The soul was the it
that spoke without pronouns,
dreaming all that would befall,
enduring the endless nothings
which littered down before its gaze.
Verlaine, nursing his make-up like Rheims Cathedral,
fingering the London orgies ‘… in which I figure
as a sort of Satanic Doctor (as for that, it isn’t true!)’
The denial, muted, does not undo the casual certainty
as to who was ringmaster, who performing beast.
***
Mot anglais misses something
but is there to be humored,
like an athlete tumbling off the curb,
a cat gone clumsy.
Empty Sundays,
impressions of a foreign city,
and what might lie behind enameled doors.
Desperados, languid as storm-survivors,
nursing hangovers and fractured ribs.
Time to go?
And then, as if there were not already
reasons and motives in a jostle of profusion,
that shot through the wrist!
The shock and rush and joy
and then the dreary aftermath
of the civil guards, pencils dull
from poking the bolts and flea-traps.
***
Brussels, Monday, July 14, 1873
Undersigned by Ch. Semal, doctor of medicine, surgery, etc.
Examination of AR, man of letters, born in Charleville, sleeping in room no. 11, bed no. 19, bullet lodged in left forearm, very near the joint of the wrist.
Wednesday, July 16, 1873
Drs. Semal & Vleminckx undertook the bodily examination of PV, man of letters, born in Metz.
“… he bears upon his body traces of both the active and passive pederastic habit … not those of a longtime and incurable practitioner but rather those of a more or less recent disposition … the penis is short and thin, the shaft little and narrow, stretching to its length freely, the crown slightly bulging and smooth … with only moderate pressure upon the buttocks, the anus is easily dilated … this movement reveals evidence of an infundibulum evase … traces of both active and passive etc. …”
***
The coup de grace,
the lance of love,
pity in its most virile form.
There would be glossaries
to follow the life,
and alphabets weighted at either end.
A whole back room of earthen vases
and Ancien Regime glassware.
Dreaming them to be lacrymatoires,
sorrow evaporated via cracks and fissures,
salt tears to sprinkle over the burnt bones
of the dear departed.
Seven days from entering l’Hopital Saint-Jean
in a state of pale shock
to the extraction of the bullet from the left wrist,
lifted in fateful inviting mockery (July 10-17, 1873).
Brussels sunshine, pain, anesthesia,
and a fat jolly nun bringing flowers, tea, and oatmeal.
Or was she thin and pretty,
severe in her empty-handedness?
In the hall outside a one-legged soldier
repaired a red-faced child’s splintered kite.
***
Bedtime stories of pagans cruel as any Bible-thumper.
Feed the dragon its gold-fleeced sheep,
napping between-times under the tinkling tree,
the kraal of skulls wet with dew.
The Pleiades were once the Hesperides,
it says so in the navigant’s primer.
***
Gold from a garden one of the older dreams,
while across the ocean gold was the
nocturnal shit the gods left behind.
The three daughters, bloused in sunrise,
driving before them the baa-ing innocents.
A dimply strawberry blond served beer
and spread rumors of disease to test her spooning rivals.
The real, the efficacious, the leisure to see
life’s hardships as a marsh that might someday
be drained, force not a rude but an affable demand,
a governor’s white suit sparkling the native rattan,
murmuring like a child to his cowering servants.
He was told and retold that the Belgians
were the inventors of absolutely everything,
savez-vous, insistently according to themselves.
The defense of small peoples, however far apart
their frontiers.
‘The ripest bananas are grown at the foot of Fort Emmanuel’,
spoken without irony.
Baudelaire too had been on the receiving end of a cow’s eyes.
***
But who, watching a loved object
exposed and made vulnerable,
has not felt the shameful sting of hatred?
The desire to see the most precious thing
be also the most abased.
Giving voice to the sighs of that wicked angel
was the first mistake, the fatal provocation
that would be punished well beyond
the certainty of its being unforgivable.
To speak of humankind as ungovernably cruel
was to bring such proof crashing down on one’s head.
***
All who swarmed and crept afterwards
would indicate lighthouse and to do otherwise
would seem a sign of disloyalty to one’s betters.
Not a lighthouse though, for lighthouses are
landlubbed by nature and the drunken dream
proceeds far from any strip of coastline.
Falot is the lantern hung from the topmost mast,
that one might follow from behind or avoid
if on collision course. And so to be free of that
swaying pendant drop of gold is to be free, utterly.
‘Almost an island’ is a late understanding,
or rather the first understanding,
early printings murmuring nonsense.
***
Hoariest of all, the memorized anniversaries.
Add these to the list of unmentionables.
A nice place for a park, a statue,
were it another time, some other continent than this.
These are the things which can never be known.
From where came the touch which severed the light
from the illumination, testing for the after-ghost
of the interstices.
Lightly, part stroke, part scratch,
no more than what one would do in comforting
a cat’s ears and chin.
Verlaine’s wife glimpsed naked.
In profile her breasts had the fruit-firm hang of a bride’s.