"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.

Hatred

I wish that I had a dart of steep venom, something pure,
A small thing pulsing with agony,
The whole of hell in the core of a bullet
That I could thwap into your heel;
Then a pin-prick might cost you a holocaust of sorrows,
Then your body, the whole of your corpulent body,
Rolling hills of gelatinous mush mounding one on another
Like a pile of compost or a heap of shit,
Like corps of corpses steeped hill-high on funeral pyres,
Might catch and flame, roar to the sky
Like a field of raging sparks;
With a wand I would fill you with pain limitless, too much
To brood, writhe, wheeze, and cut the soggy roasting
Into briny bits, and stomp them through the globe.