Ten
INTELLIGENCE
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Medium
What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize incisors?
Green saliva?
Madness?
THE NEW LEADER
When he learned that his father had the oven contract, that the smoke above the city, the clouds as warm as skin, were his father’s manufacture, he was freed from love, his emptiness was legalized.
Hygienic as a whip his heart drove out the alibis of devotion, free as a storm-severed bridge, useless and pure as drowned alarm clocks, he breathed deeply, gratefully in the polluted atmosphere, and he announced: My father had the oven contract, he loved my mother and built her houses in the countryside.
When he learned his father had the oven contract he climbed a hillock of eyeglasses, he stood on a drift of hair, he hated with great abandon the king cripples and their mothers, the husbands and wives, the familiar sleep, the decent burdens.
Dancing down Ste Catherine Street he performed great surgery on a hotel of sleepers. The windows leaked like a broken meat freezer. His hatred blazed white on the salted driveways. He missed nobody but he was happy he’d taken one hunded and fifty women in moonlight back in ancient history.
He was drunk at last, drunk at last, after years of threading history’s crushing daisy-chain with beauty after beauty. His father had raised the thigh-shaped clouds which smelled of salesmen, gypsies and violinists. With the certainty and genital pleasure of revelation he knew, he could not doubt, his father was the one who had the oven contract.
Drunk at last, he hugged himself, his stomach clean, cold and drunk, the sky clean but only for him, free to shiver, free to hate, free to begin.
HOW IT HAPPENED IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY
Hate jumped out of the way.
Sorrow left with a squashed somersault
like a cripple winning candy from rich ladies.
Angels of reason and joy
plus other Apollonian yes-men at home
on account of sunstroke
contributed their absence to the miracle.
The demons of adulterers, everyday drunks,
professional irrationalists, the fatuous possessed,
these cheap easy demons so common
to the courting procedure,
refused to appear due to insufficient publicity.
No shark put its fin on the lips
of the little waves
like a schoolmistress demanding silence
lest drama threaten the miracle.
Someone began over again and failed –
noting not a single alien tremor
in the voices crying: tomatoes, onions, bread.
FOR E.J.P.
I once believed a single line
in a Chinese poem could change
forever how blossoms fell
and that the moon itself climbed on
the grief of concise weeping men
to journey over cups of wine
I thought invasions were begun for crows
to pick at a skeleton
dynasties sown and spent
to serve the language of a fine lament
I thought governors ended their lives
as sweetly drunken monks
telling time by rain and candles
instructed by an insect’s pilgrimage
across the page – all this
so one might send an exile’s perfect letter
to an ancient hometown friend
I chose a lonely country
broke from love
scorned the fraternity of war
I polished my tongue against the pumice moon
floated my soul in cherry wine
a perfumed barge for Lords of Memory
to languish on to drink to whisper out
their store of strength
as if beyond the mist along the shore
their girls their power still obeyed
like clocks wound for a thousand years
I waited until my tongue was sore
Brown petals wind like fire around my poems
I aimed them at the stars but
like rainbows they were bent
before they sawed the world in half
Who can trace the canyoned paths
cattle have carved out of time
wandering from meadowlands to feasts
Layer after layer of autumn leaves
are swept away
Something forgets us perfectly
THE GLASS DOG
Let me renew my sell
in the midst of all the things of the world
which cannot be connected.
The sky is empty at last,
the stars stand for themselves,
heroes and their history passed
like talk on the wind, like bells.
Flowers do not stand for love,
or if they do – not mine.
The white happens beside the mauve.
I have no laws to bind
their hunger to my own.
The same, the same, the doctors say,
for they find themselves alone:
the bread of law is dry.
*
I walked over the mountain with my glass dog.
The mushrooms trembled and balls of rain
fell off their roofs.
I whistled at the trees to come closer:
they jumped at the chance:
apples, acorns popped through the air.
Dandelions by the million
staggered into parachutes. A white jewelled
wind in the shape of an immense spool of gauze
swaddled every moving limb.
I collapsed slowly over the water-filled pebbles.
*
“Lambs in bags are borne by mules.
Rough bags bruise live necks,
three in a bag.
It only hurts when they laugh.
“They’ll hang with chickens, head down,
white chicks in blood shops,
block shops, cut shops.
It only hurts when they bleed.
“Boats named for George and Barbara,
sterns faded rose and blue,
do their simple business
in the bottle of the sea.
“Thalassa, thalassa, in the blackest
weather still you keep somewhere
among your million mirrors
the fact of the highest gull.
“Mules flirt with brother slave brick boats.”
Give the man who said all that
an evil shiny eggplant.
Give him a mucous-hued octopus.
Glory bells, boys in the towers
flying the huge bells like kites,
tear the vespers out of the stoned heart.
A man has betrayed everything!
*
Creature! Come! One more chance. The Sea of Tin Cans. The Sea of Ruined Laboratory Eyes. The Sea of Luminous Swimmers. The Sea of Rich Tackle. The Sea of Garbage Flowers. The Sea of Sun Limbs. The Sea of Blood Jellyfish. The Sea of Dynamite. Our Lady of the Miraculous Tin Ikon. Our Blue Lady of Boats. Our Beloved Lady of Holiday Flags. Our Supreme Girl of Enduring Feathers. Bang Bang bells Bang in iron simple blue.
A MIGRATING DIALOGUE
He was wearing a black moustache and leather hair.
We talked about the gypsies.
Don’t bite your nails, I told him.
Don’t eat carpets.
Be careful of the rabbits.
Be cute.
Don’t stay up all night watching
parades on the Very Very Very Late Show.
Don’t ka-ka in your uniform.
And what about all the good generals,
the fine old aristocratic fighting men,
the brave Junkers, the brave Rommels,
the brave von Silverhaired
