This, the last seduction: to cobble all the world
(the fictive and the real) into the sandbox of a playful brain.
The rules are scribbled
on the backs of yellow flyers,
slipped in yawning bookbags,
pinned down by windshield wipers
and advertising (these same small flyers)
Tresor De L’Indochine
or Margot
Et
Les
Polecats,
an hourglass female
with directions on
her proper use,
to stretch the sealskin map
beyond the supple-enough girdle
of Michelet’s original misogyny.
A look across the ocean to one’s heart’s desire,
till discipline or career eavesdrop or intervene,
the mural changing from yesterday’s Spain
to Nueva York and today’s most recent
book-and-bra-burning, smokestack lightning with the g dropped off.
An anarchist might stuff a slur against the stand-in for Antoinette,
might gruff some matey foolishness on the casting couch of the Red Guard
but no one goes desk-diving at the green and glassy bounce
of an impudent cocktail: Molotov, or Lermontov,
or powderpuff that fails to ignite. A siren sounds out there,
in the miles-wide scar the unions used to count on.
Rain falls and the sensitive heart considers giving in
to despair or resignation, depending on the proximity of pain.
Presumably death removes both urgency and nostalgia?
As the crow flies,
black wings beneath
the sooty black underbelly
of the fattening clouds.
There’s no place I’d rather be
than failing miserably in my own backyard.
Take it however you like it,
hard or honeyed or mostly otherwise.
Mostly though it’s the flattery
of silver beaten into foil
that remains within easy reach
or a constant threat of summons.
The deep architecture
where falsettos echo down
to a groan like Pasiphae’s bull,
full of lethal joy and brimming.
This, not to be given nor,
cross one’s heart and spit,
taken lightly.
An outcrop of rainwashed marble,
one or two lanes (with chestnut
trees, a museum piece Peugeot)
but not so vulgar as Faculty Row,
its mythology of invention by day,
its mild depravities at prime time.
Neither the pristine auto
nor the chestnut overhang
refutes Chateaubriand’s
anticipated darkness,
the Niagara gone silent
and the surrounding forest
made straight and shelled
from the inside out
by the locust-carve of mercenaries
and disgruntled natives,
stripped and cold
as foreign moonlight.
Every analogy is stamped
with radical departure and,
closeted with fleas,
the Queen’s mapmaker
will baffle to his senses
and read the receipts
from top to bottom.
This is no longer tourism,
this is outright flight.
-What pretty eyes,
and this from one of several
voices near the exit sign,
though pretty is the last word
an honest informant would use.
No doubt the nude and happy statues,
the too-suave lawns
have been abused in accents
formerly barred from entry,
but changing the terms
so as to lessen the rod
leads not to tolerance but silence.
The Peugeot appeared in no less than two films
from the golden year of the nouvelle vague.
Who, among the residents of this crooked
(or is it curving) lane, doesn’t know this?
Isn’t able to work it into conversation as a
matter of interest, still a red herring for all that.
Either no one’s keeping score or everybody is.
Three swollen points for a casual wife-swap
but bastinado and vinegar for robbery by punchline.
Despite the rain, the frog-backed drunkenness
of the girls in uniform, the bookcase of errors
so lewdly exposed by some failure to close
the living room curtains, despite these premonitory cues
the cemetery and its central heart-shaped garden
still comes as a surprise. Once inside the gate, that is.
Why one is there in the first place skates away with a quartet
of other unposed questions, leaving only the task
(futile at the best of times) of locating some particular headstone.
Which wife was it?
The suicide
or the one he murdered?
Or is there a confusion of icons who merely share
that bumpy wasteland known as ‘relations with women’.
The joke fiddles with its buttons, looks about to bolt,
to cut in on the conga line and swipe poor cunnies from their hutch.
And one happens to look away
and out and over and down,
although more wayward
than the sniper’s trajectory
just described,
and sees what now arrests.
Someone gazing down at his feet,
down into the oily reflection
of the pond he’s not so much
eager to avoid as driven to examine.
Or is the posture
one of supplication? Of remorse?
Nausea, plain and simple,
or plain and totemic, given the
clouds (sooty, lowering),
the rain,
the smokestacks,
the lightning?
Even one who hides
behind initials and harbors
secret anxieties that he’s more
machine than man
turns away, back
to his shadowy seminar,
complete with laughing miseries
and girls perpetually dropping
their pencils.
But why this sudden diffidence
towards the feelings of another?
One promises to stop asking questions.
One promises to line up the feudal dates,
the species, the classes, the endless
revisions and distortions,
to slap a little order onto Lovely’s cheeks,
to pay attention as though attention were a proper debt.
Nanterre owes and is owed,
its sins a mouthful,
its virtues gone a ghastly
nighttime industrial green.
Yves sings in Sofia,
Simone sulks in cognac,
Aragon is told to piss off
in his rat’s bridle
and everywhere the children
wag their alphabet of
revolution or Revolution.
The one, the other, the big-and-little of both.
A mind so haunted that the attic
bursts into flames, the ghosts in the mirrors
as well as the bats in the belfry
pouring out through every available fissure and chink
till Smoke comes close to being declared,
of all the national attributes, the one most prized,
most lovingly to be given away or shipped overseas.
Meanwhile the boys yawned and the girls picked up their
pencils and swarmed their notebooks with words words words.
Was there then a tightness
in the chest or simply
obscure parliaments at play?
The possibility that sheer anxiety
and performance jitters
was the partial cause
of so much yawning
was well attested to
by the sufferers themselves
(the audio cassettes are boxed
and stacked for convenience
at the very ingress of the archives).
Why nerves,
and why now?
Jealousy, passion,
the little blue pills
of Ravaillac.
For who, among the red-
lipped houris,
would not give her right arm
for the sake of Theory?
The geological basin shifts in its sleep
and provides the rational explanation
as to why Nanterre howled out loud just then.
Howl a little longer,
while the King of Players
bluffs and shows
how easily the years fall away,
with the sun risen red in memory.
Theory wasn’t Theory then.
Was still the drudge
of the chorus line,
rarely given a solo
lest the footlights
set his tights on fire.
Like an image of the Virgin
clumped on the heel
of a moldy loaf of bread,
Theory was in the myopic eye
that winked three
pit-faced moons
above the ramparts.
A handkerchief
soaked in lime juice
and carried ever
after like a holy relic
and who hasn’t done the same,
with an eye to awe,
the chance of a free drink
or a bail-out at the
edge of the airport.
Here’s your passport,
here’s your fog.
He could have been a bagman
for the Kempeitai,
or the bylined hatemonger
for some shortlived Flemish rag.
But if Theory wasn’t who
he said he was
than why Nanterre
and not Port Royal?
(To lisp one Jansenist
‘for-instance’.)
A sudden rainstorm had battered the picture windows
of the undergraduate library and the water’s running down
provoked a funhouse effect on glass and marble both,
all passersby appearing to sway
with the crippled undulance of professional models.
The Subaltern wishes to put in his two-sous’ worth,
champing at the bit to fashion a noose
out of the rhetoric he’s picked up God or the secret police only know where.
The Mandarin’s continued silence could be taken as heroic,
that ocean-murmur in a seashell,
however much it grinned like guilty pride.
The ignorant fluidity of borders, the ease with which it was claimed
that monsters had evaporated into the lesser cities of Uruguay
and Argentina, fishing villages along La Plata,
retrograde estates pinned with red yarn on the edge of the Pampas,
or the jungles of ever-pitied, ever-exotic Paraguay.
And the locals who pre-dated the winter of 1945,
the already-arrived, how easy was it to assume
a blindness on their part, given that no one ever troubled
to ask them had they seen anything, any body like That
running towards them, away from a Europe
so busy re-slitting its own throat.
Don’t look now but the latest idea
has pushed through the beaded curtains, to shoulder its way to the bar
and impress someone else’s girl with a trick
not seen hereabouts since Tzara revealed his hepatitis.
Look sharp and rack the billiards,
there’s a long night ahead and the arcades are a sea
of black umbrellas, headed for Babylon or the barricades,
headed anywhere but home.
Hail, Rosa, well met.
The chilled sangria sets
your teeth on edge,
the ringtone no longer
the Internationale,
replaced by something
so vapid that your eyes
go cloudy
with tears of rage,
cataracts of contempt.
And yes, those weeks and months of 68
changed everything and why leave
the definitive version to the yet-unborn?
But it wasn’t the Sorbonne, or Columbia, or the Freie Universitat Berlin.
It was (there will be no repetition for the dozers,
the late-comers, the hungover plagiarists)
on the streets of Mexico City that imagination first flamed
and went from flicker to inferno,
word-on-page to word-of-mouth to word
-of-honor, truth to power with a vengeance
worthy of the gospel-quoting Cristeros.
There is a sheltering shadow
cast from Morningside Heights
to the X-rated holes-in-the-wall
backsiding Saint Germain du Pres.
The Stakhanovites might well rend their tenured nails,
gnash their stainless steel teeth,
the buxom Pompadours rock with silent laughter,
supreme among the bluestockings,
be they butch, femme, or 5th column,
whose liquid recitations on the style-over-content
controversy so quivered the old men of Peking.
I am vindicated! is the roar
that startles the lion tamer’s dreaming ear.
At midnight the pumpkins
disgorge their foolish virgins.
As you see, the city hasn’t changed much,
still Narcissus By The Sea.
But why such anger, here at the boneyard’s mouth.
You’ll have noticed that it’s not a question.
Nanterre was not the Alamo,
was not even Thermopylae,
and no amount
of deluxe reprints
or five-star séances
will bring Benjamin back
from the malfosse,
the snowstorm,
the unfinished Passagen
of the grim Pyrenees.