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.

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.

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's seeking
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 balled up clump
Of yarn under yonder 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 wandering out so late
Or so lucklessly 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 like 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 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 leaves off, shaking in the after tremors
Of the earth's soft sigh like a breeze, will 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.

Random "Poetry"

When an acrid moon rose
Over the birthing fields
Of gathered piss and compelled many words
To ramble, harvesting of weeds,
While in the long, disgusting lots
Of spilt beer and politics
The wind licked her bloated lips
And rotten apples cored,
The buildings stood
Silently as sentinels
In cool revolt against the sky.

Alencia Speaks!

Dawn, by Alencia Lysander

When I unveiled my entire body to her,
Stripping off the folds of gleaming
Priestly white to reveal the rich and saffron
Hues of golden skin beneath, glowing in multi-layered
Brilliance of rippling muscles
And the scent of lake-fed, cusping herbs

Her blood, you can bet, was boiling
The way your water bubbles when you stir the tea,
Mixing in the crocus and the argent berries, funnelling
The ruby dust of crushed hyacinth so
That the aroma wings up
In the Elysian mists of soup
Like some delicate bird, your drink:

I quenched my blood in the savor of her hot lips: delicate one,
You whose beauty is the wave of ivy wrapping round tree
Of blue pealing souls, dividing from one another ardently to the sky
From their roots, and your limbs are the routes
Of empire, and I have traveled everywhere from the capital to the heart
Like an errant begging for kisses and benediction, and I have kneeled
At your temple; so you transformed my juice into wine,
My veins into masmatic gold, and I feel a new breath rising
Deep from the earth:

There will come the unity of my soul with my brother soul
Across the wide wastes of the ocean that he worships like the setting dawn, and then
We will fly free as the bluebird into the first arch of spring
Through the gleaming horizon that fades in the parallax vertigo of the present
Time; then we will see, all things
Will be renewed, and every voice will blaze up like a living flame, or he'd say
Like the perspiring wicks of the dusk, and I'd say dawn: my prophecy.

Eucharist

The tuning fork, the present guide, the letter
And the question why, stretched like the divining rod
Under a boiling sky
To try for the deep riches of furrowing streams:

Or tell of Moses in the desert, when he struck the rock
Once and the hard resounding of metal,
Twice and the outpour of numinous
Streams, three times and the wrath of my God was upon him
Smoothing the sky into trembling clouds:
Shot bolts from the quiver, and struck him down
Not far from the river of Jordan, but stark across
From the promised land.

Who am I?
I promised it for Abraham like Jason -- the golden fleece --
With milk-whites of honey, and with the dripping of grapes, for juice;
But my nation trod on the husks, culled all their sweetness in wines,
And lay their naked rinds in the gold sun to dry;
Then some of them, mining out silver, ignored me in chalices
Of intricate work: here was Dionysus on the ridge, chaised
Acanthus running round the pillared bust, and fields of gleaming grass
That shivered in the cooling winds when freshly dark
Black ooze came down the cups. And others came to banquets,
And many came on maidens -- their honey skin was spoiled
By the thickly milk:

Here, Israel, is my providence! Here are your provinces of milk
And honey: a festival of hedonistic pleasures, carnivals of sin; and yet have there been
Always the sages who knew me, always long into the burning night,
The dripping of wax, the turning of parchments in stacks by the black
Of their white, ink-stained beards; some, muttering into cornered retreats,
Would raise their hollowed eyes to the moon, and with their infernal cries
Of antique wisdom and effectual lore would score
The plates of youth clean dry, curdle and mold
Until they were old, and then lying pious,
Flesh burdened with wrinkles
As much of the pumiced page as of age,
Mournfully, they would die.

No, Israel:
The world is filled with pedants and beggars and whores, bores each after each
Their particular monstrance, and a great remonstrance is in store
When the flesh becomes spirit again, when the meat becomes bread,
And my breath moves from general beings
To the mountains and streams that have moved them,
Each to their ends.

"Me iamque iam haec tempora fecit."

Sublimated in the rich metal of his desires
Like crystal, caked like the salt
Round the urinal stalls, and bathing in streams
Of the all pure elixir,
He rose to the voice of the living God.

His spirit ascended, the angels attended
Cool clouds in the breadth of the steaming dawn;
The sun blinked his eye and kernelled and cried
The diaphanous mist, and the gleaming was dun.

All hail to the fair sea, the tablets, the dragon,
Hail all that you pass in the meadows of midnight;
Sip darkness and bird-lime from cisterns and flagons:
The glutinous honey of raptured delights

Where the moon glows in the fragments of sunsets
And time, like chipping glass, stains the winds'
Far breath to the north while the cool south will let
The turbid pools of the stars touch the morn.

Very Like a Question Mark

It could never be the same, after
The sparrow ran into the clear glass
Pane -- it was then that the wooden frame
Bent, then that the window
Cracked, and he looked into the fragments
Of a world below gone black;

Sands melting into glass grind back to sands
And rinds, the chime of the breaking
Limes across the dawn, the setting sky,
While the little bird finds her apotheosis
High in the grubs and dirt; a sprig of grass
Has munched voracious on her hips, a mushroom
Pops between her nose, and all the world waits
For the gossamer fate of her toes: back in his mind

A hundred birds are falling like a thousand portals of glossy space
Are shutting, and the doors loom larger and larger, and the free of flight
Eludes captivity in air, and all songs sing
In shattered silence.

How singular the little creeping of light comes through the pane,
The vacuum sounds of traffic moving back and forth
-- And the long-green carpet of the earth
Is limned about with birds' feet poking out
Like little bits of linoleum.

A Scientific Poem

Masses of flesh creeping on wobbly bones
Across the dirt, colliding and consuming
And returning to the earth. When it bleeds
A red stain taints the ferric ground, and seeds
Of dissension among mattered aspects sing, but somewhere deep
Under the ripple of water and the broad caves, feet
Of cisterns and the distant calling waves, rivers
Striking together like the hum of parallel keys
On a piano, drenched with rain and windblown leaves,

Creeping from the cities' seaves. Black
Darkness of clouds and the thundering storm, a forlorn
Vision of the falling axe, the hammer on the ruddy
Backs of metal planes -- and the sickles taking grain:

And if I'd known these things were a threat to me
The waves would have clamoured and joined in pain
In revolt from the mountains like the distant strain
Of a rising trumpet, the hurricane blast
Of the titans' horn, and the breath,
My last.

The Death of the Author

"By the gods who dwell above, high o'er the plains of Ida
Riding across the world in their winged chariots, their crystal palaces
Of shining gold like the rose-light of dawn: there's Venus who has mercy,
And Cupid of the admirabile locks, Apollo with his halting bow, and Neptunus
Clementia, great pitier of things. If ever mortals, besieged
By the wailing walls of a great sea, or sundered in
The labyrinth of time have clapped their palms together, not in kind applause,
But out of hope for sympathy, and sent fleet-footed prayers to Zeus above,
And nor did their hopes deceive them -- from Kunthia on the virgin rock,
Ariadne on the dire straits, and passing by the wayward sea
Betied Ulysses in his reverent ecstasy
Of sirens (Muse, inspire me
To higher things!) -- then surely where the gods take pity
There is room for mortal hope, there is room for clemency to spare the proud
And save the meek!" Thus was Turnus' prayer, and just as, four months after May,
Boreas takes summons from the sweet West Wind, and while
Zephyrus reclines to the banquet, pageantry of rest, and sips the sweet nectar
The nymphs procure when, wrapping garlands round their holms, they tap
The inner spirit of the trunk, and gather in the bark sweet drops of breath,
Aquillo still takes up his glacial sword, and iced eclairs
Of thunder, girds the shoes that beat across the chasms and the cloak of snow
That fills them in, and decorates his brow not with the laurel of Phoebus Apollo,
But with the croceus-born mistletoe to hang in rich-hued red above his grinning scowl
(the kind you see often on angry skulls, long-dead, rotting
Somewhere far in the desert winds) then jumps on the world, seizes the globe
Like the head of a victim, pulls the bull by her white-haired scalp, and slits
The ruddy blood from the just now brown-stained throat, so anger --
Menin! Rage! -- consumes Aeneas like the brazen branches of a fire
Make the red and silver leaves wither into wrinkled crisps of blackened ash
When druids dance 'mong the elms on autumn's solstice day, brandishing
The ripped, torn limbs of the forest, flashing with fire and globules of flame
Spitting into the spinning air. His fingers wrinkle, tighten round his hilt,
He sees the prostrate belt, and his brows furrow like fields, his face
Tightens up like a dried plum, old orange, franged fruit, and the elixir
Of madness and wine imbibes his veins, breaks through to the meters of conscience:
Now all drunk with anger, now all iron and ashes of conquest --
And nor did the prayer go unheard:
"The time for prayers is past, passed like the sparrow
Passes the holm, where the ring-doves take their nests, before the fallow fields of fall
And the hungry hawk, when still all are marigolds blooming, and the lilies dip, aloft,
Their cisterns of beauty, and the sun shines clear on the golden earth. Then cities
Long at war might rest, their leaders' faces lose their studied
Gloom and a smile might break like a rainbow on lips that advancing armies
Clash with joy, while they hug like brothers who lay down their arms --
The farmers beat swords into plough-shares then, and the wolf hangs his head for the lamb
And lions benev'lent for mice, like some great creature that would take in his claws
All the little, lost things of this world, and whisper like breeze from the storm,
'There you are; you're okay: for you too are beloved...' Oh but I mourn
For faces pallid and lost, thousands of sinking faces, masked in the hollows
Of hell where the air is cool, where deep whispers echo, wail from the rocks,
Downcast like the mast of the sunken that pokes above the depths, while a ripped flag,
Black, Waves like the flicker of hope in their eyes. No, the time for May
And the fragile flowers of beauty is past; you killed Pallas, my beloved, my last
Kindness in a ruined world. Now that belt clings richly to your shoulder, Turnus,
And I see the gems you must have admired, crying each for the rubies of slain,
The sapphires like his eyes, and the marbled medallion a fragment of face:
No! You cavorted! No! You wrung it round with a pretty one, showed it to Juturna
And bathed in her pleasure, feeling cool the waters flowing around you, cleansing your hands,
Setting the record of deeds in the straits, and flowing out to the vast ocean where the waves
Wrap round the shore, rap the shore, tap the carving shore, like a hammer,
Into the inevitable and invisible countenance of my revenge. Blood flows back, Turnus,
Back into the rivers, back upwards of falls, and the whole world wrinkles into itself
Like a burning rose. There is no forgiveness for triumph, and there is no sorrow
For truth." And with that Aeneas grasps his sword, his long blade, silver to the sharpened tip,
And with a trembling hand like the tremors of earth his quaking arm
Raises it into the air, and plunges it down the way a man looking over a pit
Throws a rock, and waits, in celerity of being, for the flint-strike to fall.

Then the vengeful blade found the fountain of breath, plunging into his central, his heart,
The way when a poem is read, and the author speaks to the very seams
Of the reader's garments (new and green
Seem the washing and clashing of time).
So the sword stopped in its frame, to the hilt, connected with lame and perspiring Turnus, expiring,
The way a sharp lash binds together all flesh, digging deep captive arms to the bone,
Pushing down to the very marrow, the core, and then biting firm
Like a dog that drags a dead deer, and tastes the running blood. Then Turnus' soul gasped out
With Aeneas' trembling breath, and both fled to the shadows below.

Chairondas traveled to Opium, to the place of Cincinattus, scholar and sage of some renown, his house

In the tips of the peaks, on Opium's mountain, where the clouds

swirl by like skims of cream, and the skin of the sky

Is solid and different. The lights shift in the upper air, and the sun frowns in multicolored radiance of being. There

The swift chariot of Phoebus makes its rounds in gold-broad brilliance, there

The moon proceeds through the court of her stately grace like a nacreous pearl; while she watches

The fires of the Achaeans are all glittering below, hundreds of fires, thousands of fires, winking and twinkling like a piece of the milky way cut up with a scissors and sprinkled, sprinkled liberally on the outstretched darkling earth, looking up at their mother.

Oh how the nacreous mother mourns when the camps wink out! Mourns with the coming of dawn, to see her children flee by the bridle of swift Aurora -- with the flaming eyes! -- the steed snorts impatiently, paws the ground, gallops off and the charyots are rising, clamps like the clatter of swords and the shouts, death screams and triumphs, and brown soaked with blood! Mourn or rage triumphant, and all of this

None of the wise Cincinattus' concern. He belabors his days perusing

The histories of Persia, of the Orient, of the East. Paging through many a crumbling page

His fingers perch on the word, he opens another book and examines the word, he forms in his mind the image of the word like the slice of a peach floating in the soft and subtle cream, like the slice of dawn through the crack in his window and the steaming, burnt-out candle's ashen

Edge in the pearly sky (gone the nacreous moon) and his mind

Is like butter and not lacking fatigue.

So he dreams of peaches and orchards, and the white grapes he used to pick from his mother's
Garden, like pearls, like little gems of emerald and sapphire in his stretching hands the plums and the olives would fall.

Oh the glorious of globe: he awakes with a start; a knock on the door.

"I am in love with a woman of hair like the silver chaplet of a marbled angel, and I've chaised her in Europe and Asia, the East and the West, but she smiles with teeth like pearls, a rosy white by the sheen of her skin, and she does not care with her copper brows."

"Youth comes to love with age; let the simmer in your heart fire, let it flame, let it burn down forests and whole icy lands where the crystal palaces perch unevenly in the first dropping of snow, the first falling of wintery freezes, only to be shattered by the light of an august sun."

"The snows won't fall in August but the winds blow cold in autumn and I shiver for the chill. Throw another log on the fire."

He cuts a thick leg from the chair and the little corners of flame sizzle about it, the curls of smoke claw round the nails, the pegs (for from oak, for from knotted, proud-strong limbs of iron
Oak) are last to catch, and crackle with resentful steam. Cincinattus strokes his long beard, fine like a sheep's fur, and purses flaking lips, and gnarls a gnarled, oak-like face.

"What is the cure for love, Chairondas? There was a medicine in Asia, in the east. The sages," he flips Confucist lore, bound in leather and brass, "Say the trick was to burn together

A mixture of tea-leaves, powdered flint; the combustion

Explodes and the thick scent

Rises to the nostrils, impels it through the seeping brain. But not just any tea; the leaves
Gathered from orange trees at the end of the world, for there too the thirsty orange hungers their roots

To the depths of the earth; lyre strings mixed in liberally, of course, that goes without saying,
And a bit of powdered fluff from the first spring hare: that makes good tea."

"Sicilius," (for that his other name)

"I respect your ancient lore and books, but I think the words have been

Misprinted and some drama mixed in with the rest.

I read of a golden cup off the other side of Attica wherein was kept

(and here he draws a breath)

The elixir of Plato's philosophy, whose theft

Was sacred by the fingered rivers of Oenoe;

The Hero came long ago, and threw it into the stream, and whoever drinks deep of that

Drinks deep of love."

Now the old man, Silenus, confounded by the change, let the milk of the fading day

Pore over his brows and spill down his chin, and watched for the growing flames and the oyst-made
Sky, and took to uttering one of his prophetic

Cuts of wisdom, which he made like the greased hands of peasants

Potatos and stews for the slaves:

"Sweet in the first morning, and last with the dew
Lasting into the rivers of honey, the milk-dripping
argo of argus-eyed buds. Come in the flower,
When the long corollas hang
Down their sipping pendants of life."

Sing the pride of Kroisos, Muse, Son of Alyattes,
Vainglorious, which put upon him many pains
And destroyed a mighty kingdom, once greatly strong
In wealth, while it placed him on the pyre
For all great flames and licking bolts,
So that the gods' will was accomplished,
When they first came together in counsel:
Kroisos, king of men, and that sage of Execistos.

The Star

I wish I were at the crests of waves,
Looking out over the lapidary waters
Lapping, all facets of burnt ruby brilliance,
While the sun touches the western edge of the distant shore
And the gulls fly low, skimming the water for food.
I would hold myself against the tight winds, the slashing winds,
The winds that sear my shivering arms even as the golden sun
Can crisp the burning waters' edge; the furrowed sands
Would scatter at their might beneath my wrinkled toes
And my shadow project like a monolith, unwavering,
Longer with the falling sun and shorter, then diminishing, as cool night sets
Along the starry blight of timeless sky, eternal
In her distance, a cloak as soft
As all the bars of a prison wall. Is there no star out there,
In tutelary grace, who watches the ever revolving, ingrown fields of space
Alone, utterly alone, but casting a motionless, reluctant gaze
Unknowing and unknown on all the hidden parks?

Nebilungs

Murdered, falling down into the brown earth, whimpering
And dead; mothered in the cruel winds of October
When the pale leaves cristled hard as ice and white
As snow fall above her ruby lids, her still-glowing
Embers of skin, still-beating heart. Dead:
Weep, meadows, you willows bend your leaves, strain
Until your roots crack from the earth, until you tilt
And fall. Fall! Autumn everywhere! : You've murdered
The beautiful summer, you've murdered the still-flying wings
Of the spring, you've pierced the corolla of a perfect blue flower
And stabbed it 'til the sapping veins could purple-nectar flow.
Oh for the beas now, the yellow ones on golden days
Springing resiliently from green stems of eternity, and the
Ever stretching sky. Oh for the little wandering
Creatures, the ants in the basins and courts of the earth!
Oh for the houses and the grass cracking sidewalks,
The scuff-kneed blacklings and resplendified beggars
Holding their dirt-bent, corroding cardboard signs and cups: my reveries!

Teachers of poetry, that is, sophists
Have dried them all up, stuck
A Straw into my skin, into bones, and suck
The red marrow, the blood-flowing marrow, and gnaw
On my good tasting bones. The strains of violins seeping
A little from ochred wood won't drown them out, and my breath
Is so exhausted and puckered my lips that I can't blow a horn,
A gigantic brass horn to draw out my cry so the wind
Could gather up the stirring ruby leaves and stir the embers
Into a consuming, turbulent flame, into a holocaust, and the world
Would be purified in the ringing breeze.

Metamorphosis

Night of the mind after a metaphor, in the darkness
Of words seeking after their
Flesh, of the body as real as embraceable
Forms I sing. But oh this change! How many times
Were the words you read rewritten, how many times was it necessary
To raze my thoughts and then re-raise them, lazar-like,
From the sluggish dead? How many fields
Stitched together by broken limbs and quivering fingers
Must I have crossed in the moonlight, aloft
And lonely from the city's neon edge?
Before I can find my beginning (I left
When I began to climb to attain my second self --
I found him fleeing after a shadow like the shadows
All the while tumbling from the precipice of twilight
Into the depths of the night) I mourn for the loss of myself,
The revision of time, the recreation in my recreation:
How long will the low lying cliffs hold my path through the stumbling fields
Before the whole face of the mountains is changed?

My Generation

One by one I watched them jump
Off the edges of cliffs
With zeal at the going
And never return.

And oh! how these dressed up!
-- It was quite an event. The youths were there
Screaming there drowning voices
Like the gurgle of a whirlpool; the old men
Got pushed to the back, stamped into the dirt, but didn't care:
There time was come. In the crowd
A short weasel of a man, wearing an iron crown
Through his temples and thorns in his eyes
Sold voluminous bottles of liquer. It's best, he said,
If you drink up immediately before rising
Into the engulfing void. The liquor
Slides down your tongue, making it writhe
Like a burning snake, then your eyes cloud, your throat
Waters and sees
New things in your heart: precipitating down your throat
(Again, no need for muscles, the slow moving jaunt
Of the body escalator) and escalating, it hits your stomach, where
It diffuses from the core of your body to all of your heart, your lungs,
Your brain, broad back, down to your buttocks, your feet, your fingers,
Hair, toenails, nose, and eyes, until
Poised again on the tip of your tongue, through veins and arteries
Silently flowing, the whole of your being will scream
And you jump. Jump! Hurl yourself into the abyss, and do it loudly, with a screech,
A cry of wild volupty!

So I see the abyss was yawning. So I see
The wild clouds were riding the straits of the sky like the cliff
Was perched on the darkened gulf, a broad pillar
Of sucking madness. The greedy monster like a god
Engulfed them all, like a wink, like the blink
Of their own eyes, the fantastic vision
Of their mouth, and the empty screams echoing from below like the brink
Of their voice.

Antiquity

A cleaven pot, brown, rising
In purple fragments from the earth
(Grey gristled, where the patterns
Swirl and dog in argus eyes) inside
A few shattered fragments of papyri,
Translated from the Greek, thus:

Lover, the swift borne of your hair
As the rising wind...pluck[ing] a harp
[...] and all the gods, Venus, Apollo:
Round folds of silk and the voluptuous
Texture of skies, he coiled, desiring.

When the lightning cleaves the pot into fragments,
And the nuanced mirage of the clouds wraps around
The ancient temples, twin pillars of Herakles,
The silvered marble of another time...these pots
Speak destinies, I find them each
In fragments, little cutting pieces of agate and jade
In consistence and cost, sharp enough to pluck blood
From the thirsty wound and drive deep
Into the pale skin of a shallow maiden. Parthenos, Athena
I was hunting you, your great pleated folds
Of blond hair falling like the dawn, ripping the sky
To pieces, little pieces swirling with the ravaging passage
Of time and the thunder-bolt lightning,
And the moss and the streams and the rocks.
I was singing eternal
After your shadow.

Do you hear the wind these days? All of them
Are greedy for difference and gain, and no one
Leaves touched in the gentle light of an adoring cove
In the overgrown gardens of time
That unsearchable, quaesiting marble, bending in towards herself
In voluptuous folds, all the scarlet of form and the gold
Of her hair:
Athena I could kiss your lips, your unworshipped lips
While the storm and the ravage of time is consuming the world,
Sweeping the continents into the seas.

Shades

Human beauty was entrusted into my care
He said yes I wrapped myself around him
Like ivy sucking the first sweet sap from trees
I plucked myself into conflagrations of berries but
A sad wind. The sky falls in small drops, very small
When you're lonely and the air is whirling inferno around you,
Very small when the earth turns slowly into shadows
And whirling darkness: if you clasp a shadow
It flees, like the efforts of an adamantine pincer
On the thin and steel-clacked air. Suddenly he was a shadow
Falling across my arms and dampening my dreams like an arid torrent,
A volcanic eruption of water from deep springs above (and
The little vines running into ravines, thick moss-gatherers,
Vines sucking teats of the mountain, juicing
Hard rock). Hello my voice
Quivered in the shadows, patiently, delicately exploring
The far reaches and the arid domains, all the way
To the valleys of hills and the hesitant sunset. Darkness.

(Flash) Photography

So really the rosy forests, really
The standing blue and a picture of
You on the rocks, you by the resinous
Outcropping, cut-picked, piquing
Photographed rocks, weaving together
A dreamland veracity, the blowing
Wind and the lithe photography, ripped
On the white-scored edges, lipped
Grey, faded with dots of withering
Black (oh I could come to you
In the night, in your arms I would take
A million pictures, a million
More, and then a thousand, a hundred
Thousand still-shot pictures of your face):

The golden hues, fading in the so-dark
Edges, and then a dazzling array of
Shadows, gliding, dwelling under by the crannies, nooks,
Brooks of bristling like the shady leaves, even
Singing where the blurs, a kind of exalted
Singing glowing, and the microscopic
Burrs and crops: and where I stop, I lop
A clear-cut stream of dulcimer to the dulcet dark.

Elegy for a Love Toy

I saw you with the beautiful brown hair, russet streaked a scarlet dawn
Of faded gold, unsure and unaware, the rolling folds
Of your fading jeans were dragging on a walk: how
I longed to talk, to spew in bold strokes those words like an autumn twilight: "I love you"
Would we have whispered on casual Venised streets, while a tower
Pokes in the distance through the twin framing hills of below, wrapped
In round stone and the distant rap
Of the beating drums (some errant bum)? Even birds would hum in our sunset quiet
And the air would smell of buttered cakes and the old men taste their kegs
Of cafe'd ale (he's watching the legs of beautiful Meg, the American
Girl in the streets with the dazzling ring, wrung round the next of her pinky,
Gleaming a delicate flash while her bust
Excites another gleam, a heated flush of desire
In an otherwise cracked, worn and wearing marbled...) but we'd taste lips:
Yours soft, round, pale but browned
With a sip of cocoa, merging with your browning, day-drenched skin, my hand
Harvesting tips of golden grain through your darkening hair, other
One wrapped round ecstasy of chiseled space, and in the darkness moonlight streams
Like only cream that skims the void of a remembered face.

Soon I am leaving. Soon
The tinkle of keys, computer's hum, a plane
That bullets through the air, the anxious murmur
Of a talk show broadcast from God knows where
-- What sullen city clogged with smog-choked air -- a dog's yap
Will all fade like the colors on a bleaching t-shirt
Lying down there, somewhere on a dresser, or the fuzzy flicker
Of memory like a badly tuned TV.

These images flicker before the brain, but I suspect
The motor roared before the hum of consciousness began
And will again, after; reality is not,
Like paint dissolving in dull turpentine, such solemn blue
Or freezing red, burning black
To shudder into silver beads, and cloud, and stretch out in threads
Like a tortured patient on the wrack;

But like the shadow of a lightning streak, or
The after-image of an outstretched palm, the webbing
Finger fades, the voices die for me like a low call
Disappearing round the corner, and forever out of sight
Into the reeling calm. Image after image, silence after silence
After voice, all these things fade, replaced forever by another, fresher instinct
While the good past rots.

I search for a timeless out-of-time, where images take root and grow
And bear ripe fruit that always has that melancholy sweetness, tickles tongues,
Pervades the teeth. I fly forever in between the silky clouds at night
While the dark earth gapes like a yawn, the stars are dazzling teeth,
And the moon, like a larynx, sings. I would fashion a garden of forever, scrapped together
From bits of shaggy carpet, wicker threading from a basket, broken bricks
And pages ripped from soggy books. Assorted arms and limbs, a red-veined leaf,
A purple artery on lucid arms, and yellowed teeth: these would be
My roots, spiraling into a forest of purple trees, memories
Tinged in the blue of a setting sky, forever in the golden fall of sun;

But while I sit and write, forever fades. The voices
Echo round and round in a canon of goodbyes, the sea falls
And blasts, a solitary gull wings round, tumbles towards the earth, catches her flight
And a fish, and baffles towards the sky. All my roots are rotten, rotting
While I search for that perfect memory, for a captured light
Whose writing never fades. It is not immoral to miss your life, to flee
The shadows of a rocking globe, to see
Sunset horizons like a rainbow hued archipelago of dappled clouds...
But the ocean of time is devouring misty islands: when the singing fades, it fades
And is gone, and my weak pitched voice cannot imitate it, no, can never imitate it,
Never bring it back.

I'm on fire; for some reason (maybe it's caffeine) I'm incredibly excited about the prospect of reading Heidigger, Kant, Derrida, Barthes...give me any philosopher (no matter how sophistic or sophisticated) and I'll read him. Well, actually, what I'm excited about is the possibility of reading some nice summaries, concise introductions to very complicated, challenging ideas. I always tackle the works directly, but maybe what I need to do is enter in on the shallow end (so to speak).

I had a hot chocolate, late into the night. I don't normally drink caffeine, so maybe that's why I'm all buzzed. I should be sleeping tonight, because tomorrow we're going to Taos, my mom and I. To be fair, at 3:30 in the afternoon...but I don't want to go to bed late, wake up early, and be all groggy the next day; although, it might be nice to talk a long nap during the four hours' ride down there.

I'm beginning to feel happier in Denver. Tonight I saw Ben and we had a long conversation about all sorts of philosophical things (quasi-philosophical...I'm sure we hit on a lot of errors and shallow distinctions) that was really invigorating. I was afraid to go out, for some reason; afraid to drive, to see old people, to reignite old friendships only to see them extinguished again the moment my plane touches down in P-Town this Saturday. But I suppose...you have to take things as you go. You have to be where you are when you are. That is, if you wanna go out on a date with someone, you go out on the date, that one date, regardless of whether you're going to have a long relationship or whether you're fleeing to Cuba the next morning. Carpe diem, as Horace says; grab things while you can, while you have the life surging through your veins, set yourself on fire!

It's a shame I'll have to leave Denver now for Taos...no time to put this newfound energy into practice. But I will have a chance to walk around Taos, to experience everything fully and intensely. I just want to down all of life. I want to drain the cup to the very dregs and suck on the bitter lees and chew up the seeds just for a taste of that sweet, sweet sappling hidden deep down. And I want to write, I want to analyze endlessly. How wonderful it is to be young and have the whole world at your fingertips, to feel everywhere a sense of ardorous promise. Yet I must sleep.

Insomnia

Insomnia is a gift, until the next day; until you wake up sputtering and groaning, cursing the sun, cursing your life, your sleep-failing hormones. By that point you've picked up some mediocre book, you're flipping through the pages, awkward and bored out of your mind by a slew of unneccessary words, while, exhausted, you wait for exhaustion.

You wake up at three in the afternoon, and the day is wasted. Your plans have lain out in the sun too long and are now wilting, drooping, parched-out dry, stretching out on the couch like a deflated weather-balloon. You feel groggy, can't go back to sleep, and the clock ticks. Tick, tick, tick; the emptiness of space, the void of time, all things resolving into their accustomed and permanent positions; the fuzzy-beige walls, the wavering light through the window casting a candid, hot, unwelcome streak across your chest. Too groggy to move, but much too up to rest.

But you while away the night hours (while you wait) with intellectual collossi, monuments rising from the gritty dirt of assumption to the towering heights of solecism, solipsism, with fits of conniption thrown in, liberally, for jest. Meanwhile you're shut indoors, crushed by the night like a little piece of fudge glopped in between two dark masses of pudding collididing under a thick glass dome. You're hungry, but you can't eat anything because you've recently brushed; you're tired, but images of the world, inverted in a whirl of panic, dance in front your closed eyelids. Doubts, like the phantasmal outlines of rug-draped furnishings in pale moonlight, trip up your wandering mind; and no matter how many times you reassure yourself, their vague corners and shadowy outlines are always there, palpable as the sharp ends of a cheap-fold out bed through loose-knitting cloth, jabbing your ribs.

On Not Talking to Anybody About Anything

The other night, I came to a startling conclusion: I don't know what I'm talking about, and neither do you. Clearly, we must either learn how to speak more effectively, or abolish language altogether. Let's start by simplifying our diction to a series of expressive grunts. Consider the advantages: instead of arguing with each other, couples can express their feelings with "angry grunt" (which sounds very similar to, and is often followed by, "horny" grunt). When something makes absolutely no sense, there's always "inexplicable" grunt, which is followed by "feed me" grunt and "vodka" grunt, respectively.

How our lives will improve! We can cease all this metaphysical chatter (which nobody seems to understand anyway) and get right down to the bare essentials of life: food, shelter, and hot, hot mammas. People from foreign countries will understand each other without ever having to set foot in the class-room. No one will complain about bad grammar and syntax -- and best of all, the potential benefits for poetry and opera are enormous.

The opera's pretty much grunting and whistling already, and if we can just get rid of the encumbrance of language, the sopranos will be free to sing as expressively as they'd like while the audience will be freed from the burden of trying to understand them. We'll need operas, of course, that are rich in sentiment and emotion and light on the intellect...I'd suggest Wagner. Now for poetry: poets will be freed from the obligation to think up witticisms and clever turns of phrase and be able to get to the heart of their craft --expressionistic force; plus, all grunts rhyme, so we'll be able to return to those much lamented classical forms.

As for the sciences and wissenschaft -- well nobody listens to the literati anyway, so we might as well be grunting; and for all the advantages of science, when we weigh on the one hand the benefits of our vast knowledge of the universe, and on the other all the happiness which would be ours if we simply did away with language, which way do you think the scale will tip?

I've seen the future, and it's language free: no more arguments about religion, no more reading assignments, and no more awkward attempts at conversation on the subway. Woohoo!

Sent to the New York Times:

Dear Editor,

The Republicans sure know how to party; they've all pulled themselves up by the boot-straps, but none of them mentioned that the boots in question were golden buskins. If the Republican party were truly attempting parsimony, perhaps they would cut out the evenings at expensive (and exclusive) restaurants, the fancy (and politically safe) entertainment, and the cocktails (whose organizers will, I'm sure, fret deciding which is the more economical -- roquefort or brie -- both imported, of course; and as for the crackers, well, ritzes, for all the party's ritzy glitz, would certainly be unacceptable).

No; the Republican convention, like the nation they run, is about making money and the attendees are no doubt among the world's largest moneymakers. Attending the convention is as much a matter of showing support as it is of keeping face, and the whole thing is not unlike the gathering of primped aristocrats at Versailles in the days of yore (though it's somewhat disconcerting to think of George W. Bush as Louis XIV's successor). Make no mistake about it, the only frugality on the part of the ruling party is towards spending on education, culture, and the poor.

Sincerely,
Alex Leibowitz.

A little boy is walking down a road on the edge of the forest when he hears the beautiful trill of a nightingale; he is so enticed that he runs after it into the woods. He follows the bird to the edge of a clearing; it lands on a golden bough and begins to glitter all about as if its plumage were on fire with rubies, emeralds, diamonds. A beautiful woman steps in after the bird and calls it by name - Autumn, sired of Lark and the Falcon, the Great One; she is the witch of the South, Belinda, the darling of the Summer.

Belinda reaches out to stroke the bird - but it lunges at her wrist with its beak. The shrill song falls off, a deathly quiet descends upon the grove, and with the flowing blood of Belinda come the frosts and cold of Winter, the dark lady, who enters wreathed about in a long veil of blackness, glittering with stars.

She is Winter, wrapped in the Night, which moves and shivers about her as if a living being. She strokes it, whispers to it, and begins wrapping it around the trees -- so long a scarf, there is no end of it, going out fold by fold like the web from a spider.

Last of all, she stoops above the wounded muse, speaks in her ear a word or two of her harsh and eastern tongue, then swaddles her and carries her off. Belinda’s skin, once as bright and smooth, as fair as a forest of greening elms, looks worn and bark-like behind the blackness. But her face remains unhidden, pale and perfect, and it has the preserved look of the recently dead.

As they disappear into the forest, a single flower, a daisy, falls from the wilting garland in Summer’s long, golden tresses, which are beginning to grey with age and frost. It falls on the one spot of earth miraculously untouched by the frosts and the dark cloak of night, beneath the golden bough.

The boy, more curious than ever, but also filled with the unfathomable dread of all he has seen, gathers up the courage to steal in after the flower. He plucks it up from the ground and brings it up to his nose; ah! the smell is the sweet perfume of Belinda, the scent of long and lazy days when every flower imaginable blooms and the air is busy with bees plucking the nectar pores of the honey-blossoms. Oh that sweet, unimaginable scent! And what good for the boy, for it replaces all the horror with a kind of caress of loveliness and the incomparable sweetness of being.

Above him the bird Autumn is unsettled from her perch, for her talons have caught in the fabric of the night; she wobbles and stumbles over the branch, unsettling its foliage, which clinks abundantly, then tumbles, and then, spreading her long and ocher wings, wings off with much effort and stress, for she is dragging up with her the whole quilt of darkness. All about the forest the leaves shudder with the burden’s departure, the trees groan in the concord of their bondage…and then they are free. Autumn takes wing with the Night, and the child of sorrows is delivered into joy!

From then on and ever that boy was called Spring, and he could be seen always dancing in the desert, a garland of fresh-cut flowers in his hair.