(I) Obit et vie
September, 1898.
Atlas of botanist’s leaves,
pressed in unseen volume,
the palm given to nature.
Wordy garland
of solemn reproach: that artifice
should be so quickly mastered,
the restoration borrowing lean gestures
from its encyclopedic domain.
Argive, queen of immobility,
how did you, or for that matter, Des Esseintes,
chain the neon to an orange gilt?
Priapus in a sunflower, homage to clashing homage
upon the silent heirloom of the forever-breaking wave.
Pink then, or jewel-white.
Either way a difficult course
as the pilot knew, to flush
the driven currents
to a wordless eternity.
The grappled methodology of the mere moment.
For how else to control the demented accuracy
of the seen world,
obscuring that other world
by the tyranny of its radiance.
Hideous, under moving water,
Orpheus’ fleshless skull.
The classroom, still with gestation,
entombed with the classic facades
of death’s overwrought kingdoms.
Beyond this, a teacher’s quiet room,
halved to an almost suppression
that is not light but a
suppression of light.
The serene master
approves these constant friends,
stamped as they are
with the heresy
from which there is no conversion.
Ravenna, Brussels, Baltimore,
Besancon, materially they surround you,
impose their brick and steel girdles
on your untested logic.
And still
Hephaestus
will not come
to split your azure head.
(II) Constantinople, notre etoile
Dictate the circumstances and follow,
Ariel. Down, down, to maps
dictating the holy writ of
where-to-go-next.
A blue bath
astounds lovers
pledged to tropic straits
and chaste allegiance.
Is it a kingdom
they gather to, prancing
the bald periphery
of the ruined wall?
Which wall?
Don’t ask which one.
Suffer only the glib
cowardice of the lover
shedding responsibilities
like garments, reborn
in sweltering embraces
where blameless error reawakens one
and a hypnos of
upright flesh speaks
a schoolmaster’s lurid English of
peradventure we be corpses.
Where is that
singing coming from?
from some soft
zero of hillocks,
grazed with hawthorns
in honeyed fury,
the yellow blaze
of ascending bees
like the dark dream
of an island,
cowering in the
mild surf.
(III) Coureur de dots
Poleaxe,
hacks his reign through
the stunned complexion of
inescapable November,
cube of ambered lilac
to fasten at his throat
with a clean, barbaric gesture.
Hungry for the love of turf,
bound between gold covers.
Earth explodes with flowers,
sprays against the satin sky
its vials of peachblood and winter rose.
The naked dead, proud
unswervable in-laws,
bathe in the white body of Ondine,
slovenly thrust where hellish light
breaks on the living audience,
pale in their Lombard theater.
An abyss separates the bumpkin
from the gorgeous beast,
tiger in a whirlpool of white pines.
Pilot in grotesque mode,
declining a more graceful passage.
Skiffed seas ejaculate the mostly gallant,
burgundy shogged in fragments,
or feathered to bloody rags.
A city’s toxic glass clothes
saltimbanques in smoke’s beauty.
Zouaves, landsknects, militant
in the border café.
Conspiracy, unhobbled, bewitches
the dutiful counterjumpers, their
display of posture as yet
unrivaled in the kingdom,
dust’s unmarred erection of nobility.
In the skull of fog, beauty’s unjust twin,
dreaming out private wars.
Pilot’s gallant passage under
shitterings of savage hail,
insulted sun above the whirlpools of black surf.
Sight conveys the flesh
of islands and sundials.
The scurf-combed melon
evokes, uninvited, Mere Ubu,
whose sight conveys the nude,
saxifrage-scented skin.
Voyaging on coastal routes
sun splinters water sprites,
panther weaves through ropes,
pads ivy from the god’s bright hips,
wheezing a cat’s dark laughter.
Guided by a drunken hand
the boat careens amid a river’s debris.
Drunken knowledge of pathology
charts, uneasily, the stars,
illumines, with a panther’s descent,
slowly, from great heights,
headache’s evil spire.
The world’s size by lamplight.
Huge, is it?
From one crowed corner of
the phantom flesh, voyaging
the intercoastal seas.
The pilot traces humped shadows
through the foam,
kissing the diafan knees
of the halcyon image:
great bedroom without keel.
(IV) Timas dans la salle d’attente
So little Timas,
far from her country,
is led into Persephone’s bedroom.
Innumerable deaths, the
voices of voracious shades
astound her.
Ritual frenzy
of a blast of words,
the stare’s diafan of
rain and diamond
unfocusing the flowers.
And Timas’ little girlfriends,
in mourning, have
cut off all their hair.
Oh Timas, all their hair.
So go, more bewildered than scared,
groping the dark bedroom
in briefest burial gown, smallest mittens,
ward to thorn and cold.
Past the dresser, wardrobe,
the horrified treacherous mirror,
go sit on Persephone’s big bed.
Sit, wait for her there;
‘Perseph’ – horsewoman, big sister,
seduced, delayed by lookalike
Death.
-Stay a bit? Speak to me?
Yes! Make love to me
with a mouthful of sighs.
Persephone, do you love me?
Darling, what do you see?
(V) L’entrevue avec Persephone
-I see the one who turns
the bland coins of her eyes
upon the sexless dead,
huddled in their hundreds.
(How to make an image of that, oh Persephone?)
-With green myrtle,
twined with pale hortensia:
the reverse bears
Nessus in extremis,
his sperm a single dot
upon the waist
of Dejanira’s robe.
(Ah, words and more words.)
-I see the
miniature tigress
mounted by a shaggy goat,
mitered with horns
of blackened gold.
The ecstasy of their
coupling moves me,
as does the pit
of their boudoir.
(And last …….. ?
Is there not some final vision you would kiss from
Death’s delicate mouth?
Persephone?)
-I see the poet moving
with the bound grace
of the unbloodied.
Through the brittle Versailles
of folklore;
past the Luxors
newly-colonized by the flag-wavers
of the Naturalists’ League.
See how his patience frays
in the midst of gangsters.
A touching sentiment, surely.
But Her White Radiance
(unlike Narcissus)
loiters only so long.
Miss Persephone’s not much
of a stay-at-home.
Meanwhile, pallid pedagogues dismay
her dead little guest,
Timas sleepy in her blue frock.
Perhaps a goddess can be forgiven
for haunting a child’s dreams?
(VI) Voyage au sud
Through the
turning waves
stars blood the aquaviva,
faceless as the pilot
long-abandoned to the waves,
sucked armor-laden under the x-y-z
of the horse latitudes.
Under one’s native sky,
craft honed in exile.
City printed in sand,
the shore bears a runner’s prints
and night remains
too little starred
too often lit by the sleepless.
Christ and his two thieves
litter the southern skies.
Near echo of the ululant waters
ubiquitarians interrogate
the nimbus of zen.
Scrutiny’s survivor, this city.
Torches shadow these waves.
Agony and star, star and haven.
(VII) Auto-epistole
My dear Stephane, yes, without question there is overripeness
of emotions and their addenda.
Given the nature of isolation
who would expect other?
Who would, or, expectant how then challenge
the man in the furnace to a more logical degree?
It is not only you,
nor your words, which judicious translation
has wrecked,
transparencied to points of fragility and structural weakness
unnatural when I hear your words in my voice
it is not only you
but the surcharge of addiction
besieged, words
rebounding the padded walls
to speak naively, if truthfully, I am,
enclosed with my atrocities of feeling,
ever faithful,
Stephane
(Coda)
& of his art
bouc brebis agneau
bouef belier
countershaded brutes
gather under auspices,
his, or some
fateful artist’s
by Dead Sea unremarkable.
Cogent colors
plague his digits,
cuneiform or rotund
destiny sits on the
slant of an easel.
Progressive disavowal
of the bestial phase
light widely raging;
he is the best
of all I know,
but principal concerns
eat at the fine
words, when speaking
to himself.
Exclusive veduta:
goat sheep lamb
ox ram, and stripped
above the turquoise
harbor the banner reads –
the town, season,
year of our Lord.
September, 1898.
The birth of Mallarme.