Bitter
Rude
Rogue
Three English words scrawled in a margin of Tacitus.
Not for certain his, but deserving of a compensatory pause
before interpretation is so casually waived.
A profile to hurry past,
the gayest soul spread wide for subtle poisons
of interrogation, inflexion, insult.
A tricolor picture book of foxes
behaving like men from a century earlier.
A bush-tailed huddle in tunics and ten-league boots,
rapiers and cockades and hankies at their wrist-paws,
receiving the Latin sprinkles of a great lupine Pope.
Do not confuse the effeminate, musical, looker-on
(graceful and amused, like a Fragonard attendant)
with the host of rococo cherubs who had twined
superfluously the mirrors and bedposts
of half the royal homes in Europe.
The bourgeois kingdom had thrown up its own
flotsamed wealth and was awash with tough boys
taking to their backs, with a sneer and a price-scale,
supplying that which was so shyly demanded.
***
The contraction reinforces the image
by the visual shock which it proposes.
Pressed out in silver.
The rare raw genius that needs no lesson
in perspective. Not least from an
ashplant-wielding Oirishman out of Counnee Corque.
Where can one find evidence that the Philosophers’ Stone
is a perfect red, a poppy red?
And is it Philosophers’ or Philosopher’s,
and where, finally, does one look?
Alchemists like honeybees,
flecking powder onto hopeful metals.
A drug of consequence, besides.
By origin, by effect, by fat sleepy aftermath.
The poppy proposes the same world to the
line of the elect as to that of the fallen.
His soul had swallowed the full weight of the fall.
The crushing and the extermination of the Commune
and the communards.
After such banquets, what could new slaveries,
rapes, and murders possibly matter?
***
Once, in a clearing in the jungle,
once in a tent-city on the slope of the blue desert,
once even in a cobbled Hanseatic square,
the crowd stepping back from the incantatory
gibbering and howlings, the puppet-like
pandiculations of a spirit disturbed and
trembling into slow eruption.
Triggered by some inner demon
or external banality and transported
from jungle or desert or city
to steppe or ocean or icebound moon.
Hambourg
Bremen
Lubeck
Bruges
Bergen
Straslund
Kiel
Stettin
Riga
Revel
Novgorod
Londres
Cologne
Brunschwig
Danzig
Dunkerque
Anvers
Ostende
Dordrecht
Rotterdam
Amsterdam
Undetectable to the eye
but moving already on the surface,
the latent births of what was understood
and not yet known.
***
Long before a gaslight meant food and shelter
or drunkenness and sexual release, it had meant studies.
As though a swimmer among the named and branded,
the prized or discarded decades.
Or a scout, left by Apaches,
staked out on an anthill of words,
gnawing through to survival of the rarest, surest kind.
She’s here again, the green Muse.
The one-sided courtship,
having failed in the clinch,
she comes now to bring long-legged comfort.
Cozier than the late invention of Swiss chocolate,
sweeter than any honeyed discharge coating a lover’s tongue.
Heredia’s daughter seems to have known.
Or is that grasping at a straw? A petticoat?
A certain quality of seeming endorsement,
limited by a sense of combustible intelligence,
as though the faithful need,
the legacy’s albino vulnerability
could only lead to hurtful disdain.
***
The cleric and the kicking girl.
The story told as a one-liner
or multi-volumed till grammar
screamed for mercy.
A crossover, via light and alcohol,
into an acceptance that Beauty touched
was Beauty sordid.
Could the innocence so freely given away
be earned back? Like smoke
held in the lungs and forgotten?
The ripple at the lake shore,
first of many from a paddleboat’s slow thrash,
already many days gone, its leaving barely noticed
in the white downpour. Clara Venus turning
and mouthing the chorus of that old song,
no longer popular … I sat by the window all night, all night,
looking for you in vain …
The burn of lovely fevers,
which followed the young girls from the station,
stripping them in the mind’s yellow eye,
eating their souls raw.
The explanation which was in itself
a naked proposition, however timid and collared,
as it were the begging of a cigarette
off a passing stranger.
An air as light as air,
without reprise or follow-up,
so low and light that the lip-reader
would not hear that the tune was over,
cavatined on the dreamy smile of a teenage lover.