned table.
Learn how easily love of country
cries itself to sleep in the company
of talkative criminals.
He drew inspiration from accounts
of atrocity, pulsed death to harmonize
with sex and set design.
Made no bones over selling out
though is not considered to have done so.
Shins oiled, a lacelike chain between
the ankles, a handful of stars,
and a curved, quite serpentine sword,
falling swift through musty air.
XXXVIII
The last man
who knew all
the answers.
The legend
supplies more detail
than is needed,
each aphorism
stalked back
to its address.
The balls to see
an amusing story
as the balance
to intimidation.
Enough of a
navigator
to make
the prick
strike lethal.
XXXIX
Who could countenance such behavior
at any other time? The great brought low,
their statues pigeonned to a who’s that?
He’s holding court in the parlor,
please don’t mention the bubu.
XL
A language so crafty
that the evasion was come
and gone before a passing protest
could rouse eyebrow
or conscience. He reminded
me of an actor I once knew,
whom, had I told him so,
would have pled license,
would have seen me safely
to the door. His point was made
continuously by others.
That he supplied the booze,
that they supplied the lack of will.
The spirit of distraction and rudeness,
that he allowed himself a child’s
freedom to flirt and footsie,
until his name was mentioned,
one of his titles let slip with a
bounce and splash into the golden
shallows. And then, antennas in erection,
he was all ears. A coward
in his precious way, but no credit
he didn’t pocket like a klepto
helpless in the shining light.
XLI
I was prepared to join
the ranks of the appalled.
Expected no such riches,
such density of design.
I lounged his web
like a rival spider.
XLII
From his expensive windows he watched the past come furiously alive. The blood oranges, seen through a pitcher of water, chimed voluptuous and magnified. It was the ordering of the words which was his simple glory, the meaning itself was neither new nor startling. He warmed himself too near the terrible fire and was burned. Razor and running water the final command. He speculated (this is highly dubious) whether the courtyard he was setting off towards would house a goddess or merely his wife.
XLIII
From such an era
when the buckling of a
mind’s hinges might be
excused as overwork.
The spontaneous reordering
of a decade’s bric a brac.
Smooth flat pebbles
topping a slab of
limestone. An adequate
style from which
to depart. It is
stamped explicit on
his bones. His worshippers
deny but too many
have seen. A lonely
cottage on a wind-
swept cliché, the sea’s
far-below crashing
tidied up by celli,
drums, and a piccolo,
transparent as lightly
falling rain.
XLIV
Love no longer lovely, patience a
collar only death can now remove.
The souls of children hungry for
a little havoc, the insane giddiness
of the Wicked Queen, the world-
gobbling monster-stride of the cherry-fanged
Ogre. Naughty children gone to their
rewards, a breeze-teased curtain and
the window cracked just wide enough.
XLV
Numbers in the morning ruled the remainder
of his day, the endless cups of tea, the beer
lugged across the park, the hints forever falling
that one oughtn’t rest and here’s why.
As if knowing he was being followed he went to
neighborhoods where nothing ever happened.
The shadows and alleys and garrets and basements though:
these promised shames and treacheries and pleasures
to tinge his aura darkest purple.
XLVI
Goldenmouth, jolly old slum,
severe and lapidary and girdled
breathless within a coral storm of enemies.
His many namesakes who he
might dream of surpassing,
no sin in failure, no vanity
such that lips might unconceal.
Among many others his voice rose
from the throng and echoed long after
off the high stone ceiling, the stone ribs,
guttered like embers in their drop.
He stenciled the outline of a salamander’s
bask, described a prairie peopled
by mice, was mistaken for a cat
and rounded on till wounded.
He autographed a string of broken
hearts, held himself true to error.
Drain life and anger and malice,
and beauty remains but oddly, the
guest the other partygoers all believed
most scandalously dead.
Much to like and much to marvel at,
the visitations of a crophaired girl
with a smile that could populate a mid-sized city,
her innocence untampered with and lessons
dozened upon his bull-like head.
He flew against the sun, shot it to ribbons
from his cockpit of books and gin.
XLVII
Who would begrudge the hot tears shed on principle?
What place had risen up in those deepest parts of a people’s
dream that sorrow from daybreak to day’s death should seem
a small, a reasonable cost. A bird’s relentless melody bending two
trivial notes against the darkness of a third. Time slipping away
beneath the desire to run. Against such memories I can offer
no defense. Like a city left open as the thunder closed in,
a fiery plain lurching like a carpet from its roots to swarm
and devour the abandoned moat. There have been spectacular attempts
in recent times. The need to recreate the dungeons and abattoirs.
As if the trace of fingers on a frost-wet brick would at last convince.
Words arranged in any order. Any words arranged in order.
Tell me again why I should not. One has seen her photograph before,
many times, without knowing it was her. Difficult to gauge either shallowness
or intelligence. Darkly, as is said, beautiful. The wildness of necessity contained.
One in particular never fails to disturb and arouse, captured on the same date
she was entered by disparate djinns, an old affair in overlap with conjugal duty,
freely granted. The image is before? Or after? Or in between?
XLVIII
Tracking his name
back from where it
appears in the index,
I find him each time
among his companions.
One of several, a genus-driven
trope. Should I be concerned?
Is it too late to redress
the oversight, unbalance my lightship
in some other direction, nose
cautiously out into
the bay-baffling wind?
XLIX
For this to be true
of the ones who are loved
or owed some debt
the pain must be borne
and neither exalted nor
excused. I did not mean
to say must. To say
something else instead.
Incoherence in the face
of it, wary of the glibly
elegant and articulate.
Sometimes no words
in any order.
L
Small dogs among the duelists and the beeches.
Unaware of indifference.
A uniform and a booming voice presages a scratch behind the ears.
A twig tossed to scatter the selfish birds.
LI
There is not enough distance between lapses. The order hints at desperation towards the end. Desire selects one of each, wishes none to see the graph behind the freehand line. Romantic notions were the hardest to shatter, perhaps because their discoveries and births were joyous occasions? And best remembered, always, as such? He said that accuracy had its place, although this was not one of them. An instance of honesty, found cited out of proportion to the incident of its cause. A bribe in some sleepy suburb. Another delay to the extension of the villa’s back wall.
I refuse to look it up. Not without naming names. I refuse.
LII
He set
a new standard
for mildness.
The many stories
of obnoxious staging
have never quite stuck.
In bemused frustration
he elicited a casual statement
of deep profundity from a possibly bored friend.
The paper and bronze I have always found a little ridiculous.
Adored, however, by many, and I am
willing to hold my tongue.
There is no law demanding the
free expression of every wrong opinion.
Should there be?
LIII
Overshadowed by the one on his heels.
Or that’s the convention.
Lately though, he bears more traffic.
The well will someday run dry, earth sealing like the death of a great worm.
LIV
There seems to be one in every language.
Brat and colossus, opening doors without first asking
why they were closed to begin with.
He seems not to have known how cold the passage would be.
There was no chance of a half-wink in the light of a half-joke.
Only a disgusted turning away. He insisted it was only fair
but he was not believed. I did not believe him.
I was well along before I saw his city in daylight,
having seen its nightlife, many times before.
Gadfly and god-flogger, whose very modern prose hid a remorse
for what was vanishing, regret which raided cross-border into anguish.
Emotions cluttered to the staples, pinwheel of pet peeves iridescent
and still startling as the page leafs onto its jaundiced fellow.
To be seduced into comrade-closeness, at the risk of making
hatred of others one’s own.
LV
He knew the difference
between reason and rumor.
Prayers done, Masses done,
logic given the downturned thumb.
The consequences blanched the map
like an ice-storm, snuffing many haven-candles,
plugging the nostrils and mouths of
any caught out-of-doors.
And when the doomsday winds died down,
there was no sound to fill the silence.
It is only sadness, he said. All this will melt away,
God’s mercy like the sun.
He is known to have said this.
LVI
How could he not have known
his effect upon others, men and women?
But perhaps he did not.
Vanity of a type unconnected with beauty.
I choose to believe the loss incalculable.
The evidence amounts to 3 or 4 pages.
LVII
If mocked, be humble: pride lives in another house than this.
His reflection in a snowflake.
Letters from savage queens buried under an archive of botanical sketches and patents for inventions derived from nicotine-dreams.
The sound a rubber-tipped cane might make upon the cobbles.
Another witch denounced in the backwards north.
The academy would like to kill its fathers.
They are hiding in plain view.
LVIII
When a bear sings out
what does it mean?
Does the bear dream stories?
Freeze-frames of stun and react?
Or a revery of shadows
tumbling like cubs, curdling the
berry-colored stream?
The margins of the libretto are
not as crowded as I was expecting.
Small questions of a general nature.
Business-like, which is to say bloodless.
Politics and personal jealousy
provided the flame and foil.
Nothing of great consequence.
We could all be happy with less.
LIX
He fell in love with everyone.
Except for those he hated and wished,
conspired even, to have murdered.
He held each woman at arm’s length,
close enough to see the dilation of pupils under lash.
All in preparation for a life among the sun-drunk
scorpions and woozy weaving wasps.
Frustrated at every turn, and his belief in this injustice
was fervent, toxic, neverending.
He would not recognize the man we call by his name.
His subject was war.
Like any specialist he prized his ghetto highly.
His atrocity tales were of immense service and he
took the side of the blood-spillers, a gift and
lesson in itself.
LX
Again, the many musts
and unforgettables.
Friend of cats,
come back soon.
Or never, as was clear
from the moment
the women came and
went, varied
as the change of
leaves in a month
of early snow,
no wind,
a rain
determined
to root the secrets
from the stones.