I cannot create a texture that sings
The way birds hum in the moonlight,
While streaking through the grey hair
Of parting clouds. I cannot strap a guitar
On a clinging door that floats
Halfway in the middle of space
And time (if they exist). What I am
Is a voiceless whistle trapped in a hissing mask;
What I am is a starker stalker
By the lornful beats of an ancient mandolin:
You'll understand if you take the route to Beijin.
Who put the Jin in Beijin? There are glass towers
Poking out of the sand, wishful mutations.
And the Bei? Some German word,
Falling off a foreign tongue,
Scattered in a pronouned panacea. Together
They are a fragrance of enchantment...I digress:
The poet is a hulk, the world is a hulk
Molded.

Herodiade (Mallarme)

Abolished, and her wing, hideous in tears,
The basin's, abolished, mirror of alarms,
Since from naked gold profaning russet space
A dawn -- cresting feathers -- chose
Our cinerary, sacrificial port,
Heavy tomb the bluebird fled, caprice
Alone of dawn in vain black plumes...
Ah! Uprooted countries and the manor, sad!
And not a lap! The mourning water folds
Again into herself, whom no more feathers see,
And neither the memorable swan: the water reflects the affront
Of an autumn extinguishing, in her, his branch:
The swan's when, among the pale mausoleum
Where the plume plunged her head, grieved
By the diamond, pure, of an errant star, but
anterior, which never shined at all.
Crime! Butcher! Ancient aurora! Supplication!
Heaven's blood! Lake of complicit purple!
And among the fleshy rose, wide open, this stained glass.

The Agamemnon

Guard:

Gods, I beg of you, from these duties a reprieve
Of guarding all the year's length, through which, lying
On the rooves of the Atreides on my arm, of dogs the custom,
I have come to know the conference of the nightly constellations,
And, which bear to mortals winter, summer,
Ruling lucents noted in the ethers,
Stars in their risings, and when they set.

Even now I am watching for a symbol of brightness,
A light of fire to bear from Troy the prophecy
Of victory and its tidings: for thus decrees
The heart of a woman, man-ruling, hopeful.
So both when I keep my bedewed and night-rousing
Bed, unreceptive of dreams (for fear stands about, before
My sleep, so that there is no steadfast closing
Of eyelids to drowse) -- and when I deem to sing or hum,
Carving a tuneful remedy for rest --
How I then lament, for such a home's disaster groaning,
Not ordered for the best as once before.
But now I hope for a lucky 'lease from suffering,
Since the holy angel of fire is striking through the gloom.

Hail lamp of the night, daily light announcing
Both many festive gatherings
In Argos, and the grace of celebrations,
Mercy, mercy!

I sharply sign to Agamemnon's wife
A rising out of bed so to swiftly set about the house
Ululation well betiding for this light,
If indeed the city of the Iliad
Has fallen, as the burning call makes clear:
As for me, I will sing a proem.
For I'll wager things turned out nicely for my master,
Twice-six, from the way these omens throw themselves.

Let it be I'll raise the well-beloved hand of a returning
Master of the house with this, my own. As for other news,
I have no voice -- for on my tongue a gainly oxen
Treads (things which this very house, if it took speech,
Would clearly tell) -- since of my own will
I publish for the learned while I elude the unschooled ear.

Madrigal

Winter blowing and a tack of ice, lack
Of lice on itching skin, the wrack of flims
-y love is in the air, in hardened sins
Wilting and digressing, the flower-backs
Like ball-sacks drooping, looping
Of the settled seeds. Verona's plucked the blossoms
And garlanded her tresses, thick usury
Of every umber absolute, sunsets
Overwhelming coasts with flooded luxuries,
While bay leaves flutter with exotic teas. Mind
Struck numb by the cold of passionate faces, dumb
Signs sticking in the jabbed ice, rice
Paddies of white cocaine that powder Ceres serious,
Rattled by a shuddering wing, fat owl and the king
Of frozen doves, my love:
Where are your icicled pickaninnies
Now? Such a long garland of limbs crusted over
The pine trees like sentinels of autumn
Color has collapsed into a rooved rafter,
And the drafts of laughter settling after
Taste the soupy lakes.

The Odyssey, Proem

Tell in me the man, Muse, who, much troped and traveled
Since he sacked that little town called Troy, holy,
Saw many of men's hamlets, learned
Their minds; tell how he suffered many pains
At sea and in his heart, struggling for life, to rescue
His companions (but neither with mighty tries
Could he save them, the fools -- eating the Cattle of Hyperion,
The Sun! -- who immediately snatched up
Their hoped for day): so in each its place,
Godly daughter of the God, relate these myths, even to us.

Winter blowing and a tack of ice, the lack
Of lice on the itching skin, and the wrack of flims
Y love is in the air, in the cold skins
Wilting and digressing, the flower-sacks
Like ball-sacks drooping, and the looping
Of the settled seeds. Verona's plucked the blossoms
And garlanded her tresses, thick and luxuriant
Of the absolute umber, sunsets
Overwhelming the coasts with flooded luxuries,
While the bay leaves flutter with exotic teas. Mind
Struck numb by the cold of passionate faces, signs
Sticking jabbed in the ice, rice-patties of white
Cocaine powdering Ceres sober
And rattled by shuddering wing, the fat owl and the king
Of frozen doves: my love, where are your icicled pickaninnies
Now? Such a long garland of limbs crusted over
The pine trees like sentinels of autumn color has collapsed
In a rooved rafter, and the taft is a thick soup on the lakes.

Soleil et Chair

La chair est triste, et j'ai lu tous les livres

A mixture, she said, broods in the depths
Of the cauldron, brews over the green slime,
Emerald by the color of turquoise, steadfast liquor
Of the ethers. The rosy hues of the sun
Already danced and carped, frenicking the reins, the walls'.

Etude of a clear study in purple, a lamp and a table,
Grey, a picture of the moon setting in blue
On a distant planet. What are the consequences?
Following the evening, all the day's seems to stretch
Like the pale shadow of a lampshade, and the nights recline
Into the same dull silhouettes: give me a lease
Of wonderful powders, tease me out among the primal flowers.

There are no primal fires, in turn, only the turning
Of the ladle, only the bubbling liquid, only the glum surrounding,
Hidden in the depths. Such an ordinary thing conceals madness?
Wine is the night to him that beholds it, the sparkling day for partakers:
A pill of whiteness the color of snow, the suds of soap, conceals
Hidden realities, depths of conscience. Take, she said,
Take on silver spoonfuls, take with vinegared brine, seep
The honey to your skull -- mixed with honey even bitter things
Are poisons, and helpful remedies conjugate themselves
Into a myriad of shadows, spectrums. Do you hear the long yellow
Hull of a cry, the pitched pitchers of waterfalls cataclimbing
Up symbols? The first thing: the gray is the symbol of dawn:
Now learn, set forth in crystal quantities, the Doric lays of the grey day --
Transmutations and transformations with a little liquor.

I shudder to remember. First the night turned in on itself like a bladder
Sucked inside out, and the sensitive membranes quivered at the touch:

The bladder is close to the sexual organs, the organs play
Such a quiver of piercing shards, and next it was my heart!
Dull little boy limbing in the shadows (it's always the shadows)
Is that a gold gleam? Even her pale freckled age is a revetment,
An invention or investment in a new body of beauty, being:
If the whole sinews of being were like a cobweb, and everyone of them
Tangled, then the next step would be the breaking or the trap. Greedy maws
Guzzle blood and the roar is like a leaf
In nature.

Hum, the good taste is becoming sound, hum
The journey is the soul of a tapering candle.
Last lakes, the chocolates of darkness,
Repeated metaphors I sing.
Where are you climbing on the ladder of beauty?
Never hold more true: I worship you.

But flames scatter in the winds
Leading to holocausts or death.

The fall began sharply, the ether
Sucked in a breath, which was a beat, and the drums fell a tat, tat, like patters of pain.
Other voices, other rooms poked through the marrow, divestments
Flocked cruelly, and the angels were confused patches of green silk.

C'etait mon bijou, mon enfant,
Mes ames because things were multiplying into little new
Shudders of wings, a million pale things were a million delicate buds
Unfolding or closing, but it was a vertiginous pale of rejuvenations,
Dressing itself again into the ethers of time. What were the ethers?
The pale cloud of a mist awaking, scattering, spreading
Into the same old celestial rays: chair-dust, chaise.

Waking

"It's best when poetry doesn't quite have
Meaning but has at least
The possibility of meaning."
-- Alencia Lysander

What would I do, my body bathed
In the darkling pool of perfect happiness,
Flowing, quenching ‘round my toes,
Caressing by the heels, up across tendons
To haunches, through the haunches, seeping in the glutes
Up through veins – the way a virus, often dashing
Against the hard rocks in the body, works its way
Into cells, pulses the heart, and
-- bursting like flowers bud their blossoms,
Little by little
In the fragrant spaces of May – scatters
Through the whole, through the wide
Void of the body’s earth?

Surely I would be encompassed in oceans, then, surely like a liner
I would burst with flowing, and inundations of cool, cellulite-thick
Milk would sud me.

I need a nature that’s clean
Of the fear of death, renewed
From extravagance of living,
But where the dawns?
What crepuscules of silence?
If every heartache burns,
Will the chill when the sky gleams maubery
Be something, and not a vagrant dream?

Dreams fly especially, foremost in sleep, the way styles slither
In a thick inking, but especially the inking
Of tart blackberries into currant into wine. Wine,
The dark lake, shivering berries
By the sides of the current,
The mouth of the water
Singing an eternal and inevitable
Gape, and then the clash
Of cymbals,
Almost plummeting
Into the past.

Oh time! Every moment, you take some away
And bring anew things to birth: I can imagine
The cells dividing, augmenting themselves
And multiplying, poised at problems: red,
The gummy iron, white, only for the dearth
Of dirt, parsed particles devouring and engaging
Such small things, and shortening always
So the centers of pleasure grow dim; but every motion
Is the thrust of necessity, blind necessity beyond
The mind, the particles of the mind, just like a dove
Wings aloft, a white streak in the aether, above
The glistening sun, beyond the towers, the departing
Shadow is all that's left, all I can see. I wish the milk juices
Of poetry could invigorate my body, and sayings do, redo,
Rewrite my life. But I've fallen into the valley of forgettings,
Where motions pass into imaginations, paginations
Wrinkle out like yellow meads that drink the bleeding stars,
Sunflower seeds'.

Portrait of a Stone

If a sound travels into the scarlet depths of the earth, and births
Frequencies of coddling lights, pods of invariable dearth
Since their crystal origins, seeds and forgings
In thickened steel (the bang clack crack) through which becomes
Glass -- all while the rapids stir the vast reflections of the sun
Into blue simulacrums and golden flues, and the muses
Perched by the splitting rocks -- until dawn falls like a falcon,
Feathers screaming each like a knife through razor air: then the glare
Of beauty blinds, and bindings of adamantine matter, firstling elements
Are wroth. Bear me aloft in soletude of manners, rainbow floods, and glorify the crud
Of mountainous reptilian spines that slither in the liming beck
Of times.

We are all sexual beings, every
Drop of sweat suffocates
On dry, wrinkled arms, beads
In muscular flab and cellulite
Of soaking sloth for desire of
A breast, a particularly choice
Leg, a hanging pod, anal beads,
Peas and pee, the seeds of things
Are always -- but even the seeds --
Are bubbling, boiling over
Fires, rich cookings of metal, the wind
Cradles the trees, sky
Pressing full, unclouded lips, eyes
Watching, burning with tremendous pull
To be together. Time yearns
For its fulfillment, life, death,
And the vast in between spaces
Groan. Yes: all the world is like some gargantuan throttling snake,
Throttled, twitching, hissing like a cauldron, teapot for the rot
Of growth. Spring, benevolent herbs, intersect, arduous
Chemicals, craze, leaves with the green
Soak of the sun: life is on the run.

The Cure

The cure for love, men, passions inflamed,
Because passions are the poisons of life,
Is a drop from the well of eternity. Allow me:
Mouth-like, the abyss, whose lips
Quiver duly, twin-glossed necessities
Embracing all, and few. No locks
Ring the mossy edges, the ledges lack
Inscription: not a gem, no beauty, only
Diamond-forged and sharp, pressing,
Cold. The steady drip of lust
Falls off there, each globule
Becomes the empty globe, no form is left
Collapsed into no thing: peerless windows
Without walls, doors in the absence
Of entrance. The implosion of the haze
Hangs over broken irradiations, not
A golden light imbued with darkness,
Not even a whisper. Drink that peace
Men, serenity beyond begging,
Illumination and illusion, selfless self.

Seascapes

Mind, why sick? The air
Trembles, fingers
Rip the anchored tides, diseased!
A roaring ocean. Can't you look for pebbles?
So many pebbles for a nice rock. Then
What about the foam that broths
The bay's cold throat? -- Baying, something strong
To the trunk. Raging when the clouds
Whistle like stopgaps, formless vagaries, lions, liaisons:
Gazelles. Frequent quaking inverting mountains
Into water! Whirlpools. I like the hum -- if the tears
Would thrash me, slam me through dizzying apertures
And dangle me above sea kingdom's crux and flux
Sparkling of the sharp rocks, perched abyss
Ready to plunge and swoop like gulls for a fish...
Oh madness take me any way. Blue, I want
Everything to be blue, azured cillements,
Caerulean coquillage, none of this dripping green.
Frosts: in the winter could the heaving mass freeze over?
I am one ever on the edge who wants to be burned
By ascending suns, and turns
To your falling embrace. Cast the shattering:
If the nights are glossy, we'll have always
The chocolates of darkness.

War

No introspective chaos...I accept
The common ordinance to love -- common
And divine -- particular,
Unique in every being, eternal sign
Of taciturnity, dissolved
In massless wings of flame; bronze
Never touched, nor will sculpted gold
(The dirty red, scars
Aching like a wound, perpetual
Gaping of mouths, singing
The heart's blood).

Every word is too much for a twisted
Tongue, half rotten, biting off and flailing
In ancient flagellations:
Chew, Vengeful god!

Rip out a beaten breast! -- and fill me
With roses, stuff me
Carnations and amarynth tides, leave me
All fragrant to die. But none: I'll go,

I'll turn the prick-point on the gun, run
From shells bursting over the sky
Like a fetid night. At least then,
With the rations all distributed, and fun
Changing into her scalping slip, I'll get a lip
Around my sun, come
Dawn I'm really exhausted,
And the tips of her hair
Will be frosted
And there's never one.


An Alchemy

Suppose this was the root of everything,
Spring blossoming into strange patterns,
Idle decorations for a crown of stars.

Suppose this was the scarlet night,
Silver enchantress weaving on the cloth
Of aching black, and turning backs.

Suppose this was a levy of dancers
Laying pale wreaths on candid cancers,
More rank than rotten meat:

It would still be art, a word
Of transmutations. How?
A line of dancing cows, brown manure
Stacked in marvellous alignments,
Tridents making forks of gels and seas,
Creeping trees. Where does the night go?

Below the well of time, and if you climb
Down fifty wooden stairs, and ten of clay,
Into the wild arms of May, and back again
Through cold December, remember to dismember
All your age. Dissembling was an answer
-- was or is -- I can't disclaim, all I can claim
Is fatigue and the rich metals that lead
Into all and a voluntary silence.

O Lover

How would I touch you?
Your legs are far too sharp.
Your hands hang, like hams,
Too far apart; your face
Is like an ape's, and true, you're smart
-- but smarter than you should be,
Than I would be --
Or so you told me
When you wanted love.

Unpack yourself for primates,
Try the warmth of a giraffe, graph
Your sighs on rising lines,
Accelerate the times. I'm
Busy hanging worlds on a string,
Too busy for a fling,
So sing the song to someone else.

It is a nice song, I'll admit: pretty
Quick and leads to kisses, but it partly misses
The point -- the times are really out of joint,
And everybody's napping
So what's the point in sapping?

Triste

I have touched the rim
Of mortal beauty,
I have quenched the limn
Of heaven's grace:
A face
With swollen eyes and sleepy grin,
Myself
Smiling down at him.

I watched the moments,
Crystallized and crumbling,
Crack. I placed myself upon a wrack
Of arms stretched in embraces, wrapped
Myself in garments of delight
And let the pain of loss seep
Through the ephemeral night.

How I yearned and cried for morning
When sleep might cede to frenzies, heat
Precede the chill
Of walking on, alone, uphill.

Now loss and love, contentment
Mix among the morning mist; the tryst
Has been forgotten, or removed
Into a foiled rapture, rueful laughter
Stains the pavements and the dark sky
Drips. How I was sorry for love, then, since
I have consumed an earthly fire
By sipping from the bloom of bliss.

Die Götterdämmerung

Lost, fatigued, and lonely
I remember the twilight
Of another race:
Their men were thin as bronze wires,
Their women were like grapes, unseeded,
Fruitless. They lived
In cities of glass
That trembled with reflected lakes
In which they cultivated
Fish, bronze fish with golden scales
And topaz eyes, and they called the colored waters
Beauty. When it rained
They would lie out under the stars
And hope to be burned;
When the sun came dripping down
They would hide under their rooves as thick
As wicker baskets. They lived
In a solitary climate of ghosts, and listened
Most attentively for the murmuring of trees
That were piled around them, eggs
In a snow-capped mountain.
Their language had no meaning.

Night. I was in the city and the odd criss-cross of branches, watching them, lying on a mound of turf, by a sepulchred monument, a statue on a horse, drops of rain dripping off my nose, over the arch of my lip, onto my tongue, falling from the tree. Acer. Acid.

Beautiful dancing boys, wallowing in the electric lights, and the sliver of shivering music, just down the block. Car, clatter. Someone threw a beer out the window. The residue of alcohol cycling on the edge of the cylinder. Or maybe it was a bottle? But then why not the splinter of glass dazzling into a million pieces? Or maybe less.

Chill wind shuddering, my lips murmuring an errant phrase, "Phoebe silvarumque potens Diana". Diana by the moonlight! A virgin! The hand idles over to the tip, flicked through denim, and the tube grows, stretches out like a subterannean, sulfuric monstrosity. Or perhaps a little string of moss.

"Fell over laughing", stamps, feet! Abrupt move away from pubic, curl into the statue's shadow. Two girls, ruby slippers, pernicacious stockinged limbs, tight, seamless dress, black and white on the right and on the left, passing, laughing.

What are the loci of comparison for Epode 16 and Eclogue 4, and at what points can we say they establish a conversation? The terms comparison and conversation are important, because they imply two different principles of reading, principles it will be helpful to elucidate before we attempt to answer the question. Comparison is an artificial, or better, synthetic act associated most directly with the reader-interpreter, the one performing the comparison. It comes from the Latin con + parare meaning literally, 'to match together, to pair, to make equal'. Comparison is synthetic because it is essentially creative – the reader links together two works hitherto unassociated (at least in his mind) so that each might illuminate and deepen his understanding of the other; it is artificial because the point of contact between the two works is not obvious or inevitable, but rather supplied and nurtured by the reader. The etymology of conversation is less straightforward, and therefore somewhat more revealing. It comes from the early French verb converser, which in turn comes from the Latin conversare, literally a turning towards, but also 'to pass one's life, to dwell, to hold intercourse with [sexual as opposed to Platonic], and [increasingly in modern French and English], to exchange words'. I would like to stress the notions of dwelling and intercourse. With conversation, we move from the primarily synthetic comparison to something more organic, sunontic, so to speak. What is it stake are two different views of literature: either literature is an accumulation of independent, self-composed entities or it is the space cohabit of many voices combining or colliding in a dissonant harmony that reuses and reproduces its own past. This is the space of history, and ideally the space we would like to investigate. However, since in practice it is difficult or impossible to find such an object without in part inventing it, we must of necessity mix the two, moving from congruencies that are too close to be accidental to the comparisons that these congruencies suggest. This will be our method for examining the poems.

Hikes in Winter Park

Fast tracks, a catalogue of signs, sticks
Sticking into the lonely snow:
I miss these wild groves, the aster elms'
Star-like dance; I miss the trance of lines
Bleeding under the powder, packed
Surface of frigid feet, whether elks'
Or boot eating skis, tracking their picking pokes,
Mountains nodding through still air, rabbits
Darting over frozen ground.

Things are better today. Last night I was strangled with lust, crushed under the weight of a bodiless body, embodied in the lack of all bodies, or one.

I'm trying to be productive, something to do at every hour of the day. Writing is a good way of focusing my thoughts onto a page. The page really controls you; I used to think I was creating worlds, but really I'm being created. Let me explain. Words and ideas are inseparable; the Romans believed that Piety, Justice, Victory, and Concord were gods. The words denoted deity; that is, ideas. Likewise, our conceptions are indelibly (and perhaps ineffably) linked to the words we use to describe them. When I say, "The impact of the Third Reich" – whatever Third Reich means as an independent concept, it maintains none of that freedom because in the sentence it has become a principal of collision. Birth, growth, life, and death – motion and stasis – these are the inevitable principals, that is, the first things, out of which all thought springs.

But poetry is inescapable. I want to tell you what I really mean, but every telling is the reworking, the revision of another telling, connected by repetitive phrases, by a repeating ego, by certain habits and facts, or doings, that make me who I am and not any other random predilection.

Last night I sat down at a computer and hacked out some very worrisome phrases, then I looked for any body I could. Lust is a delicious pain – if I could take a pill to eliminate these cravings, that is, to expel them from the threshold of my being...such a theatrical guest! Life becomes infinite under the power of lust, and because I can turn a blind eye to every other pursuit, because I'm blinded, deafened by the hideous roar of the music – such a cruel and powerful god. But it's nice to worship a god.

I wrote three or four pages yesterday. I'll write more. I have no more time to write letters today. I wish I could have sent you something descriptive rather than philosophical. I'm keeping all this.

From the Journal of a Madman, Transposing His Life Into Fiction

What to do with these chains of lust that bind me to the hard here, the fickle now? Lust for smooth, beautiful bodies and smiles, nods and kind words, appreciation and sanctification, but just not the brittle, cold, lost alone. Life heading through avalanches of pressure with the hope of a glimmer of light, but only the light of the winter sun. How cold, cruel, and distant is the sun -- so far away, so lost, so hopeless, so alone. If I've ever stood in his blinding light, if I've ever felt the warm carress of a fickle ray -- oh but it was fickle! -- and then I belted out a neat tune. Wavering in the sunlight, stretching tendrils out towards the sunlight, begging for understanding, for love, for warmth. Look at the catechisms of cliche I've fallen into: the mind without images falls into oblivion. Oblivion of shadows, wraiths, the forgotten beggar who paws for his cup of mulch: I don't want to be one sitting out there in the cold while the storms tumble down and the cars skid. The cars: who is in them? Everyone is in them. Going somewhere. I'm stationary. I'm the only man in the world who sits like a rock, and never moves. But time moves. Time is ticking, ticking down, away, dripping in yellow streams; every spurt of semen is a lost moment of youth. Do we crust over like syrup for sex? You are beautiful. I would tell you I'm staring at your ass. In my moaning, I'm going to spend another half hour here, hashing out my differences and my sorrows. How can I love you, or at least the image of you, long lanky brown hair frolicking the back of your neck in clumps, uneven folds, slight glasses, small face, small body -- so small, like a child. I guess I'll just write anything I want tonight. I don't do that often enough: write, journal style. Throw grammar and sentence structure to the winds (I just revised that). Just concentrate on this boiling tempest inside of me. Boiling: there will be no originality, there will be no meaning in these empty phrases! Oh I want you! I would tear off your shirt, suck your nipples, nibble them with my teeth, savor the flesh, collapse into the thawing warmth. What warmth! And if you didn't murmur a word but stroked the back of my neck with a light tickle or just the kind of scratch for a cur or a dog, how happy I would feel; I would moan. Not even the stirring of lust: I would lie on you like a mattress. I would curl up into you like a blanket. I would wrap myself into you, the way that I want to wrap myself into the void of an eternity. Jon! Oh the storms are coming, the faces are coming, these are the ramblings of a mad-man. People that I knew. Memories shuddering, rippling like the uncertain images of Heraclitean streams. That ass, the blue jeans. Why is it sex that I can only think of? Why does this organ keep me back from success? Sucsex, infiltrating everything, an ass. That ass! Long poetic meditations about the gluteus maximus and the maximus of the gluteus, or sugary something. I feel myself beginning to calm. The rages are quiet. Not someone to talk to that I needed at night, but just an outlet, some means of expressing all these thoughts that well up inside me along with desire, fear, and stress. It was to my own oblivion to ignore a journal for so long. But I want it to be good! Like a demon, demon of the astral flowers -- all the nymphs gather round and suck sweetly from the nectar and try to feed me, but it's the kind of pulp that if you eat it you are a thousand times hungrier and thirstier than you were the moment of partaking; and they are all sirens for sound. And I am a shipwrecked survivor of beauty. O for a memorable phrase! O for something like a raft I could gather myself up onto in this raging tempest! The storms come up again; like there's some gigantic beast moving in my stomach. Help! Help! Will there ever be the sanity to compose verses? The more I focus on him, the worse it gets! Like the sun has descended into the middle of the ocean and become the black hole, the principal of the perturbations. Trepidations of the spheres. Oh could I ever go up to any man I loved and simply say, "I love you. From the moment I saw you, the very way you move, I need to bury myself in you..." Like a tomb. The perfect realization of love would be death. Now the thoughts are raging, now my mind and not my motions, my emotions are the tempest. Emotions, motions out of the self. Certainly, because when we smile at something beautiful the disposition towards pleasure; and we run screaming with daggers in our hands at heartbreak. Oh there's no end to this. I could go on, on, on. I want to talk to someone, anyone. I would tell a story, as follows: once there was a very precocious boy. They encouraged him, pushing him closer and closer to the edge of the cliff, until, of his own accord, he jumped off and tumbled down twenty stories into the suit and (finally) the flowers that had prefigured him all along, and it had been expected. What does that story mean? It means that all the freedom I have craved, crave even now, is the enemy of my genius. If I can do anything, I'm the slave of my desire for excellence. The slave of my desire for love. So many slaves, so many desires! Oh what a century for genius! These are the chains of our lust. There is no form! There is no form! I would shout, but my mind is in tatters. Things are calming again. They'll heat up the moment I try for lust. I can't bear lust, there's no way I can bear it. God, why did you give me a dick? But why not! A spurt of cum is worth every anxiety; if only I could bury myself in a beautiful boy and die. The desire for warmth, death, oblivion is suitable and fitting. It's the only truth I know.

Rimbaud

Myths of beetles were crawling in the mud,
Noir on red blood,
And the coconuts were jangling to the breezes,
Freezes of autumn
Were flowering by the amygdallic gems
Some sculptor must have carved
By living notes.

There was no sculptor, soul,
O million dreaming wings,
There was no scraper, sole
Travail of constant things.

Travel was life, whether he touched
The blue Floridas or crinkled leaves of fresher hue
Between fine fingers; he gawked
At the rushing avalanche of dreams, flowing up
By the vague eye, or down
With a swift grin, or
Sometimes palaces rising up like placards
Of gold, immense vagaries of emerald, the shining spirit
Of the sun crowning the jewel dripping nard of his locks, but
There were also peaks rising into the air like celestial
Fantasies, phalanxes of purple fallacies, and fragrant
Phalli. He sucked
The tips of roses; the sweetness of scents
Became the ardor of his veins, his heart in flames
Fluttered beautiful fans, and plunged into the breasts
Of high calamities, geographic mirscopicities, and villes
Of vile bouche. Kissing mouths meant nothing to him,
But he moved on, through the blue triumph of sorrows,
Through the raging gold, tunneling under the mountains,
Letting whole hues of grandeur fall into riches,
Until he came to the peak of escape. Some people do whistle
In prayer that the peak of escape is salvation, others
Nothing but grim death, but there are those
Who confront all creation, and slashing the long makeshift
Glasses of baubled urns, the rising bubbled clay
Laughs, laughs at the sunset, the dawning end of day!

Hear Me

It's painful to die,
And I should know,
Because I've died
Nine or ten times.

You should learn
Death's face:
Stretched taut
As rubber, sharp
Like a hook,
That sawed off chin,
A piercing eagle's
Nose, spacious
As a pelican's mouth
For the goldfish

Gutted and
Skinned, seared
By his breath --
Though death's
Not all grim eyes
And frowns, but his smile
Is an eclipsed shadow,
Strangled solar
Loons

Black -- to be sure --
As cocoa, that grin
With the succor of death:
A sweetness of sleep,
Heavy limbs,
Drooping eyes,
The nostalgia
Of becoming,
Of giving up.

To men I say
Don't fear death:
Each death
Is a passage
From lichen
Through twilight
Into new
Cerebral labyrinths;
Each craft
Is the structure of ages'
Purple patterings,
Winking fools.

Don't fear death,
For we are dying
All the time,
Seeping
In every place
Where limbs
Drop off, faces
Wrinkle, books
Decay, and flesh
Becomes ugly,
Intelligence
Rots.

Where is it all going?

The passage of time
Is as inevitable
(And perhaps prefigured in)
The tides.

It's painful to die,
And I should know
Because I've died
Nine or ten times.

You should learn
Death's face:
Long, sharp
And angular,
Like a hook's bait
For the goldfish,
That same sawed,
Curving nose.

Gutted and skinning,
Cooking flesh,
But death's not all
Grim eyes
And frowns
Like an eclipsed
Shadow.

There are
Fields of rosy
Dew, the due
Of honeyed
Streams -- black
To be sure
As cocoa is
A sweetness in death
Of sleep,
Tired eyes,
Heavy limbs,
Nostalgia;
Of becoming,
Of giving up.

Each death
Is a passage
Through tunnels
Hanging heavy with lichens
Into new
Cerebral labyrinths;
Each craft
The construction
Of ages,
Purple patterings,
Of the fool's
Horrified
Grin.

To men I say
Don't fear death,
For we are dying
All the time,
In every place
By the seeping
Detergent of laundries,
By the churning
Dryers of streams,
Over coffee,
Disappointments
To a friendly gaze;

Don't fear death,
Because limbs
Drop off, faces
Wrinkle, books
Decay, and flesh
Becomes ugly,
Intelligence
Rots.

Where is this all going?
The passage of time
Is as inevitable as
(And perhaps
Prefigured in)
The tides.

UN ANE AUX CIEUX

Un âne descendait au galop la science.
— Quel est ton nom? dit Kant. —Mon nom est Patience,
Dit l'âne.

*****

Granted that true beauty is to be apprehended only in the lofty reaches of philosophy, whose somnolent towers are wrapped about in the apparitions of funneling language, and granted that the ascent is always more difficult than the descent, as long as the laws of gravity hold, I tripped on a rock on the way up the peak.

-- O rock! I said -- Diamonds and fanatic rubies, you who are stained with my blood -- and I called the tempests to me, and the churning winds, and I cracked my scepter against the rock harder than Aeolus or Moses, so that for days this echoing cry filled the mountains: You mean nothing!

Now the heights might be impassable, fogged up with glass as they are, to mere mortal minds, and I don't know if, from those surpassing cliffs, one can see the tips of archipelagos sumberged in the structure of floods, depths extending to summits unknown; or if a shroud of hyperluminous darkness cloaks every star in the gyring genesis of eternity; or if that rock is as endlessly finite and brittle as the perfidious and tottering point of my fall...

What I do know is that life, for all its extravagance, perceives an end, and in this ending, if one can grasp it, is the apex of the whole rocky structure, as if one could embrace slopes of crystal by fastening to their innermost bulwarks, or something like the play of light. Here is not a record of my travels, but an allegory of my defeats, and I leave it to you, God, whose manifest existence I might doubt, to unknot the twists, tie up the ends, and resolve the solvent bits into a single thread. Then, if you can lead yourself out of the darkness, then, if you can shape trees and majesties, then, if you can brush a woman's face lighter than gold, I will proclaim you a master of painting, and hand you my share of the games. Lector intende: laetaberis.

It really all comes back
To the Jews, you know
The solitary garden,
Twilight, and the Torah,
Beaming moon in midnight skies:
The witching hour
Stirs with no known breezes
In the parallel alley
Ways perpendicular
To a poetry of pure philosophy, extending
Into boundless space.

Sonnet by Moonlight

Vritur infelix Dido totaque uagatur
Vrbe furens

When the solemn arch of the lamplight, pierced
By the first, reckless gleam of the day, gutters
And collapses into a dark fog, thick and foul,
Whose acrid, desirous murmur dispels

Through the passionate air like my longing
For sleep's fragrant peace,
Another urge, secret
And rich in fertile chants

Reaches into my heart as deep as the fresh air
That tickles my nipples, and I swear on an errant word,
Some idle phrase, lost in a vagrant dream;

And somewhere a wind whips the dancing trees
Into a frenzy of unseen music, the sun boils over
Like a bloodshot eye, and the blue sky...freezes.

Love in a world of words,
Child of Africa,
Is yours, so black
When the wind bites your lips
Playfully,
A little by the golden boughs
Dripping with marigold scents,
Hanging with the first ripe
Blossoms of fruit, the season's.

O would that her hair
Fell down twilight in such
Rope! Would that her chasm eyes
Swallowed me! You know me,
Traveler, and you know what I want.

Little black boy,
Little child of Africa,
You are so sad. Conversations
Carried in libraries,
Through ember computer
Terminals are nothing of harvest.
Aren't the people singing there?
Don't the women gather up,
In thick limbs,
Wonderful juice staining,
Skin-seeping peaches?
Don't the men lift up full heaps
Of grain with muscular arms?

When she's dancing
She doesn't notice me. You
Awkward the streets of Portland
With caramel shudders at every flesh --
How you could kiss them
For the cream of her lips!

There is no harvest then?

Oh only the weeds have harvests
And the dark storm seasons,
Amid the black inkwells of stars.

On Reading Gerusalemme Liberata

For every hand that grips the sword
With knuckles white,
With poking bones, taut tendons strained
Against the flesh
In frosted fury through to break
Just like their swords
To pierce a shining plated breast
Insignied gold
To muscled folds of olive skin
That burns beneath:

Blood, savage blood like rubies' blaze,
Reddens to catch
The sun with wicked gleams, flows down
In liquid streams,
Purples to oceans, lakes of tears,
While maidens dream
In heavy pommelled haze of lands
Whispering breezes,
Loves that fall like cherry blooms long
As it pleases
Stretching fields of dewy grass, buds
T'unfold, to burst
Unchilled, in untouched winter passes.

Ears singing to ears...

More Notes Towards an Anatomy of Poetry

I

Poetry must be philosophical:
A king said
Edicts, written in gold and silver
What gold?
Glimmering lakes of midnight?
Silver? Horses, streams of mist:
Streams and oceans, lakes, rivers,
A partage of mountains and land.
So we have:
Earth, heaven, and hell, joined
By the lapping water
(Solitary diadem of crowns)
Under the open sky. The open sky?
Universe extending to eternal
And eternity. What? Shore and sea
If you understand: no rhymes,
Philosophy dissecting the anatomy of life.

II

Of a life. Now we have the dramatic.
Not the dramatic per se.
The paratactic; when we say
Synechdoche, none of that:

On the lamp-lit stage
By the falling rush of angels
Three rolling eyes hit the cue
Of the pool balls.

It was felt all along! Now see
How misperceptions can disturb you?
Unrest, unrest, and the cities of gold!

III

We mention gold again:
Golden crowns, golden thrones, golden stones:
As if they were all assembling
Into some elaborate apparatus, in which
The combined pilgrims of joyous exclamation
(Make no mistake about it
Dressed in red)
Might wash their hands in the holy streams.

IV

Streams, rock; sky, earth, and the mixing reflections
Of clouds. All a singular benediction.
Poetry must be literate, and not beyond but above
All human beings. Pleasure!
The eternal poetry, how can it have one writer?
Puns ruin the justice of it, and when the sky, collapsing
Pours forth past the cracks of the jewel encrusted firmament
The floods of "Noele sur la terre" (so to speak)
And not the last deluge, where will the holocaust be?

V

It really does come running back
All to the Jews, the solitary garden,
The twilight of the midnight Torah.
When will there be a poetry without mysticism?
We said a poetry of pure philosophy?
You know if space is boundless
The words echo eternally.

Before I begin
Some remarks about poetry
Is neither form nor feeling
But the congealing
Medium between, fit
(as Milton says)
Through the protracted drawing
Of a sense, from whence
Rhythm and harmony,
For meaning
But neither in philosophy
Since taylors sit
Their subjects on
A golden throne and hone
All types of sophistry.

Run, Barbaros, to the foundations of the forbidden city; run, in motley,
To the anchors of the foundless ships;
The long walls lay in crumbling splendour
The omens of their grim surrendur. By palaces of plenty
Forgotten of the iron dragons, through the sagging fields
Of pidgeons, renewed in their severally hinter-flights,
Emanate a winter's blight: of what kind
Cross and battered, with the trappings of mountains
And grinning hollows -- of what kind lost and slathered
In the dew of molting hemlock turds? The squeezing birds'
Ineffable delight, the vistas of expansive sight, all while your right
To the blaring drums and the beating horns
Collapses, while the slabs and slashes
Of our spectral beauty lap
The ruins of the slapping sea.

Hymn to an Adonis, Ocean Most High

Things burning slowly by the rudder
Hum distinctly through the streaming
Beats, transcendent sea; rapid silence
Descends softly and lowly as webs of gauze
Through poplar trees; time
And the sieves of twilight
Mix with the powders of midnight dew
For tantalizing dreams.

A witch will brew the potion, stirring
Bubbling bulks of meat with fish's eyes,
And whisper coarsing lies
Under her bearded breath.

Seth, the muscular undulations and the cool
Administrations of the balm, a rising hulk
Of tender arms and all the mounting flowers
Boulder storms to whip my sail, toile the rails,
Smash the knell of the blue machine
To a lichen cove:

Smooth your lips, and soft the down
Of breezes, while like a quivering toy
The keel moves where it pleases
Fertile brows to arch with joy --

Climb triumphing towers through the wisp-light dawn
With the flight of birds, whose gold tails sip
Of ruddy marigolds, near glittering crystals
Sold by the hanging chimes with all the bawds
Of maritimes: for the ocean is my lover's breath
Of hurricanes and tattered cargo; all I ask
Is come ashore before the death of this embargo.

Manifesto

I have found it --
The poem being.

What is the poem being?
A mode of display,
Loops of language
Coruscating
Into congregating
Idols, the symbols
Of her electric face.

Here is the shine
Of beautiful lips
Forming the tips
Of beautiful words!
Words not, indeed,
Fragmented, pieces
Torn from linguistic
Fadaises,
But the spoken, the true
And the true, not spoken
But red.

When?

When the valleys are embodied
In promises,
When lyrical lilts
Come to their own
Green being.
Then the oceans
Will not separate
But agregate
Into a poetry seen.

Meanwhile, watch
How the poets dissolve
Like drops
Sublimate in salty streams,
While taste
Bleeds sallivating sips
Of clear dyeing slime;

Watch history
Melt
Like butter
Of clear
Days
Into a dusky
Philosophical glaze;

Then raise towers of triumphs
To the ground, and raze
The burning towns:

The clear smoke
Of a raining flame
Blurs
The line from heaven to hell.

Manifesto

The poem being:
When is the poem being?
A mode of display,
Loops of language
Coruscating
Into congregating
Idols, the symbols
Of her electric face.

Here is the shine
Of beautiful lips
Forming the tips
Of beautiful words!
Words not, indeed,
Fragmented, pieces
Torn from linguistic
Fadaises,
But the spoken,
The true, and the true
Not spoken, but read:

When valleys are embodied
In promises,
When lyrical lilts
Come to their own
Green being,
Then the mountains
Will not separate
But agregate
Into a poetry seen;

Meanwhile watch
The poets dissolve
Like drops
Sublimate in salty streams,
While the taste
Bleeds sallivating sips
Of clear dyed slime;

Watch history
Melt
Like butter on a clear
Day
Into the dusky
Philosophical haze;

Then raise the tower of triumphs
To the ground,
And raze the burning towns:

The clear smoke
Of a raining flame
Blurs
The line from heaven to hell.

Sing, women of the orient; begin the seaside lay:
Daphnis proached his black lips to the flute
And let a savage note against the ocean spray
Past all the gods of salt to soothe.

Sing, women of the orient; begin the seaside lay:
The ripples gathered by the running shore
And danced like bacchante maidens in their sway,
The coconuts all scattered, palms betrayed.

Sing, women of the orient; begin the seaside lay:
Nerea rose from rosy depths and dressed
Her braids in veils of swarthy gray,
And 'tranced, with equal tones she hymned the blessed.

Sing, women of the orient; begin the seaside lay:
"Galatea, over the far, curved rocks, the trays
Of the slopping tide, bind the seashells in your hair,
Hide lest the red eye catch you, Galatea."

Sing, women of the orient; begin the seaside lay:
"O Kuclops, Kuclops cloaked with sheep that brayed
Their slaughtered limbs for hungry mouths, in your lair
Forebear to slobber with those bloody teeth, O Kuclops, Kuclops."

Sing, women of the orient; begin the seaside lay:
"Galatea, strum your harp with the fine music that lays
The winds through the pithy pipes, impair
The living coral with your feet, and set the flame to sleep, Galatea."

Demure, my muse, demure the woodland pipes:
Eo, Eo, for while the western lights
Blazed azure in the sky
The burning eye was singed in sleep, eo, eo.

Demure, my muse, demure the woodland pipes:
The greedy shepherds on the hill, eo, eo
Tore the mass and ripped the deep
Eo, eo, and feasted on the fleshy thief.

Demure, my muse, demure the woodland pipes:
"You watched, Galatea!" round the dancing rocks
Came Daphnis' cry, by Nerea
"You watched, you watched!"

Demure, my muse, demure the woodland pipes:
And Nerea slipped through the crystal waves
While Venus watched, and Daphnis
Tumbled on the music of his staves (you watched, Galatea!)

Demure, my muse, endure the quiet night.

La Flaneur

Where is he? The wanderer
In the heart of the city,
Not the valleys?

By the blue, cold ridge
Of streets instead of flowers,
By the marine bridge

Of somnambulent towers,
Where the alley-docks flow
And the glass rubble grows.

Deserted Farm 1909: Oil on Fiberboard

Thick, rough, and course round the rugged,
Claws reaching out for the mauve
Of the moonlight,
Dominates gently the pinking clouds.

How long can the old house
Haunt here, ancient chalk streaks
By the dirty grass?

As long as the windows
Like their squinting eyes, and the door
Loves a gaping mouth.

Shuffle in and feed on sweat, the bare
Cool rocks are silent,
Watching for their rusty pores.

No seeds could crack
This desolation, and the lunatic pimples
Splatter on their pocking, leafless
Arms.

Alchemy

Happiness
Floating slowly on the downtrodden grass,
Sodden with storms? The rage flash
Of loneliness, the acerbic swerve
Of a matinal, the clarion bell
On the bird fented stone. Walk
Through the folds of deliberative colors,
Uncreased and flying
Into the silver clappers of the sky, know
That all these make for a handful
Of rippling lakes;

Uncarved statues in the dawn?
In the evening, when the moon is whittled down
To a bone, picked clean by the carrion birds
Of thrill, and locked by a turn of grief:
In the long rows of the graves,
Who will see you?
In the strong groves of a haze
The violets bloom, wishing-full violets,
And the azure clods.

But not to worry of the trumpet:
This brass is gold.

Glutted with time, reeling, having consumed
The days and drunk the fickle nights
Down to their rollicking, ashen dregs, the moment
When dawn floods the horizons with her crisp sunlight
And the towers reveal themselves like gem-clad
Green monstrosities, I strayed on my course
Of rhymes and guttered into a deepness.

Visions tickled the extremities of my lashes
And ductile pipes like a tapering, flow
Of the just altered image of flames, the central core
Of pure white mixing with a blue flight that flits
To the textile corners of memory and takes
The long shape of the mistress moon.

"Never would he write freely again..."

They're taking me to prison,
Autronius, the old bastards, Lepidus
And Caecilius with his blind eye, the blood-toothed
Hound and the tricky varmint, running
One with the other like beasts on the hunt...

No tree aetherial to climb, can't burrow
Deep in the fertile earth; the mother
Weeps with every trickling stream. Well
To a place of darkness, then, well
To the insatiable planet's gullet, well
To the steel that closes in strides, stridently,
With a slam...

I'll spend my days in the blackest pitch; with what little light
Drips down through the maw of the cavern's throat
And water from the aging stones,
I'll have to quench my thirst -- it will suffice
For a few short scrawls on real pumice
Instead of pummeled pages. Autronius, the pernicious, uncut grass
Like emeralds now, the smog of the city bastions
Which we so often moaned to me like azure lakes,
Little drops of sky in the darkness of their constellations...

I wonder if I look far enough up these tunnels of monstrous omens,
The ceilings formed in the shape of hundreds, crawling, shadowy,
Do you think I'll see the slightest glimmer of the clement stars?

Pro Caelio

page numbers refer to Penguin Classics ed. trans. Michael Grant, 1989
/ refers to a new subject or paragraph

166. the stranger conceit, public games, insinuations re. Clodia
167. pardon of Atratinus, character of Caelius
168. a) his father; b) his town
169. Caelius' morals (a) / defamation vs. prosecution
170. Atratinus' pudor / Caelius' decency and his father's care
171. Catiline - Caelius under Cicero
172. Army days / Catiline the two-headed monster
173. "fictitous mimicry of virtue" / "I myself..." so you can't be surprised if even Caelius did
174. Caelius would not have brought a charge of conspiracy if he were (id bribery)
175. debt, moving out of the house
176. King Ptolemy and Medea quote / various other charges
177. insinuation that prosecution has no senators / C.'s assault of wives / "hidden hand"
178. bribery of witnesses - no witnesses / Crassus, Dio's murder: P. Ascius acquitted
180. Titus & Gaius Caponius, friends of Dio & C. / Lucius H's insidious speech
181. Herennius too stern on vice / Bestia dinners / Luperci
182. Herrenius' logic vs. C.'s rage / Baiae / youth!
183. Easy to attack immorality / "common failings" / Caelius not vice
184. Intro to Clodia, gold and poison, ruptured love
185. Husband-brother, permission to attack Clodia / civil or severe?
186. Impersonation of Caecus, lust
187. Clodia: Show that he didn't party or you did
188. Polish (her brother): other men / corrupts youth with money / Cic. as father to Caelius
189. Cruel fathers / no debts, just rumors / kind father
190. The "imaginary" foil for Clodia / objections to Cicero's education / superhuman
191. It's the rage these days / nature & youth (but cf. 182)
192. Freedom of youth, with conditions / good citizens formerly corrupt
194. Caelius is himself viceless, a good orator = good man / Clodia's cupidity
195. "Out of touch with our...age" / not adultery, just plain sex / I forgive you Clodia
196. Dilemna both ways in favor of C. / gold and poison / Dio
197. Why did C. give gold?
199. More exonerations re Dio / no oratorical tricks / Lucceius as witness
200. Dismissal of Dio / Poisoning - what motive?
201. Dio invented for Clodia / who helped - her slaves? / slaves = associates of Clodia
202. How did he get the poison? / insinuations re. Q. Met., his death
203. Does she have the audacity to discuss poison? / the baths
204. Imperfect tense handing over of box / Clodia as a maker of fabulas
205. Holes: why not take the box, before rather than after / Pantomime
206. The witnesses / court-room and dining room
207. Slaves freed
208. Stories about the box / Closing statements - vis
209. Some precedents by prosecution for vis via morals
210. Caelius' training / test. from Crassus and Pompey / first orat. success
211. Success until Clodia (critical juncture) & prosecution of Bestia
212. His ambition will mellow / preserve a nat'l treasure / cf. Cicero
213. Sex Cloelius as a foil / Caelius' father
214. Pietas, the fruits

Questions

1. What does Cicero's speech reveal about Roman attitudes toward moral behavior in this period?

2. How much does Cicero use Caelius' defence as an opportunity to pursue his own enmities?

3. Is Caelius comparable to Catiline?

4. What is the role of Clodia in this speech and how is she villified?

L'entreprise de charite

In this chapter, Bonnefoy recounts Rimbaud's relationship to Verlaine in the context of his new project of charity and charts Rimbaud's incipient transformation from "enfance" to adulthood.

First, he considers Rimbaud's homosexuality, arguing that it was "homosexualite profond" -- not an accident of nature, but intimately bound up in the project of voyance, "le dereglement raissonne".

He examines an untitled poem in which Rimbaud describes a world holocaust, joyfully. Here Bonnefoy sees a somewhat confused attempt to reconcile revolution and order; it is order, ironically, that poses the greatest threat to the revolutionary coalition, which must therefore be maintained by continued destruction.

Bonnefoy then contrasts this tentative and confused solution with "l'entreprise de la charite" and Rimbaud's life with Verlaine. Rimbaud had failed to reconcile the feminine and matriarchal ideals, so he turned to another male poet to accomplish his reinvention of love, a decision that coincided with his program of rebellion.

Verlaine was not, however, the object of rebellion alone: Rimbaud saw him as a wretched, unhappy creature whom he could rehabilitate, hence recovering for them both the 'primitive sojourn in the sun'. Christian and romantic tendencies coincided -- through charity Rimbaud would give birth to the new order, an order which was the stripping away of an alienating civilization to reveal the primitive fraternity and love that lay beneath.

However, Rimbaud's project failed: in terms of biography, his sojourn with Verlaine gave way to debauchery, drugs, and errance; in terms of his intellectual development, Rimbaud was unable to reconcile his own self-hatred with his attempted love for others, so that "la charite...est vite redevenue la vieille revolte luciferienne" (97).

Paradoxically, it was because Rimbaud knew Verlaine so well that he was unable to love him; Bonnefoy relates this to Rimbaud's life with his mother, who loved him until the first manifestations of consciousness, and finds confirmation for this theory in Rimbaud's perfect kindness to and pity for strangers, those to whom he was an unknown, those to whom he was not Arthur Rimbaud.

During a separation with Verlaine near the end of 1872, in great pain, Rimbaud began writing Un Saison en Enfer, only to be interrupted when he rejoined his old friend in the spring. Regret, fighting, and insults continued, leading to a second separation and the possibility of a real reconciliation, but Verlaine's response to Rimbaud's urgent and tender inquiries reinforced the latter's contempt for his lover's weakness and cowardice. They reunited, for a short time, until that infamous shooting incident, which Bonnefoy claims was inevitable.

Rimbaud set off from Brussels to his mother's house, no longer a child, since he now possessed a past, tortured memories: it was here that he was to accomplish the end of his Saison.

"Je conclurai sous le signe de ce poeme. "Honte" montre a quel point Rimbaud aura ete malheureux. Je prends ce mot absolument. Et, au dela de toute situation ou Rimbaud pourra se trouver, de toute idee qu'il pourra essayer de faire sienne, il faudra que l'on se souvienne de ce malheur."

In "Absolu et Parole", Bonnefoy continues to explore the dynamic relationship between the poet's art and his psyche, now in Paris. He begins by sketching biographical details, including Rimbaud's passion for poverty and his first experiments with absinthe and other drugs -- noting the contrast between Rimbaud's sincere pursuit of an absolute and his contemporaries' effete obsession with beauty and form. Bonnefoy then spends delves into the relationship between reality and the "inconnu". He claims first that l'inconnu is not simply the unknown (i.e. with what has not yet been seen, felt, or experienced) -- but neither is it some religious experience which is beyond reality. Rather, the "inconnu", for Bonnefoy, is closest to the metaphorical movement of the poem, in which experience touches something inside itself, and this interior is in consequence assimilated and rejoined to the exterior. The closest analogue would be the dream, which is contained in reality but warps reality, is part of a visionary rapture that has the potential to reconstitute one's ideas of sobriety so that the state of intoxication, in some way, becomes a truer expression of the real.

Still, as Bonnefoy shows in an analysis of the poem "Age d'or", some dregs of iron remain in this vision of ultimate unity (as he claimed, earlier, that Rimbaud gave up absinthe because he felt the consciousness it brought him was an escape rather than an arrival); the alchemically transformed voices still "s'agit de moi" -- the "moi" of the voyant cannot be safely sublimated, is only dangerously solipsized, and retains its presence in the midst of the vision, perhaps a consequence of the very nature of poetry itself, since there must be a "dichter" to deliver the dictum.

And so, at the moment when Rimbaud was discovering eternity in the ancient recession of sun and sea, the antique passages of space and time, he was becoming more and more convinced that his visions were mere illusions, temporal ecstasies. Thus his increasing awareness of and an attempt to renew a Christian charity in which the individual, through his own abundance, could be dissolved into universal life, as much philanthropist as self-serving through philanthropy. The continuation of his quest for love is again, for Bonnefoy, a response to the lingering presence of the mother, who has replaced nature in the act of giving birth, and hence, is the instigator of the separation.

Responses to an Album of Photography

1.

The doors flowing
Into their past
With occassioned
Glimpses of light
Perspicacious in shadows

2.

The crypt shining
The spherical beams
Of beauty, pointing
To the ceiling's vague
Reflection in the waves
Of cervical marble

3.

Lakes of clouds, squashed
Underheel on the rude clods
Of concrete;
Cobbled walls, bent
In the glassy streams

4.

The ship points its prow
To the stakes of the buoy
Fastening the ocean
To the cloud pastured hills, but bound
To its brothered deck

5.

Stones swim in the basin of pebbled
Trunks, and the leaves cling
To the pulverized floor; or they poke
From the oils and nard, ripened with grafting
Flavors

6.

The apparition of twilight
Reflected in a star
Stirs curdling pots; the uncooked kitchen
Rusts

7.

The bucket lies upturned, just like
Truncated pyramids in igloo tones, but too naive
The prey of warps by tattered lace

8.

Clay bottles and bellies
Build intoxication, waving webs
Obscure the snow-paled brights

9.

Steel claws attack, by porcelain
And latin'ed tags, the silvered eggs

10.

A concave cup, with concupiscent
Stem, with flaccid trunk

11.

The grim house along the geometrical
Lines of reality,
By the obscured, illuminating fog
Of illusion; the turning measures
Of the spinning globe,
Whirling 'round inside themselves

12.

A far facade against a desperate tree,
The recovery, by balls, bronzed domes,
Of the sky's serenity

13.

The monster perching tent
Of cattled wood, by symeretric,
Prison bound ports; a dozen keyholes
Stacked against a dozen, then another dozen
Peering upwards for a better view

14.

Vertigo of the dizzy alley,
Watching a motorbike pass through
The leaning, slattered shades

15.

The bridge descended in a leap
Across the watered gulley

16.

Where does the peacocked eye
Of the battered circles mix into the dough
Of new deceptions?

17.

Projections of stone, arch and ancient;
The amusing grace withholds her breasts
From the catty sly of hanging balls
-- The gruff goats watch

18.

Chesire eyes know the hidden secret of the god
Is not among this ruined place,
But what assured straightness
Is the crooked chin

19.

Cascades of many poppies
Hang in the leaves; the garden gate
Voluminous with vines, invites
Saharan prairies

20.

The poplar trees make pathways through the mist
To stone-lying tables, amid distrust
Of the tired trunk's circling arms

21.

Stab into support of buildings, solid steel
Rims of the portico palace, collapse the caprice
Of the well-cut stone to intolerant glass

22.

Enter the abolishing kitchen, just by
The oriental silence of the lamps, declining
Hard-backed chairs
With windy lace

23.

The mirrors lie in the true beauty
Of their sculptured rapports

24.

The teacup satisfies
Its own designs

25.

The long glass reflects on tragedies
In gilded splendour

26.

The shavings of music make perfect notes

27.

Multitudes of hard-bottomed chairs
Could not stay seated and departed
From the pillared panoply

28.

Do you know my drooping lips,
My unsatisfied face? The strings of fate
Pull unspeakable hunger and clack
My replicate arms

29.

The hand could not escape the gauntlet
Of the brimstone blaze, but cast itself
In cracks of iron

30.

The limbed wax drifted in the sallow pools

31.

Did you note our finish? We are eager
To assay chartless waves

32.

Beas infest their grace, the buttressed breasts
Horny for peerless hands, a chiseled face

33.

Do you know a good joke? I hide
The tastiest ethers
Of wine

34.

The apples were succulent and painted
To excellence of vermillion grapes,
While the crystal bobbed glass
Could not escape
The englished mellon's eyes

35.

The edges of the books intact,
But pages of volumes rusty

36.

The cushion rimmed curl of imbedded fact

37.

We hold the scroll of sanctus Christ
Forever fixed in grey

38.

The rippling edges of the harpsichord
Piano the wood-dusted fabricate keys

39.

The long light shines
By the burning arch, cubbies
The clear air in running stripes

40.

Look to the brick plastered
Doorways for ascension

41.

King in father Christ, kneel
For the stuccoed baptist,
The baptized and the flowing folds
Of latin robes

42.

Each of these whites is chequered
With black-rined stones

43.

Come for the boiling basin
Shadowed in triple portlets,
Stay for the circled lights

44.

Along the laddered length you'll find
Job's ascension into heaven
And the calcinate thrust
Of salt-spayed air.

Pygmalion

I pushed myself into the forge of my own flames, saying,
"If one so beautiful dips in Elysian streams
Then where is life for me?"
I whittled burnished ivory out of the rock, every figure
Was the cascade of her voluptuous breast,
Which my fingers, trembling
Carved, my digits fingered.
I set her on an altar of the moon
Rock and I sheaved its roughened grains
With my back, scraping and tracing, again and again,
The spiraling folds. O mater gloriosa, I said,
And feasted on her living lips, calcinite that dripped
The deep earth streams a thousand years
Before I saw those gorgeous azure
Cils mucoused round with the waxy moon
And the milky ways, spreading out in blackened
Butter thick on hamlets and the three spring towns. In their temples
They adorn her, and the smoky piers
Are burning through the grass, commingling with the poisoned,
Churning night. Passion, salt spray to the nozzle of the senses,
Promising the far flown and the golden, the virile
Slapping ruddy shores, secret, and virginal islands: I beat
My beating chest, I salute you.

Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa

Trimalchio lifted himself to the altar, the Parian podium
Plaqued with the flowering grace: "Forgive my sin,
Venus," he said, but knew no other homage he could add:
For what description of the beauties, laced with rhyme,
Might please the goddess' wrath, or woven in sublime
Textures and fissures of apostrophe? I am a pale, lean
Thing, he thought, but only thought, and then he turned in his dismay
From darkening marble. Night descended on the sun's old throne,
Cooled the flames of sin, proformed her beaming rod
In giant holes of scope and pocks in school. Her convex face
Diminished in the distance of his gaze. By his feet a bent
And poppied haze curled into buds; his own face blushed.
The buzz of beas gathers in the thyme, the honey sweetness of a myrtle
Sways in clement breezes, and his tracks wander far
From the arching torch-light, as his mangy shadow pleases.

It all comes back to the garden. There were roses and lilacs, asokas, lilies, and the sugary pomegranites of May, which were strewn all over the overripe greens like bleeding stars. Thickets of tall trees, thickly hewn silver clusters of star-dust limbs and ironed, emeraldine branches, buttressed the boundaries and propped the ancient ceilings of the sky.

By night there were meteors, flashes of dizzying celerity falling earthward in the heavens; then there were the thousand etched canvasses of glittering Chinese lamps, reduced by distance to blotches, some, or yet mere speckles as fine and jagged as bits of cemented glass. If the old man came to smoke his pipe, then rings of floury black dust would lift themselves heavenward like the praising pillars of the old sacrifice.

What did the old man think?

Promised but not fulfilled; being deceiver or deceived? Perhaps in the great motions of the globe, turning in immovable remoteness -- removed, removing stars in any event versing or reversing, inverting or reverting to the the vertigo, the prodigal, the vertigal gale. Fine upswing of their tender bits, the virgin prat paraded in a parody of cunning life, coming rife orgestrions of organed beings, bringing in salopous serum venomed holds of brightly ecstatic binges in arithmetic, probably coinflips and dipping trips on sea-quenched boats in farthing moats around the milky, molded floats of flecking, faceless cheese. No. She stands still and unbequeathed, bolt upright and securing doored perceptions -- not reception, nor intention, ours or hers, declensions of a verb, th' acanthous word. But with the aperture of eyes, scries, inscrutable and dazzling songs, inscribed or generally imbibed and so provided in the gongs of viridian mares, tugging shares of mangy ploughs for furrowed earth, lies any worth in wounds? The coughing wind of winding cords rewrapped 'round crackling cork, the cristling cross of crissed and crossing crises? The name of the bark is hidden in the cords of the stolid earth, foolishly, and no rebirth.

But still and always the expectation blazing in gold, like a fire before fine water rhymes the traces of a carefully carved arch, vaulting into the rainbow calamity of its existence, multitudinous symposiums of colored being. And when lightning strikes a branch from the void sky, no less the intermission of a cackling explosion, the holocaust spreads slowly, the way a baker pushes frosting with a carver's knife, and no less rich in heat than the various pusillanimities of painted sound or the caned expressions of a snowy sucrose.

Articulation, the old man thinks, is the big toe tracing its own emptiness in the furrowed dirt, the same articulation of bent fingers that he can identify in octocenarian oaks, and yet the perfect vibrancy and fragrance of mountain hymns. The desire to sing, should it come upon him, would be no less an outer vibration of his gullet with the air, no less his heart beating in time with the thyme, the flower sprigs, the divine perfumes of this endless summer, but still it is an endless summer doomed to fall.

Memory perches in his mind like the crow on the gnarled hemlock, tracking the quick-cracking snow. When the terse winds blow over the forests, and their feminine limbs quiver in the freezing wind, will the endless vistas of fields mourn the passing shadow of the sun? A feeble light gains the ascendant horizon, and looks down from his cataclysmic perch; but how feeble, as abrupt in rupture as a callous branch when the mistral bites, and it tumbles soon into the twilight. Then mourning night of the cold gales, sapping night, sucking the strength of freshling saps, sorrowful night, night of ruined towers and creeping frosts, comes.

Minor Third

It was so easy to use third person pronouns, even though he knew
That you were a type of aggrandized I, and poetry
The mirror art of persuasion: like a painter (but why not a hog
Tyer or a chair maker, or just an old car?) who brushes in a little pink
By the glades of grass, the shrubbed outline or the link
In one long chain of flamingos where the eye might linger, rest
In the impressed vagrancies of epic herds; but a painting's made of paint
And poems of only words. Then he dabbled in being a poet, the dilettante who knew
Because he painted perfect chairs, what a chair was better than
The wood or the muzzle of a mangy pig or the corrugations of mettled rusts.
And when he spoke, the crowds came:
From Belgium
From Italy
From France
From Uganda
From Turkmenistan
From the snow-ripped poles, the steady sinews
Of Antarctica and Greenland,
Kentucky like Connecticut, the cuts
Of the green growing Everglades, the Granges and the Indian slopes.
All these crowds of people! Jesus, what bread, what cavorting in the isles!
And all for that glimmer of the word, the poet speaking
Plain and clearly in his authority. Pound them
With your purveyors of tropes, give them the clear outlines of a story
(And are you taking notes?) the word, the word, the invincible word
That the credible crowd clammered to hear, their crowed hats rising to catch
Like their fodder of worms, awful smells, or the silent ringing
Of the church-bells by easter islands, in the fogs and the frogs.
What did he say? Whole libraries and days of skin-prickling
Research, hole risings, settings of the vortexed sun. Let the poet
Be shot like a ringing call, let him rest in the vague mists that lick
The clicking cobble-stones and their corrosive feet, the sea's
Retreat. The whole world: what is this crippling mass
Of humanity and sound? He composed whole audiences
In a calm chair, he clung to the third person pronoun like the lair
Of some anonymous leopard or tiger, and dragged back his victims
To endless, sordid feasts of the flesh. There is no fresh air. You,
The long man, in the back, with the debauched eyes and the muzzled grin,
A question? Yes. If poetries persuasion, then
Can the grumbled bouish boulevards ever rest? We want a shivering wind,
Like a bucket of truth to foam up all this slop: test the way of the air
With a spittled finger, and grind your talcum-ed hair 'til the nard dripping
Ruth persuades you of fine intentions and tests new and ever more cultured inventions.

Le Bateau Ivre (trans. in progress)

Defluebam ut impervios rivos,
Non me actum plus sentiebam
Tractoribus quos sagittaferri
Fecerant scutosque tulere
Nudos sub cruces coloribus.

Love Poem to a Stranger in the Park

Bark, the vein of the rain, rubbing
On soft cloth, velcro streaks of the arms, touching
Thinly the air by the whisps of thin hair, auburn
To diamond black scratches of lead, sprigs of white, the blight
Of the mossed by jacketed green. Where eyes? Off in the semaphore distance
Of a plain and highwayed turf of cars, shooting to the far
Beaming sunlight or the azure delight of the shivering background
In trees, in softness of rustling leaves, and then the embrace
Of endless space.

Or the cities, the towers, elevators tall, and the ups and downs
Of carpeted halls, dirt-packed, close, inscrutable deserts
Of soundless tread, the horizontally flashing head
Of the copier, paper and the pounding of leaden ink, all while the wink
Of a Friday night.

Would you dance by the twinkling lights
Of the saffron cape of stars (more cars) and the fright
Of bodies hanging from the railing like geldings of tulips and lilies
In stew-thicket swamps? Embraced, plucked, for a shining moment
Of sweet-nard, sweat-necked and bared chest
By the broad sigh of a stranger's breast;

Or still like the girl (stolen and steeled) lying naked, cold
By the bath-towel robe of voluptuous beds, the reds
Of artificially plucked roses in bouquets of radamanthine
Twisting glass? This too will pass, know

That roses wilt (Ronsard), but here in the shuddering breeze
Even the falling of a flash-culled, silk textured red turned to brown
Feeds in the urgings of bark, barks that raise up
To wild oceans of sky, azure peaks rushing to tips of the sun.

Rimbaudi Vocalia

A atrum, E ebernum, rutIlum, viridans U, caruleum O
Genesis dicam aliquando vocalia vestras latentas:
Lene pullum A muscarum perrumpentum olentes atroces
Qui bombinent circum, umbrarum fauces; E,
Vaporumque candor tabernaculorum, cuspides
Celsis montibus gelus, marmorei reges, tremores
Ombellae; Punicei, I, desputus cruor, ludus
Labrorum bellorum in bileve crapula in paenitentum;

U, circuli, viridium divi marium vibrati,
Saltus redundantis pecudibus paxque rugarum
Quas imprimet alchimia laboriosis temporibus;

Summum O Classicum alienorum plenum stridorum,
Emensa orbis silentia ac angelis: Oque illud
Omega, yanthinum Suorum yubar Oculorum.

Sensus (Arthuri Rimbaudi)

Purpureis aestatis noctibus, in semitis ibo
Stimulatus triticis, gramina ut conculcem exilia:
Viriditem istorum sentiam sub pedibus somnior.
Patiar ventos perfundere caput nudatum.

Non dicam, nullum meditabor:
Sed infinto in animam me tollet amor,
At ibo longe, longissime, velut bohemien,
In natura, laetus par apud feminam.

Ob Rem

Canam linguam in novam, explorebo
Quod difficile, quod non est certe,
Sine obscuritate quod certe non est.
Non amores Karthaginis nec
Quod ego etiam cupido vel spero,
Quod passer non est contemplebor.
Scribo ut legar, comprensus ut sim
Amplectu cogitatis vel osculo mente.
Quid scio? Carmina sunt satis,
Sunt oscula menti -- verbaque
Sunt acta; sunt facta ob rem.

Without a Sound

How boring if the world like a leech
Clings to the deep bogs of my breast and sucks
The plugging flow of putrid blood: like a knife's
Slice through assiduous bleeding, the healed and the opening
Wounds, abscesses of time, the constant tonic
Of a chronic inadmission, a lack of inhibition
Heading towards death. Long worms pulled out slowly and stretched
Like a ringing roll of tape, and the clack-work batter
Of stress, lacking sex and less of flesh in a trafficked mess
For adulterous tariffs: the best guess, an inevitable test
Of an impressing chime. So when the swans cool
In the ardent rivers and the limes hang thickly on the trees where birds
Perch silently, eyes blinking in the fog and breeze, while
Soldiers fall still in the mists, each cake-holed wound like a blessed
Eucharist of inevitable reply, still there is the sigh
of the mote and the mog: thick sticks of thistle down, stubble
Of sirupy slime, crime of growing tad-poles and shrieking mungs,
A horror of frogs and ghostly despair. What is this pallor when the moon
Blinks like the Cyclop's tooth on the jack-assed, screw-capped end
Of the sky, when the stars drip like blackened fangs and the howling earth
Tremors with a sudden disgust, disgrace, like the fulminous waves
Luminous in marvels, rancid delight, dressing the sword-beaked fish?
It takes a hero then, and something sharp, so sharp it penetrates
To the inner vanishing pussy, the chesire-cat mark of the grinning ground, to renew
The icy claws where the snows flock like sheep, the spicy clause
Of deception or deep and residual lust of a same, lust for the grinding
Of weary machines, lust for mechanicked removable clocks,
Lust for the ticking gears and the drooping eyes. Cars on the streets
Go wham wham wham, the brakes incarcerate the wandering dregs
Of asphalt, and the legs are peddling endlessly, tireless, without a sound.

The Mystic

So the buildings, sifting through the voids of the unconscious soul:
So the buildings, red, long, luminous and large
Reflected in the tarrying pools, the wavering flags of the schools
In the erstwhile, whispering wind. A soft chuchotement
Spirals the verandas of imperial plazas, extending to the height
Of a vertigo nausea, fractals in the mass of a black-spinning wind.

The blue-silver trees are still glowing in the vortex of the dawn,
The crippled crisps of green are gathered still on boughs,
The lofty reticence of a sigh is still peeking through the curtains
Of a diaphanous petal-like blossoming wind.

Submerged giants in cavernous waterfalls are humming with silent lips
Round brass filled domes, through the twilights of a sifting fragrance
And the spirit carved silences of pallorous noise; a white wind
Is brushing cataclysms of snow, slightly marred, on the windows and rooves
Of the titans, the ramparts and watch of the broad stony guard of a gold
Wind is fluttering butterfly wings past the timbered savannahs, perching on lightly
The lilacs of wheat, and the green wind ripples the batters of sea
Winking eyelashes and bathing in pools of the gloom.

Colors of the winds, come to me in many-colored raiments and coats of the shining sun.
Colors of the winds, bathe me in bosoms of nard, feel me in ecstasies of time.
Colors of the winds, illuminate the earth's, the sun's, the moon's.

A Letter from a Cafe in Dublin
Alencia Lysander

R2.

Naufrage
Alencia Lysander

The air is dank in Dublin, blue billows of smog
Slither down the streets and crawl, capacious curves,
The desperately blind alleyways. I'm sitting at the Café
Rouge, detesting smoke by the cup
Of tea, just spiked with bloody wine, the wretch
Of a tepid drink keeps my mind
Hazy, my glance is hazy, glazy, fogged...

Jog my memory, run down to
The Place de la Rue, up the pivoting arch
By the big glass walls, where the sinuous crystal
Falls, blue glass on the streets, falls
(And in windows the China and scrawls
In obsidian halls); jolt me and pen in my memory

The measure of my lustful jaunts.
-- I've been staring at those two
Jiggling, unevenly dressed, crossed
Legs for what seems to be hours, finer than smoothed sand
And more rippling with meat, beginnings of hair and darker
than sun-brewed Arabian hands -- by two bulging
Pecs, near the rising steam of express.

O, Blue eyes like meridian twilights and pupils
As dark as the beach-lights are bright,
My spy-glass kaleidoscope dazzles your diamonds
But far from the waters, black wastes of the shore.

R1.

The air is dank in Dublin, blue billows of smog
Slither through the streets, crawl, capacious curves,
The desperately blind alleways. I'm sitting at the Cafe
Rouge, detesting smoke by cups of tea
Just spiked with bloody wine, the wretch
Of a tepid drink keeps my mind
Hazy, my glance is hazy, clouded, fogged...

Jog my memory, run over Place de la Rue, the pivoting arch
By the big glass walls, where the sinuous crystal
Falls and glass on the streets, falls and in windows and
China and scrawls
On obsidian walls; jolt me and pen in my memory

The measure of my lustful jaunts.
-- I've been staring at those two
Jiggling, unevenly dressed, crossed
Legs for what seems to be hours, finer than smoothed sand
And more rippling with muscles, beginnings of hair (and darker
Than sun-brewed Arabian sands), and by two bulging
Pecs the rising steam of express. O, Blue eyes like meridian twilights and pupils
As dark as the beach-lights are bright, but far from the waters, the wastes of the shore.

O.

The air is dank in Dublin, blue billows of smog
Slither through the streets, crawl, curvaceous curves,
The desperately blind alleways. I'm sitting at the Cafe
Rouge, detesting smoke by cups of tea
Just spiked with bloody wine, the wretch
Of a tepid drink keeps my mind
Hazy, my glance is hazy, clouded, fogged...

Jog my memory, run over Place de la Rue, the pivoting arch
By the big glass walls, where the sinuous crystal
Falls and glass on the streets, falls and in windows and China and scrawls
On obsidian walls; jolt me and pen into my memory

The measure of my lustful jaunts. -- I've been staring at those two
Jiggling, unevenly dressed, crossed
Legs for what seems to be hours finer than smoothed sand
And more rippling with muscles, beginnings of hair (and darker
Than sun-brewed Arabian sands), and by two bulging
Pecs the rising steam of express. O, Blue eyes like meridian twilights and pupils
As dark as the beach-lights are bright, but far from the waters: the wastes of the shore.

The poet wanders a crumbling world
Eating pistachios. Hamlet or the prince of thieves,
Stealing fragments and reassembling them
Into vivid semblances of sound, spreading pyramids
And stretching spheres, smoking cigs
Of such black pitch and pithy stuff. Muse,
Name the several types of tobbaco:
Burley, strong and field-soaked, rich, mixed regally
With drama (Elizebethan type from dun);
Black Mallory, heavy in the glazing fire of wheat, and Ismir,
Samsun from the Balkans; lemons, Virginia oranges, Blue Cadmon
Caledonian, and Marlin Flakes, dexterous dextrose,
Fine cut Cavendish of nicotine in sucrose-white rolled stumps
Cudgeoned into the pavement, thick-dug by a blunt-heeled
Foot.

Tableau for Contemplation

Gold fire in marigolds, magnolias, the burning fields
Sending their crisp delight of ashes to the winds, the skies,
In their velvety softness, blue cusps of their hems,
All finery of silky clouds. A day like today
You want to run all the gemmed, budding fields
For miles, lick the salt foam of the fragrance in sins
Of the whispering breeze: "Something far, Chalcidean dark ends,
And cynotaphs of scrawled moonlight nacer," what does it say?
The colloquy of life like a fine liquer, liquer
Of the imagination, sweet blooming elixir,
And the hidden garments of books, cast about like pale
Dancing shadows of veils, filtering the sunlight into split
Rainbows of ingenuity, and served up on miasmatic floors
The golden mosaics of pawns. Always by the sea it is calm,
And the eternity, the soft coo of the gulls, the rushing murmur
Of the far off dulcimer lutes, and even then the Zen-like sands.

Wallace Stevens on a Boat, Somewhere off Tehuantepec, September

I spent those days in a kind of leisured impetuosity, Siegfried,
Writing poems composed of a hundred lines, cocaine-cut
Into clumps of extremely short words, unmetered, of course
As it was my natural inclination to avoid
All measurements, all figures, above all
All numbers! The horror that I felt, Siegfried,
When I picked up the white book with the prison black stripes running across
The cover, entitled: Versifications, in which
Poems were reduced to mathematical problems and formulas;
And I was very much a snorter of angel dust back then, though since
I've learned to write in prose.

Oh yes, there are a few things I regret:
I regret it now, reclining in an amiable suit
Somewhere off in some comfortable chair, drawling out my syllables
Like the drawling tap of my cigars, rich, old, brown, and fat
Just like my suit, and as the saying goes, clothes make the man...
Not at all like opening up a fresh can of sardines, the little slimy bits
Slithering madly around the watery pap
Like worms in sap, and the delight of taste (at which I shudder now)
When that slippery sustenance
Slid down your throat. I would eat five or six dozen of them
A week (a day, perhaps?)
And get horribly sick on gin, sitting at a blank computer screen
For hours writing on tonic (and forgive me if I'm anachronic).

It's an unclear, Renoirish day, isn't it, Siegfried? Hmmm:
The little, pink bits of fluff (but now that's redundant) trotting over the clouds,
The clouds with their larger anchors in the wind extending down
To flick our ears, fills the mind with marvelous dreams, doesn't it? And good for the digestion.
No, I had a story I wanted to tell you, but it is very much
As a dream, just like those little bits of sirrus shredded on the razor edge
Of the azure; it regards an opera, and a woman with a pale, painted mask,
And a Herculean task, a boulder entirely too heavy to lift, and coffee'd thrift,
Some idle table scraps, and a laugh, and thickly salty
Taffy on Numidian beaches. But nevermind, suffice it to say
I went out with the gang last night, and the motor roared in an unexpected
Way, and the car-lights drifted again and again, repeatedly over darkness.

There's the light-house. Old Collins live there still? Nobody's raising families
In light-houses anymore, these days; I think I read that in a poem by Frost.
Don't you think it's splendid, Siegfried: all of life these days
Is lapsing into prose, like the cadence of brilliant peacock leaves in autumn;
Life is prose, Siegfried, and even when the woman's crying up on the stage
There are prescient murmurs from the scenery, a ghastly parody of wind
Running over the plastic carpentry of flowers, drifting down from a cough somewhere
Probably in the rafters, and then there's the clink of change in the ash-trays
And a few stale puffs of a fresh cigar. Life is prose, Siegfried,
Falling through time as surely as the grey ashes fall from a cigar;
Now what have you been up to, then?

P.

The wind is coming down in broad sheets, and the pages of rain
Slap against me; the whole world seems to be
Rifling through the book of seasons,
But it can't find what it wants
So it thunders and storms. Acharnos,
What excuse can you have to dawdle in this weather?
I have my sheep, my ranging herds, huddled like a clump
Of cotton by that cliff, but where's your farm?

A.

Peleon, pull the ragged cusps of your cloak
Closer in to the bristling edges of your neck
And try to smooth the hairs with warmth. This is a time for wolves
And I wouldn't be out wandering so late
Or so recklessly but for my Ludia. Do you know the tale?

P.

No, but here; let's duck under this tree, see
The long boughs drip with their bounty of rain, but the grasses beneath
Have less than their fair share, just as the farmer who comes before dawn
Gets the brunt of the work to the darkness, but the drunkard
Who wanders in late leaves as early, when his work's barely done; so this indolent grass
Is dry, ripe, and richer than the spreading of fur, better for a sit
Than soft sapplings. But with the same congenial air that these leaves,
When the rain falls off, rustle like a tremorous sigh
To disrobe themselves of their thirsted drink
And drip it to the earth that's spare below, so I'll share with you
Honeycakes, a tug of wine, and some of the mealy apples
I've been gathering all morning, the fallen from the trees;
All I ask in return is the news.

A.

Please, your kindness knows no bounds;
There are tribes in the north and men,
Savages, who'd sooner strip a wanderer's skin than think
To ask if he be friend or foe. So they say
That Pentheus' own mother ripped his head
Clear off his spine, and though his lips were gaping with her name,
The blood drained from his throat right with the breath;
Then there's Hercules who plunged the spear in a lover's breast
(And you might know such bitter grief, Apollo), nor are you unaware
That Odysseus, much sogged with wine dark seas,
Received no loving welcome from his wife --
Fearful of his life, he had to court her,
Not, like suitors, with a lyre,
But rather by the plectrum of a bow!

P.

We all know such stories as these, Acharnes, for it has always been our habit
On stormy days to sit by our hearths
While the doors cake up with soot, and the winds, impious,
Lash the thresholds so the candles flicker like the flame while rain
Begins to spot the sodden sills and shades of lain
Shudder, or fill with lighter light, at the pain of each passing bolt
-- Then the hunger of thunder -- to sit and tell each other stories of days
Ancient or not so passing long, wizened and heavy with Aeneas' rage,
The clement Achilles, or perhaps decked out in freshly fitting arms, heroic deeds
That shine like the breast-piece on their chests, or then again
The plunging swords of civil war, famines, plagues; and crops too,
And often the rising of stars; In short, any wisdom and much besides
We're accustomed to know.
But we two are not now father and son, nor knitting daughter
At a mother's stool; not cowgirls milking cows, nor errant maids
Discussing lover's tricks, but men, and sons of men,
And so are far from the idle hearth;
So share no brilliant gems, or erudite lessons as these,
But bring your lips to the news!

A.

I met a girl by the springs, Peleon, when the autumn
Burned with with dying summer's flames
And seared the leaves a golden red, brown
Dark like embers, black as a starry night, blue
As the cusps of wavering lakes, surrounded
By mossy bits of green. She was stooped
Above those brilliant waters, and I saw her face
First by reflection, a kind of pale grace
Trembling on the surface of the pool; then white broke
And fled in outward ripples, then replaced
With the simple brown of a brown-filled urn; this naiad queen
Held not a royalty of art, a fancy gem invested
With battling furies composed in a circular line
Of grief by raging arms, nor the pulse
Of Orestes' love, unspeakable but
Brown, the simple feel of clay, which drank
The water, bubbled, and deluge
Of deep delight came in its being. When she raised the cup
Like a Caratid over her head, I knelt and made her service
On the altars of my heart; I poured out
The intoxicating wine of my grief, slew
The burdensome beast of my sorrows, cut the throat of my past
And bathed in the flames of future love. She stood
Not now so still, but perked up like a deer, who, grazing
Notes the hunter's nod, a bristle runs across her fur, her ears
Perk, she waits, then runs, and would have run
But for the blessed weight of the fresh spring's sip.