COMMENTARY – THE CHANGE
I think this qualifies as great religious poetry and also earns itself a place in the annals of complaint. The boots come from Clarence, an aluminum-fronted boutique on the Champs-Elysees. Kid Marley was a rodeo champion from Tennessee who sold the author a lame horse in the late sixties.
DEATH TO THIS BOOK
Death to this book or fuck this book and fuck this marriage. Fuck the twenty-six letters of my cowardice. Fuck you for breaking the mirror and throwing the eyebrow tweezers out the window. Your dead bed night after night and nothing warm but baby talk. Fuck marriage and theology and the cold goodnight. Fuck the idolatry of anger and the priests who say so. How dare they. How dare they. Thanks for your judgement on me. Murder and a fast train to Paris and me thin again in my blue raincoat, and Barbara waiting at the Cluny Square Hotel. Fuck her for never turning up.
COMMENTARY – DEATH TO THIS BOOK
There hasn’t been a book like this in a long time. The modern reader will be provided a framework of defeat through which he may view without intimidation a triumph of blazing genius. I have the manuscript beside me now. It took him years to write. During this time you were all grinding out your bullshit. It will become clear that he is the stylist of his era and the only honest man in town. He did not quarrel with his voices. He took it down out of the air. This is called work by those who know and should not be confused with an Eastern trance.
ANOTHER ROOM
I climbed the stairs with my key and my brown leather bag and I entered room eight. I heard Aleece mounting the steps behind me. Room eight. My own room in a warm country. A bed, a table, a chair. Perhaps I could become a poet again. Aleece was making noises in the hall. I could see the ocean in the late afternoon light outside the window. I should look at the ocean but I don’t feel like it. The interior voice said, You will only sing again if you give up lechery. Choose. This is a place where you may begin again. But I want her. Let me have her. Throw yourself upon your stiffness and take up your pen.
She makes a noise in the hallway
Come in, I say
She comes in
Out to the balcony
Stand behind her
Lean over, I say
Up with her skirt
Drool in my hand
to open it up
Watch the sunset
over her hair
Are you connected
to the hotel, the chambermaid perhaps? I say
No, I’m the one
you are writing about, she says
the one who sails down
the pillars of blood
from brain to isthmus
and lost in your unhanded trousers
I cause myself to come true
How noble I felt after writing these lines. Aleece had gone away. The emanations of my labour had cleared the hallway. And how much more satisfying this concentration than trifling with a foreign presence or, worse, disturbing another’s heart.
COMMENTARY – ANOTHER ROOM
But you have disturbed my heart. Even if my legs are made of stainless steel and a fish circles in the air at the height of my buttocks I am not protected from your agitation of my heart. I am a bee in your world. I am a squirrel. I move too quickly. I die too fast. Your song is cruel and selfish. You have no gasp to express me. I smell so wonderfully sea-like. There is a seaweed bandage, a one-layered seaweed bandage, on something torn in me. It is futile to contact you in the midst of your training but I’ve been hoping you might fall on a spear and leave your master and live with me on the servicemen’s beach behind the Gad Hotel. My legs have been in a jukebox ever since you left. I am Dutch, I am young, I have sailed the world. Bring the fish back to my anus and bring the bee back to your swollen bite. And remember me, Green Eyes, remember your shell-shocked whore and the lather of her ruthless shaving. I appeared in this world with you when you were lost in the pride of being alone. I took you to bath and I took you to bed and I put sand in your mouth by the ocean.
Forgive me, Aleece, forgive me is scrawled across the seascape pictured on this giant postcard.
DEATH OF A LADY’S MAN
The man she wanted all her life
was hanging by a thread.
“I never even knew how much
I wanted you,” she said.
His muscles they were numbered
and his style was obsolete.
“O baby, I have come too late.”
She knelt beside his feet.
“I’ll never see a face like yours
in years of men to come,
I’ll never see such arms again
in wrestling or in love.”
And all his virtues burning
in this smoky holocaust,
she took unto herself
most everything her lover lost.
Now the master of this landscape
he was standing at the view
with a sparrow of St. Francis
that he was preaching to.
She beckoned to the sentry
of his high religious mood.
She said, “I’ll make a space between my legs,
I’ll teach you solitude.”
He offered her an
