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Rosa van lima met je bedachtzame glimlach prik een naald in je slaap doornen onder je kleed
mysticus is de man die spreekt over je mysterie terwijl jij hardnekkig zwijgt in alle talen
welke geheime stemmen fluisteren je toe in je ongeremde luciditeit en slapeloosheid
je handen trillen en strekken zich bleek voor je uit klaar voor een buitenwereldse omhelzing met je don juan van agonie
je rode lippen tuiten tegen het serafijns blauw van het weerspannig uitspansel voor je open raam
eerst pak ik je op het aanrecht dan duw ik je in je kussens tenslotte kruisig ik je tegen de wand van je monasterium
tranen en muziek lieve lady der lusten richt je half geloken ogen op in hemelse extase
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I was alone on a night with a deadline when I heard a warm husky voice saying: 'hello'
Twice.
My mouth tasted like raw fish. Fingers tried to unlock my jaw.
For a brief moment I saw everything from her perspective. She only had a memory for facts and numbers.
The invisible side, the flipside, the bottom and inside of everything around me dissolved into fragments of a landscape. Sliding further and further away.
The only thing left to see was a mountain with a bad side and a good side. The possibility of the wrong choice made me paranoid.
I froze.
The sea went quiet and all the colors vaporized.
In the distance I could hear a solution being dragged away.
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Pal op een aanlegsteiger aan de rand
van de nacht waar ik je zag stond hij,
in pandjesjas, de degen schuin als je hand
in de mijne.
De maan een grijs beschilderd ei
en amper vingerafdruk op het golfkarton
van een plas.
Wij keken. Zwegen elkaar aan,
begrepen niet dat tussen ons dit stilstaan
en verdwijnen even nietig was.
Ik kon het doffe kloppen van zijn vleugels
toen hij opging in je handpalm horen. Voorbij
de vissen van het licht week hij, die nu
op goed geluk af in het donker wonen.
Wij vluchten net als zij en blijven hopen.
Wat verder ritst een trein het landschap open.
uit Zwijghout, gedichten, uitgeverij Atlas, Amsterdam/Antwerpen, 2000
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Het zat in de pen, in de tijd
van de pen die bad om meer inkt.
De hand van het blad opgelicht,
de beweging heen en terug
van het blad naar de inktpot.
Schrijven was diep ademhalen
tot de inkt door het hart
naar het hoofd steeg,
daar de woorden uitkoos
voor een adempauze later
de zin.
Schaatsende letters,
wind over het weiland, een bosrand,
strijklicht op regels
waarin vissen zwommen,
een kabbelend praten
gespiegeld in vloeipapier.
Wat er stond liep vooruit
maar wist wat het naliet:
blauwe tongpunt van verlangen,
blauwe vingertoppen van verdriet.
uit Het tegenbezoek, gedichten, uitgeverij Atlas, Amsterdam/Antwerpen, 2006
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All through my life the hand was there
Everywhere I lived everywhere
As a small child the hand led the way
Showed me what to do told me what to say
As a growing child the hand took the lead
On my young fear the hand would feed
Hurting through the day always out of sight
Hurting even more in the cold of night
The hand pushed me places I did not want to go
The hand took its time always so slow
The hand it would whisper into my ear
Something so simple would create such fear
It made me do things I did not want to do
I hated those years as my body grew
The hand said it loved me but it had lied
I spat at the hand on the day that it died
I felt safe for a while with my sisters and brothers
But the hand was soon back just the hand of others
As I grew older my life it was planned
There was always a reason always a hand
The hand pointed out my ways of sin
As the hand came again and coloured my skin
Day after day became night after night
So easy to lose the will to fight
As a grown adult the hand was still there
Blackening my eyes and pulling my hair
In a world of pain none understand
Everyone takes the word of the hand
The hand it will win it has so much power
On your weakness it feeds and will devour
I write as a child a young girl and a wife
I write no more…the hand took my life.
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{VI} O SOLEMNLY STAY THIS, MY FILM PROJECTOR HEART. I WROTE
THAT SENTENCE FOR A FIRE ONCE. I built a fire from a forgotten friend. I drew
ghost water from a lover and took it to bed, a train. This is my machina, with its gears
softly turning beneath the rolling of a forest floor. When night appears again, we are both
friend plus enemy; the blood and the calm; menacing to some as Chinese New Year. Our
manual of snow misses a page the way I miss pulse, and dark, and the borrowing for the
sake of the borrowing alone. I covet this place, though I am summer’s end. I am love song,
the cross-fade, the badge, the brought in screaming. Wolves here know this as a baptism of
war. WE KISS WITH CLASHING TEETH BEFORE THE RAIN, AND I
FOLLOW YOU DOWN THE MOUNTAINSIDE, WE, BRINGING LIFE TO
WHERE THE FIRE HAD GONE BEFORE US. Stay close and don’t tell the lions
your name. DEVISE A METHOD FOR TURNING THE NUMBERS INTO SAND.
Inhale. A coming. Exhale. The ghosts.
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{V} Picture. Petition. Wrecking ball. A filament. LOOSE FALLING SNOW
DRIPPING AS STATIC, MY BALTIMORE, AND I AM AS IF I AM DAWN,
AWAKE. Tiny radio, my pocket, a form of oxygen apparatus here. Its every
verse a
wandering, careening toward a suitable chorus. We get, in this way, what we
deserve
most. We give what we are, in this way, of ourselves. Microphone. Reject.
Car alarm. A
furnace. Some sort of perdition, some rules for the road. I tried. I tried
again, and failed,
where I could not remove your picture from the wall. Its face took me down
instead, trembling me from basement to heavens. Where a crossing out of the minor.
Where the
burning of middle initial. A team of ghost prayer horses. A bloodletting. A
home.
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{IV} I come apart when the authorities arrive, spread across the room like
an ocean doing
the same. I am reaching behind me now. Every morning with them was cause for
another
string of misdemeanors. I talked on the phone then. I drew pictures of women
and men doing their best to relate to one another, like lines drawing lines upon
lines, over and over again, insecure. Dinner was the time of day reserved for crows and me. We
gambled excuses in exchange for a minute more before turning out the light. It is
well past dinner
now, and the light has been out for days. The rafters are humming;
bullhorns, relentless;
the fields are dividing; they know me by this name: Penance. Vibrant lights
scribble non
sequiturs across cracked plaster. I am all lungs in here. IF THIS IS A
BATTLE HYMN,
I AM THE DRUM, THE WINTER, AND THE HAMMER WHICH BEATS THEM
FORWARD. The men in plainclothes finish cigarettes while we wait.
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Perched on the outskirts of the periphery,
just outside the where of how,
you once noticed a crack, the craw, the claw,
the cusp of yesterday edging toward a moment ago.
Lips lost longing, lounging with the lunchbox open,
the aluminum foil unsnugged, sesame seeds & bits of crust
in the tiny foil crinklepockets that look like inverted
reflective mud dried up & cracked into patterns.
She said a serious joke that’s no hoax, not hokey.
What’s your position? I wish I knew. That’s my position.
Too little time for so much trash. Time off, down
time that can never be downed or sunk
like an empty tempus fugit battleship,
a fugitive monarch butterfly, not mockingbird or monarchy,
no mock-up or rehearsal, neither hearse nor umbilical cord
snipped for freezeform finesse. The moment migrates
from the here & now to the nevermore or sweet hereafter.
Bittersweet, not neat or ribbontied.
(published in The Smoking Poet)
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…on nights only when they must. – Divik Ramesh
because the ground was just turned over
and dirt clods in the furrows were getting wet
and heavy, because the sun was going down,
because the wind picked up, because the grass
waved iridescent green in the afternoon light,
because the field spread out, because walnut
& poplar trees bordered the field, because giant
sprinklers were watering the crop, because
ghosts moved in & triggered memories
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"When the eyes of Prince Prospero fell upon this spectral image…" from "The Mask of the Red Death"
Despair is scattered bleeding on the moon.
Contagion novel figure will create.
The massy hammers hung on halls with hate,
And chandeliers will eat a gaunt buffoon.
Opprobrium tints fire-light maroon,
Grotesque green smoke caresses arms of fate
In castles glaring turns to devastate.
A thousand precincts carpet lapses soon,
Phantasms emanated ghastly vows
Whose seven chambers dream laughter’s hue,
And murmer westerly the clock bizarre.
The rushing movement jests, not knowing how.
Indulge the bells that reach new presence blue,
Incessant maddened purloined dagger scar.
(published in Sonneteering, Chicago: Beard of Bees, 2010)
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Everyone hears voices. The voice I heard that night was the voice she used to write the names she used in writing. “make a name for yourself” what if the name makes the sound of a smoke alarm when it makes us listen up to the sound, it makes us rush toward the sound like a long lost one, one who has been lost to us without a sound, now there is a sound of one who may have been lost only to us, not without a name, but a name whose sound makes someone stand up and turn to us rushing toward them like a long lost someone whose name is the same now what if the name is the same as someone else who has not been lost to us, but with us all the while and he or she is the same one whose face is so familiar that we would recognize them no matter where they were, he or she, and even if they came up behind us in a sudden wind whose touch was not immediately familiar but whose face was as familiar as could be and if the sound of the name is recognized by someone who hears the name and suddenly the wind dies and the sound of the name is clear to us but not to someone who still hears the wind rushing to meet them at the train station who has not recognized the sound of the name he or she hears at the train station, can the sound be recognized to make someone turn into the wind and still hear clearly, the name whose sound is the same as when they left and were lost to us who will always recognize the name and the sound of the wind rushing toward the train station and the more we hear the sound of the name the more we begin to recognize that it is the same name we have always heard from a distance and it continued to sound in our ears as if we had always heard the name, no not a sudden wind, would make us turn toward the voice who said the name because it was familiar or if it was so familiar that the name was the same as so many other names whose sound, like the wind in a train station, where the sound of names and places and time and faces are many, so many now they say that you can’t go home again because it is not the same home you left when you were lost to someone in a place and time we recognize when we hear someone speak about this or that place or time and it is always the past where it is all so familiar and even if it is not we don’t have to be so careful about what we do if the name is familiar and we recognize the sound as someone who has left us for far away where the past is unfamiliar and the sound is not one we recognize but one whose sound makes the sound of a whistle, we turn to face the direction of the sound and if he or she is different from the one who is lost to us, we turn and return to the home where he or she is sitting on the steps and smiling.
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{III} I dream in killer question marks because there is a war outside. I’ll stand in the rain
to burn myself clean because I blister in the sun. City brakes squeal from thin-wearing
pads, and the cabs continue on, all rickety and mean. I’m holding hands with saints in
orange corridors, built from dead husks of abandoned subway cars. Their names are alive
in aged hues on the walls, and they are bleeding into the cracks that have begun to form in
the parietes of my heart. I’m sorry I haven’t written in a while. I’m sorry about the
anonymous picture postcards. I forget. I tore a note into my arm to remember. It healed,
and I soon again forgot. The buildings are silver bullies in the daylight, hulking graveyards
by night. Please send a flare, a map, or a compass. Send me a slingshot, or a prayer. I
carry the old photographs, but what can be burned is sacrificed for heat when the giants
falter to the dusk. The salt in the air is burning at our mouths. THE SEA IS
RAVENOUS WITH REVENGE. There is a flood on the horizon tonight, and the
guards have begun to desert their towers. THE WATER HAS REVEALED US IN
WAYS WE COULD NEVER HAVE IMAGINED.
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{I} HOT KNIVES WILL MELT INTO THE EMPIRES OF FLESH ON THE
CONTINENTS OF THEIR SOFT, SUPPLE THROATS. You can stay up all night
burning powders in their names, but they will come for you all the same. The dawn, to
them, it does not exist. You are never alone in the being alone, and the wolves will open
up, show you the light if you let them. Let them, you will not. You will hold knives over
flame and count beats between the calls of crickets. Hold fast. Steady now, and breathe. A
circular motion. The turning of a screw. A radio going silent in the warehouse of a mind. A
temple. A refinery. A steelhead. A trap. The judge and the judged, both waiting for the
click.
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{II} Maybe the trees will take us for granted. Maybe they already have. Maybe we will
grow up to do the same, you and I. Or maybe we will dive into the lake, together, and
never come up. Maybe the summer will forget our names. Maybe it already has. Maybe
we will lose ourselves in the fall and do the same, you and I. Or maybe we will splinter
across the canyon, together, and become a fine dust. I already blame the Staghorn Cholla.
I already blame the wild Vesper Sparrows. The saints of Phoenix have come here calling
for us again. I am radiant with things I will never understand, and you, you are charged
with the same. We are always, and always the same, you and I. We are drawing now
nearer to the edge of the forest. Maybe the wolves will forget what they have seen here. Or
maybe they will use it against us. Maybe we will return with our weapons, together, and
do the same, you and I. Maybe we will become the bullets that splinter apart their bones in
the names of men. WE WILL REMOVE THE ONCE SHARP TEETH, YOU AND I,
AND LEAVE OUR FORMER NAMES AS VESTIGES IN THEIR PLACE.
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I do not like badly rehearsed repetitions, she said. It's only fear for silence. An eternal longing to create.
I stare at the screen, but there's no answer. I loose myself in the inability to adjust,
surrounded by neatly folded steel and glass. A spurious protective layer of polished chrome.
As she left, a beam of light uncovered the dust, flying away from broken book spines.
Too many words dancing and singing around the smoldering fire extinguished by last night.
Shadows of aeroplanes frighten me.
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ich habe die namen der großen vögel vergessen.
jeden juni fällt brut vom first einer scheune, die jetzt leer steht. später im jahr stehen sie steif auf den feldern, von der straße her flocken die kleider weiß aus, von weitem riecht nach verscheuerten sträußen + stahl + geborstenem gut von jenem gewitter am anderen tag: meine heimat.
in der heimat brechen sich namen an der scholle,
im wort: was dort angebaut wird, ist mir fremd.
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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
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He sings a drunken song of soil and ground.
A deep red sound embraces his neck as he
wistfully speaks of long journeys.
Bellies full of scorched meat. A red scarf
dangling from a dead tree. Empty envelopes.
His serrated words beseech my every move
like a wet towel laid over the forehead of a feverish child.
I listen. Eyes wide open.
A gesture, smaller than a morning shiver.
A surprise attack of skin and hair.
The suffocating smell of coffee and oatmeal
and his eye that slowly turns away from me.
I am awakened by the sound of the absurd feeling of loss
And guilt. Fled from the soil and the ground.
The soldier showed his grotesque scar as he granted me the entrance.
The zoo garden was flooded by the compact silence
Of his absence.
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Als vrij zijn is: hou jij je mond
want ik heb iets te zeggen
Als vrij zijn is: jij achter tralies, want
... dan hoeven wij niet bang te zijn
voor al jouw anders zijn en doen en anders
laten
Als vrij zijn is: de dag van morgen
strak bepalen door de dag vandaag
iets minder dag te laten zijn
Als vrij zijn is: de deuren sluiten
en op het beeldscherm vrij bekijken
wat veilig uit de buurt moet zijn
Als vrij zijn is: steeds rustig slapen
omdat de anderen hun tong moedwillig
is ontnomen
Als vrij zijn is: eten wat en wanneer je wilt
maar de schillen laten vallen in de kranten
waar de honger wordt verzwegen
Als vrij zijn is: niet hoeven weten wat mij
heeft vrijgemaakt, mij vrij houdt, mij
in vrijheid elke dag gevangen neemt
Als vrijheid is: wachten tot de ander
mij bevrijdt van angsten waar ik
heilig op vertrouw
Als vrijheid mijn gedachten pleistert
Als vrijheid om mij heen overal rondom
en in mij waait,
maar voor jou niet is te vangen
Als vrijheid mij beschermt
tegen jouw ideeën die voor mij te
anders zijn
Als vrijheid voor mij vandaag zo
vanzelfsprekend lijkt, en jij niet
weet wat dat betekent
Dan is vrijheid munt voor mij
en kop eraf voor jou
Dan is vrijheid lucht en willekeurig
Maar staat het mij misschien wel vrij
om iets van mijn riante vrijheid -met
wederzijds goedvinden natuurlijk-
tijdelijk of voor langere duur
af te staan om jou
van mijn verstikkende vrijheid
te bevrijden
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1
Above the bar, a big TV was playing without sound. You kept glancing up at the screen.
I followed your empty gaze.
A talk-show host, smiling with all his teeth, was shaking hands with a confessed criminal.
They fell like two mountain climbers tied together.
2
It was hard to make sense of what was happening.
Back then, I still cared about the news.
Our blood escaped through every pore.
3
I found a bench overlooking the cemetery.
A plaque in the ground described how you had split open like a carcass in a butcher’s shop.
I half-closed my eyes in order to see only sky.
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1
Run, you yelled, run.
Others chose suicide.
The only dreams I seem to remember are the nightmares.
Barbed wire and concrete, shaded in the summer by young maples.
2
The hit man feels around under the bed.
His fingers come away covered with blood.
He looks up at the fat priest.
I don't think God is interested in me, he says.
3
The train could leave at any moment.
No one I ask knows where it's going.
She has one foot on the platform, one foot in the air.
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Soldiers wore black uniforms, police wore brown.
We took refuge in a peeling church full of broken televisions.
The skeleton horse poked his head in the door.
He possessed the kind of gregariousness I find suspicious.
Your real duty, he said, is to save your dream.
Tine worlds floated in the shaft of light from the one visible window.
Everything else was as I imagined it might be, like the melancholy still life of an old apple by an obscure provincial painter.
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We are making a religion out of Small Things,
weaving significance from yarn and whiskers and wire.
These inkstains are our sacred books, telling stories
of the first kiss, of cat’s eye marbles and baby teeth.
Our pockets hold cowrie shells and birthday candles,
feathers to burn like incense for the mackerel sky.
We are finding the religion in Small Things
the luck in a penny from the year you were born,
the mystery in a drop of mercury sitting sly on the table,
the sanctity in a dandelion untouched and unblown.
Our amulets are rhinestones and peach pits.
Our reliquaries are hollows in the trees that gather water.
We are trading old religion for Small Things,
for they are everywhere and just as important, too.
They hold us together like a chain of paperclips,
and our prayers have dwindled into punctuation.
Thank us for the beauty in tea leaves and eyelids;
bury us in graves that have been measured out in inches.
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"It’s got a crack", she said, and she put the magnifying glass into her lap.
A string of creeping saliva finds its way into the kitchen. Sturdy feet.
"I’ve seen enough"
Seven days later she boarded the train
for Prague. Trees zipped themselves into greenish lines.
Above a nightshop the neon light vainly tries to reveal the truth.
"God is Everywhere"
A blue fly with an open mouth drills itself into the last slice of pizza.
Slowly.
Chewing.
I remember what I red in a translation of Vonnegut’s Galapagos:
"Here we are dealing with a human flaw"
The milk has gone sour.
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"You should have buried your mother a long time ago",
the porcelain whispered in crumbs.
All the lost moments gave me a guilty look like monumental landscapes
no one could see through. The only one I frighten with these thoughts
is me. There’ no way back, no proof.
She sculpted a quiet face out of the passion she brought
from her childhood. A spiders web of cracks a a guide.
Arms and legs. Disappointment as sawdust. In the
garden of her mother the pond
had been dry for many years now. Above the roar of the fairground
the sirens broke a thought:
"Shake well before use".
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There was no way stopping him,
drunk with nostalgia.
A timeless creation of himself.
A growing and unconscious desire for pain has taken root in my diaphragm.
Discarded memories search my brain, surreptitiously,
like invisible shadows securing my every gesture on the retina of oblivion.
Smeared lipstick on fingernails.
Blood-stained feet. A left shoe.
Whispered messages.
That one there.
Or that one.
There.
A feeling of guilt has gone astray through these thickets of pain.
A quest for beauty.
I thought you only had to move around to get rid of this fever.
I need more to put an end to it.
Emerging light dispels a bleeding moon.
The trees of the park stand out.
Black against the horizon.
Leaves tremble as they respond to the wind.
Camouflage Techniques for a big city.
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Straight lines in black and red have drawn an alternative outcome all over
the bathroom tiles and I stumble across the floor like a three year old on a sugar high.
Sunspots outvote the closing of a perfect day. The scent of fermented wheat pushes every shape
of sound to the background as the mirror seems to have doubts about this reflection.
An unfortunate act of force crippled an early ending. The clarity of it all blinds me.
Nothing will ever be the same. Unbridled screams of panic escape my mouth as anger takes over.
Stop!
At the breakfast table I put on a mask, made of the pleasure I extracted from our past.
The waiter smiles as he pours hot coffee over my head. I gauge your reaction.
There's nothing there. In the room, the smell of detergent slaps the future in the face.
top
A man sits alone in a room, staring at the fire like Descartes, broken glass in his beard.
There are things for which he doesn't know the reasons.
He throws his arms around a horse's neck on a street in Turin and bursts into tears.
Someone slits someone's throat.
And where did the bullet come from?
Death is just like a pink eraser, only more so.
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This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky --
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.
top
Beneath the intricate network of noise
there’s a still more persistent tapestry
woven of whispers, murmurs and chants
It’s the heaving breath of the very earth
carrying along the prayer of all things:
trees, ants, stones, creeks and mountains alike
All giving silent thanks and remembrance
each moment, as a tug on a rosary bead
while we hurry past, heedless of the mysteries
And, yet, every secret wants to be told
every shy creature to approach and trust us if
only we patiently listen, with all our senses.
top
aan de aandrang van de trap ontsluiert zich een nieuwe trap ik zie de stad
de bomen werpen geurende doosvruchten de torres van salmona klieven
de lage wolken ik kreuk een eucalyptusblad tussen duim en wijsvinger de geluiden
van ronkende motoren de motoren van bogotá stijgen op als de vogels van zalamea
maria slingert heen en weer tussen je witte smalle borsten waarheen
zullen we gaan jij en ik wanneer de avond de lucht de warmte ontvlucht
mijn herinnering schuift met het inzicht van copernicus de duisternis in
nieuwe orchideeën duwen zich door de hete spleten van de asfaltjungle
ik spartel opwaarts wanneer je zijn naam als een zalm in je mond neemt
de gestapelde stenen vullen zich met parende vogels drie gewapende mannen
met dunne laarzen volgen ons met zachte ogen waar gaat de tijd heen
die in de verte zichtbaar verkleint tot het punt dat we afscheid nemen
als een moeder die haar kinderen verlaat om terug te komen met handen van fruit en water
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I
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna;
Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt
The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.
II
In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.
Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.
She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.
A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned --
A cymbal crashed,
Amid roaring horns.
III
Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.
They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side;
And as they whispered, the refrain
Was like a willow swept by rain.
Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame
Revealed Susanna and her shame.
And then, the simpering Byzantines
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.
IV
Beauty is momentary in the mind --
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives. So evenings die, in their green going, A wave, interminably flowing. So gardens die, their meek breath scenting The cowl of winter, done repenting. So maidens die, to the auroral Celebration of a maiden's choral. Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death's ironic scraping. Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise.
top
"Iceland. Anesthesia? What was that word again?"
The nebulous blue shadow cast his voice in the form of a question from the wings.
He was never quite sure of himself in these situations.
"It’s Gravy!" called an usher from the rear of the auditorium.
"Gravy is majestic! Gravy is no false induction, jack!"
Just then, the rotten eggs.
A minute later, the salmon.
They make their way upstream and gather old popcorn in readiness for their winter slumbers.
"I could have been a flower girl," the nebulous blue shadow whispered to himself as he shrunk in despondence.
"I could have pondered {XXX}, physics, or subliminal linguistics.
I am the opposite of river. I am a slave to my one distinguishable character—my lack of proper face."
top
testosterone funny blanket
ripped sheets and new years
origami weathervane
mutational excerpts for cash
cornbread is your birthday;
your birthday, she is alive
with a middle name like Salvo,
you never have to bring your own
the frat boys fill your tin cup
with cigarettes, aerosols-
and meats
and call you a pretty taxicab
to take you pretend home
no knees are good knees;
no prayer is prayer enough
I saved the last sentence for you-
you, crawling on your bad knees
trying to make sense of the sense
you left bragging in the hallway
a microscopic orgasm;
a see-through, a piñata
light fuse and back away
are closer than they appear
top
Ik heb het kleed in de gang, ik heb
het kleed in de gang, het kleed in de gang,
heb ik - en ik heb gezien dat het scheef lag-
niet rechtgetrokken, ik heb een uur, een uur lang
het kleed in de gang niet rechtgetrokken, ik heb
dat pas na een uur gedaan. De dokter zei dat het
niet nodig was het kleed in de gang voortdurend
recht te trekken, en het zou kunnen dat hij gelijk
heeft, het zou kunnen, maar hoe kan ik nou het
kleed in mijn hoofd rechttrekken als het in de
gang al niet eens recht ligt. Eerst de gang en dan
mijn hoofd. De dokter zei dat het kleed niet in mijn
hoofd hoort te zitten. Maar hoe krijg je een kleed
uit je hoofd. Uit de gang. Ja. Ik stel mij voor
hoe ik op een ochtend het kleed oprol het de trap
af laat hupsen en het op de stoep neerleg om door
jan en alleman mee te laten nemen. Maar hoe weet
ik dan dat het bij jan en alleman in huis recht ligt?
En hoe weet ik of ik zelf dan niet een ander kleed
neer ga leggen in mijn gang en dan zitten er twéé
kleden in mijn hoofd. De dokter zegt dat ik het kleed
expres scheef moet leggen. Ik moet naar de gang gaan
ik moet het kleed aankijken en het niet één centimeter
niet twéé centimeter, maar drie of vier centimeter uit
het lood leggen. En ik moet dan rustig gaan slapen.
De volgende dag moet ik wakker worden,
constateren dat er helemaal niets verkeerd is gegaan!
top
Without philosophy, one must contend with the immediate
tragedy of a chipped dish.
The jerk and snap of reflex is initial, instinctual, protective.
Flinch and the third eye blinks shut.
Squinting, we watch the thinnest wedge of the world
and call it complete.
The cat, at rest in my lap, jerks alert at each surprise sound,
then settles in again. One must relinquish each disturbance as it comes.
We fear and so refuse to witness what is ours:
love, mishandled love, indifference and little else.
A flurry of anchovies and broken water:
the transparent sea keeps invisible predators.
Helicopters circle the city, sending down a cataract roar
as searchlights displace the night.
Alarms caterwauling this way and that
demarcate the distance between ourselves and new disasters.
Cataclysm does not have to be our offspring.
I will not mother mayhem.
Borne of upheaval, the mountain draws in its clouds,
but keeps its many sheer faces above the cloud-line.
This heart, this mind, these hands, if open, can hold and mend—
if clenched, can only seize or dumbly pummel.
The moon levitates with unseen abandon.
What things refuse to reflect or release?
Holes in the universe. Voids.
Such black matter is not just in space.
top
A river flows
down to the Atlantic;
the Matapedia
Irish and cathedral
on one side
Québeçois and cathedral
on the other.
They all know what sin is.
Jeanette walked to the pier
every day, bought a fresh lobster
concealing the quarts of beer
from Olive and Reggie
in the toilet tank.
She hung a rosary there
to atone
for the bastard
she nourished with
lobster and beer.
Tiny filigree iron cross
laced with lines of rust.
top
Parasitic, predatory, she flaps two sets of wings
against my tongue, builds a papery nest that absorbs
my saliva, sucks my mouth dry. I stutter out nonsense
to avoid the prick of her ovipositor, its paralytic venom.
It would be easy to avoid this. It would be easy to gag her
out, separate her thorax with my teeth, silence her buzz,
but she is insistent. She wants me to spit her with wild
velocity, stinger first, straight into your patient face.
top
My heart is open but done with errors.
I have placed a number of frequencies under my pillow in hopes my dreams will play in the form of a radio this night.
Data drifts in silence, grinning among the faces in the rafters—their ammonia celestial bodies telegraph to the ghosts in the carpeted hall.
The light bulb is filled with bees, buzzing out of sequence.
They’re dancing like drunken sailors on a weekend pass—temporarily home from the war.
If I hold out my hand, I can almost touch the darkness that exists just beyond the pattern cut across it by the light.
A shadow on the wall suggests the trees have begun to notice the same.
top
Bees are living in her hair.
She is baptized by a summer storm sky roiling and black,
pierced with needles of lightning.
She will be a hot fever all night.
In the morning, gazpacho for coolness and crunch.
The bees fly out to pollinate the cucumber’s yellow flowers dripping pollen.
That is why she bears them.
The next door pig is rooting quackgrass roots.
He is a minister on weekends.
He claims all of our souls are going fiery.
The overturned water tank is his pulpit and nothing grows underneath it in the dark.
He passes mushrooms for the body, frigid well water for the sangre.
She has enjoyed his sermons in the past,
but the more he eats and the bigger he gets,
the less sense he is willing to make.
He never forgets to pass the collection plate and she always tosses in a smashed tomato or a heavy eggplant.
The bees just circle and ignore.
Honey drips off her nose and chin now.
There is no magic here,
just life a half a degree north of the 42nd parallel where we all keep a shotgun in the closet and the sun is up for 15 hours and 15 minutes on the summer solstice.
top
The phones are dead, our children, unreachable,
unless that’s one of them crying in the street.
Everything simple has become complex.
I should’ve known we’d be abandoned
to vandals and the weather,
and, before heartbreak had vaporized,
admitted to the priesthood of grief,
but my thoughts were taken up with other things,
the advantages of probity versus confession.
Now the three-legged black dog next door,
moved by the poor moon’s blistered face,
growls all night in grisly sympathy.
top
what might stop him from walking out
into the soughing heat of his
savannah what might keep him
from its burning winds its
tricks its cozy
punishment
his feet are sewn to hot
trails only by wrenching by brute
ripping in his walk might he tear
into the blood table
would he fall then free
and bloody onto cold alien
steppe
top
No one back in Louisville asks
if I’m happy. They pity me,
alone, long winters, no family.
Logging. We scratch ourselves raw
from mosquitoes. Saws cut off
fingers, limbs. Many pack up
for warmer places,
not a city of hardwoods.
Stockton Island surrenders
fall and spring quickly. Winter
ice turns shores jagged.
If I had a son, would I
tell him to try this work?
He’d have to like hearing
wind in trees, smelling peat,
wood smoke, oxen. The company’s
hitting hard times, men
laid off and fired. Maybe
I’m next. What to do
when I leave? I’m full
of trees, birds, the coming
of spring when Superior thaws.
top
i.
he says it has something to do with heartless creatures, like wolves. Or the way they feed off one
another’s echo and follow blood trails in the snow. Sea birds fly low, they reverse their patterns.
i(a): Predation has something to do with this. The shortening of Autumn days.
ii.
she says grief passes in exactly six months and you emerge cleansed. She draws a circle in the
snow with a stick, there are no real stages, it is not methodized like feathers.
ii(a): Kingfishers are scouring near the reed mace. A lull over the water.
iii.
I wait for the birds to settle down, migration becomes too powerful at times. I forget the window,
leave it open-
They bypass latitudes: adapt to suitable winter habitats.
iii(a): A reserve area of land, without body.
top
Toen je auto de tunnel indook
hielden we onze adem in
dat hadden we zo afgesproken
nog voor ik het licht aan het einde zag
had ik al opgegeven en driemaal mijn longen gevuld
maar zonder jouw adem naast mij
voelde het alsof ze werden gevuld met natte aarde.
Ademloos bereiken we de parking
van een vijandige meubelketen
waar je gerookte zalm op Zweeds brood kan eten
terwijl je kinderen of die van een ander
verdrinken in een bad van ballen
of simpelweg worden meegelokt.
Je kocht een sofa voor je dochter
die alle mysterie uit haar leven heeft gebannen
en dus werkt aan winsten op varkenskoteletten
het werd een beige sofa met rode spikkels
waar je geen aanstoot aan kan nemen.
Op de terugweg werden we bevangen
door smog en weemoed
jij door smog
ik door beide
top
The universe expands, contracts,
Curls back upon itself,
Crashes in thunderous jolts
Unheard in spaceless space.
The universe begins and ends
Begins again somewhere
Where there is no where
And ends where it begins.
The universe gives birth
To cosmic eggs, itself an egg,
A progeny of stars and nebulae
Racing to the end of endless time.
The universe unfolds, a dream,
Traveling at the speed of light
And standing still while it surveys
The loneliness of strings.
top
His name was Pompey but he was not the original one.
This one was tender about old swords but serious
when it came to storing the same sixpence
in his pocket from the trousers he wore before.
If you asked him, he might tell you
he was not a fathered boy.
At first, you didn’t know him
well enough to ask. Once you showed him how
to align a magnet on a skipper rock
you realized you had no need
to ask him, he would tell you everything.
You both knew what it was like to live
outside watching in. You both knew someone
from across the way and how they hanged
rag dolls by the hair, caught in bureau drawers.
This gave you both the shivers, but others
called them dauntless. This was a word
he had learned in a book you had read the night before.
Did a person really have to build a raft and float
the Mississippi to be dauntless? And what about
the people who didn’t? Were they considered
daunt? Until he showed up, there had been
no one you could ask.
top
there are howling wolves
among the poplars
their voices tessellate the night
and we vibrate
the moon is off course
sliding mercury drunk above us
in some blunt mistaken arc
who will rescue
the shattered constellations
who will pick up the pieces
of this night
who will tell the wolves
we are not coming
we never were
top
Do they dream of past lives and unlived dreams
unspeakably human or unimaginably bestial?
Do they struggle to catch in their slumber
what is too slippery for the fingers of day?
Are there subtle nocturnal intimations
to illuminate their undreaming hours?
Are they haunted by specters of regret
do they visit their dead in drowsy gratitude?
Or are they revisited by their crimes
transcribed in tantalizing hieroglyphs?
Do they retrace the outline of their wounds
or dream of transformation, instead?
Do they tug at obstinate knots
inassimilable longings and thwarted strivings?
Are there agitations, upheavals or mutinies
against their perceived selves or fate?
Are they free of strengths and weaknesses peculiar
to horse, deer, bird, goat, snake, lamb or lion?
Are they ever neither animal nor human
but creature and Being?
Do they have holy moments of understanding
deep in the seat of their entity?
Do they experience their existence more fully
relieved of the burden of wakefulness?
Do they suspect, with poets, that all we see or seem
is but a dream within a dream?
Or is it merely a small dying
a little taste of nothingness that gathers in their mouths?
top
He was still a long way away when he limped into view.
Maybe the airport was fogged in, maybe the disease was contagious.
He rolled his suitcase over the railroad tracks, bumpity bump, drenched in the coldness of passing headlights.
It was a little past midnight, an hour I once knew well.
A woman with her throat slashed stepped out of the doorway and boldly offered the garish wound for him to kiss.
I had a job as a guard in the local museum of antiquities.
On most days, the visitors were few, but serious.
It may have been a mistake for the captain to order an extra tot of grog for his men.
Sailors from the ship eyed the red fire axe on the wall. I am ashamed of mankind, was all one said.
What strange weather we were having.
The only light came from the flashes of electrical activity associated with panic attacks.
I tried to sleep, but a so-called colleague phoned with a question.
You OK? she asked. I pretended I didn’t understand.
It began to snow where the general stuck a round-headed pin in the map.
top
Removing a single kid leather glove,
she cups the brief heat of a demitasse
rests without disguising: she is loitering.
Girls don’t choose to idle gloom-time alone;
mothers’ warnings leaden the marrow:
other’s desires wedge in and split like trick ice.
Beyond the fence of floodlight,
fears circle and snarl like Transylvanian wolves.
One can suffer night terrors fully awake.
Sitting in the bright, tiny automat,
she is on a derelict raft, surrounded by a hundred
flares of alligator eyeshine.
Mother night, your Keres are busy scavenging.
Daughter doom and daughter sleep are adamantine
moons satelliting a magnetic body.
Oh, pity the bare-legged, full-cheeked one
protected only by a hat brim and a clutch of coins.
Someone come walk the girl home, see her safely to her door.
top
Ladies wave their handkerchiefs in greeting, men lift their hats. The passing flock of crows spreads a bewilderment of shadows. Police disguised as woodcutters and Lithuanian tailors watch from behind lampposts. Each day brings less daylight, but also lessons in how to hull seeds. I look up at colossal windows arched like tombstones. All along and without claiming it, I’ve had a seat on the wagon that carries my coffin.
Oh, to be old and stoop-shouldered and walking through streets that aren’t there, pastel birds from discount pet stores rioting like exasperated horns and rattles and a statue of the dictator ducking into a doorway in a shapeless cape of melting snow.
I borrowed my broken yellow teeth from diseased longings. Icky, the child said. Even thieves had lost faith in the face value of paper money. Despite the film of dust on everything, winter retained some of the glitter of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. An old lady leaning a ladder against the side of her house was the only one in the village to escape. What next? Contact me with suggestions.
top
Several dead sparrows
dangle from the clothesline.
Should we leave
or press the doorbell?
The hostage in the video
blinked in Morse code.
I shout for help.
There are gallows at every crossroad.
Don’t forget to be happy,
the automated message says.
Blood provides
the only splash of color.
The sensation of drowning
is added to the list
of what’s not allowed.
top
Zonder gemakkelijke woorden
verliest een duivel zijn identiteit.
Opgebruikt door primair schuldgevoel,
gedeconstrueerd door taal.
Verschillende ijskasten met niets eromheen.
Alles onvoorwaardelijk opbouwen.
Vage lust krijgt meer vorm.
De lijn van de dag speelt geen rol.
De onmacht geluid te stoppen eindigt in chaos.
Misnoegd. Teleurgesteld.
De beloofde engel heeft een reservehoofd vol pijn.
Gewoontes verdwijnen in cirkelende gedachten.
Denken stelt de tijd uit.
Dingen worden automatisch
Keuzes lijken jarenlang te hebben.
Alle leven moet een beetje naar de overkant.
Zonder woede is een hoorspel niets.
top
nooit heeft de droom zich ontdaan
van zoveel licht, is hij in het donker
blijven hangen, is hij het spreken
van vaders verleerd, is de schaduw aangegaan
van het slot. gesluierd vlotten beelden
aan de horizon, trekken de flarden tot
op het zand, vage gebaren in dood gewicht.
vergeefse lachjes in vergeelde beken.
maar in de hoeken van de steen, gekneld
tussen keel en klank, breekt het gemurmel los,
rekt het vel van het verleden. bekoort
het vergezicht. begint de stilte te pulseren,
beminnelijk geweld. met sierlijke vingers tokkelt
het bloed op de rand van een woord.
top
Wear hunter's camouflage.
You don't want to be
one of those people,
do you, whose goal in life
is symply to stand there
and look good?
Your grandmother was,
and the soldiers tore
a crying baby from her arms
and flung it on the fire.
Therefore, every day,
practice invisibility.
Plunge through intersections-
the busier, the better-
just as the light turns red.
Move often and without regret,
and leave no obvious trail,
no broken twigs and such, to follow.
The devil is upstairs humping
a pillow, pretending that it's you.
top
She said "you are an astronaut clipped from the mothership
You are a jellyfish with no lips"
I said listen shortstuff
I skip my moon rock across your puddle dive
I'll kiss your punches with my nose
I bet you smell like butterfly
but I bet you dream cocoon
and I bet you never say the word 'fuck'
but we all know you do
My heart is a runway
I've been staring at this sky since my love took off
Will you be my friend?
Will you pull me a porchswing?
Will you punch me in the touch, just once?
I need to reset my bones
swingset my ribcage
so the next time somebody pushes me away
I'll swing right back to that chisel with my marble spine
Go ahead build me
Go ahead throw me at the storm like a fisherman's prayer
Do you ever think about God's ears?
Wonder if the levy broke a promise?
Wonder if the wrecking ball was trying to run its fingers
soft across the bricks
but its head was just too heavy?
Before you become my friend
picnic with my rubble
roadtrip with everyone I left in the dust
do the laundry from the last time I was loaded
how she found my trigger and we woke
with the sheets pulled above our heads
praying the mortician could make us pretty
None of us are pretty
but our ugly has an alibi
and our gorgeous has a baby sister
a sand collection or three harmonicas we keep blowing off
for that flute we carve from our wrists
Put your lips here
Tell me there is music in my blood
then tell me there is more in my light
Hang me chandelier from the last night
I believed this life had to hurt so much
I am done kneeling in the church of steepled smokestacks
Done stargazing traincrash
Give me windsprint
Tell me my fingerprints are the shape of ripples on a frozen lake
Tell me my coal mind will never collapse on my heart
I'll tell you these poems
they're my birthmarks
and I came this close to having them removed once
even kept that voice-box cutter hidden in my shoe the day that flight took off
but the runway
it's made of marble
made of gush
made of windmill
made of salt
and there is a sea of hopechest in every word I speak
praying to be open by the night
with its belly full of anchors
full of yield
Pull the shield
from my wingspan
Teach me how the candlewax says thank you to the flame
Tell me how your mother says your name like an orchard going bloom
Angela
A doctor once told me I feel too much
I said so does god
That's why you can see the grand canyon from the moon
we are a telescope a riverbed
we are empty lockets melting into gold
we are hearts breaking bread
Fold me in the napkin poem
Pull the tinsel from my hair from all the past I cannot let go
My gills are adjusting to the air
The story husk peeled from my bones
My bones know the song of our tears
dripping from the faucet
ticking like a metronome
I know there is better music
Even in this cabin full of fever
tonight I'm catching nothing but the lightning bug
My body is a mason jar
transparent as a jellyfish
I wish for a heart you can see straight through
for a voice that glows in the dark
and a few really good friends to skip moon rocks to
top
I have not found the key to myself
the one that will get the high gates
to swing wide open , and the lights
to come on, at once
When not denied entrance entirely
I fumble in the dark and stumble
blindly, run into doors and walls
groping and hoping
I knock my head against false ceilings
and trip on traps I forgot to remember
then start at the sight of my reflection
bumping into myselves.
top
Innocent or not, the arrestees
enter the court building
in cuffs and with downcast eyes.
All science, Bronowski said, is a search
for unity among hidden likenesses.
Might as well stay on the line
for the next available operator.
You can hear if you really listen
the common names for things
weeping noisily beneath the music.
top
Er zijn uren waarop alles knarst,
als stoelen hun armen strekken, tafels hun poten,
en kasten hun rug doen kraken, onachtzaam.
Ze zijn het decente denkbeeld moe
op een vaste plek te blijven steken
niet van hun standplaats weg te mogen.
Ook mensen die werken of beminnen
kennen zulke pijn die toeneemt
als hun boedel rebels begint te schuiven
Zoals een continent, beslissend en onmerkbaar:
iets geeft mee, gaat stuk of slaat op drift
zodat alles moet worden herzien,
Op een ochtend, toegevend aan een niet te tomen drang
naar wanderlust, met een zware deur half bewust
op een kier gelaten, en een nieuw licht dat binnenglipt.
Een stuk onbeweeglijkheid geeft eindelijk op,
snelt plotseling weg op houten benen,
gezwind als een paard dat de stal ontvlucht.
Dawning (Yahia Lababidi)
There are hours when every thing creaks
when chairs stretch their arms, tables their legs
and closets crack their backs, incautiously
Fed up with the polite fantasy
of having to stay in one place
and stick to their stations
Humans too, at work, or in love
know such aches and growing pains
when inner furnishings defiantly shift
As decisively, and imperceptibly, as a continent
some thing will give, croak or come undone
so that everything else must be reconsidered
One restless dawn, unable to suppress the itch
of wanderlust, with a heavy door left ajar
semi-deliberately, and a new light teasing in
Some piece of immobility will finally quit
suddenly nimble on wooden limbs
as fast as a horse, fleeing the stable.
top
The fucking cops are fucking keen
To fucking keep it fucking clean
The fucking chief's a fucking swine
Who fucking draws a fucking line
At fucking fun and fucking games
The fucking kids he fucking blames
Are nowehere to be fucking found
Anywhere in Chickentown
The fucking scene is fucking sad
The fucking news is fucking bad
The fucking weed is fucking turf
The fucking speed is fucking surf
The fucking folks are fucking daft
Don't make me fucking laugh
It fucking hurts to look around
Everywhere in Chickentown
The fucking train is fucking late
You fucking wait you fucking wait
You're fucking lost and fucking found
Stuck in fucking Chickentown
The fucking view is fucking vile
For fucking miles and fucking miles
The fucking babies fucking cry
The fucking flowers fucking die
The fucking food is fucking muck
The fucking drains are fucking fucked
The colour scheme is fucking brown
Everywhere in Chickentown
The fucking pubs are fucking dull
The fucking clubs are fucking full
Of fucking girls and fucking guys
With fucking murder in Their eyes
A fucking bloke is fucking stabbed
Waiting for a fucking cab
You fucking stay at fucking home
The fucking neighbors fucking moan
Keep The fucking racket down
This is fucking Chickentown
The fucking train is fucking late
You fucking wait you fucking wait
You're fucking lost and fucking found
Stuck in fucking Chickentown
The fucking pies are fucking old
The fucking chips are fucking cold
The fucking beer is fucking flat
The fucking flats have fucking rats
The fucking clocks are fucking wrong
The fucking days are fucking long
It fucking gets you fucking down
Evidently Chickentown
top
The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees
Hoard last year's leaves, won't mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn
To elegiac dryads, and dour grass
Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness
However the grandiloquent mind may scorn
Such poverty. No dead men's cries
Flower forget-me-nots between the stones
Paving this grave ground. Here's honest rot
To unpick the heart, pare bone
Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton
Bulks real, all saint's tongues fall quiet:
Flies watch no reserrections in the sun.
At the essential landscape stare, stare
Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind:
Whatever lost ghosts flare
Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor
Rave on the leash of the starving mind
Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.
top
When I was a windy boy and a bit
And the black spit of the chapel fold,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,
I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
Nine-pin down on donkey's common,
And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
The whole of the moon I could love and leave
All the green leaved little weddings' wives
In the coal black bush and let them grieve.
When I was a gusty man and a half
And the black beast of the beetles' pews
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches),
Not a boy and a bit in the wick-
Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,
I whistled all night in the twisted flues,
Midwives grew in the midnight ditches,
And the sizzling sheets of the town cried, Quick!-
Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal,
Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts,
Whatsoever I did in the coal-
Black night, I left my quivering prints.
When I was a man you could call a man
And the black cross of the holy house,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),
Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,
No springtailed tom in the red hot town
With every simmering woman his mouse
But a hillocky bull in the swelter
Of summer come in his great good time
To the sultry, biding herds, I said,
Oh, time enough when the blood runs cold,
And I lie down but to sleep in bed,
For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!
When I was half the man I was
And serve me right as the preachers warn,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),
No flailing calf or cat in a flame
Or hickory bull in milky grass
But a black sheep with a crumpled horn,
At last the soul from its foul mousehole
Slunk pouting out when the limp time came;
And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,
Gristle and rind, and a roarers' life,
And I shoved it into the coal black sky
To find a woman's soul for a wife.
Now I am a man no more no more
And a black reward for a roaring life,
(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),
Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed room
I lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw--
For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife
In the coal black sky and she bore angels!
Harpies around me out of her womb!
Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
And all the deadly virtues plague my death!
top
This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:
the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see beached skulls
the song nobody knows
because anyone who had heard it
is dead, and the others can’t remember.
Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?
I don’t enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical
with these two feathery maniacs,
I don’t enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.
I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song
is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique
at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.
top
A messenger arrived
from a country
colonized by magpies.
I have two sons, he said,
one whose name
means wolf
and one whose name
means laughter.
It felt like rain,
what’s called
a baby’s ear moon,
false angel wing.
They hanged him
in a cornfield.
The world is made
of tiny struggling things.
top
...Hypnotic like a school of airborne fish
they frolic about in the open sky
flickering into focus and diffusing
back to the ether that spawned them
Gathering like a storm and breaking in waves
raining hard, a downpour of butterflies
flitting like a great kite, giddy it got away
yet guided by a steady and invisible hand
How do they know to spell such exalted shapes
fluid arabesques across the stage of heaven
as they swarm and glide as though of one mind
a soundless symphony, mysteriously conducted
top
To speak of the smell and feel
of books, the erotics of the text,
has begun to sound perverse
One by one, the old places of worship
churches, bookstores, Nature herself
become quaint and are vacated
In their stead a gleaming, ambitious screen
part shuttered window, part distorting mirror
full of wandering, restless spirits
Like so many ghosts in limbo -
free of the tyranny of bodies,
yet aching for their phantom limbs.
top
Words are like days:
coloring books or pickpockets,
signposts or scratching posts,
fakirs over hot coals.
Certain words must be earned
just as emotions are suffered
before they can be uttered
- clean as a kept promise.
Words as witnesses
testifying their truths
squalid or rarefied
inevitable, irrefutable.
But, words must not carry
more than they can
it’s not good for their backs
or their reputations.
For, whether they dance alone
or with an invisible partner,
every word is a cosmos
dissolving the inarticulate.
top
Do they dream of past lives and unlived dreams
unspeakably human or unimaginably bestial?
Do they struggle to catch in their slumber
what is too slippery for the fingers of day?
Are there subtle nocturnal intimations
to illuminate their undreaming hours?
Are they haunted by specters of regret
do they visit their dead in drowsy gratitude?
Or are they revisited by their crimes
transcribed in tantalizing hieroglyphs?
Do they retrace the outline of their wounds
or dream of transformation, instead?
Do they tug at obstinate knots
of unassimilable longings and thwarted strivings?
Are there agitations, upheavals, or mutinies
against their perceived selves or fate?
Are they free of strengths and weaknesses peculiar
to horse, deer, bird, goat, snake, lamb or lion?
Are they ever neither animal nor human
but creature and Being?
Do they have holy moments of understanding
in the very essence of their entity?
Do they experience their existence more fully
relieved of the burden of wakefulness?
Do they suspect, with poets, that all we see or seem
is but a dream within a dream?
Or is it merely a small dying
a little taste of nothingness that gathers in their mouths?
top
I could not decipher the living riddle of my body
put it to sleep when it hungered, and overfed it
when time came to dream
I nearly choked on the forked tongue of my spirit
between the real and the ideal, rejecting the one
and rejected by the other
I still have not mastered that art of storm-riding
without ears to apprehend howling winds
or eyes for rolling waves
Always the weather catches me unawares, baffled
by maps, compass, stars and the entire apparatus
of bearings or warning signals
Clutching at driftwood, eyes screwed shut, I tremble
hoing the unhinged night will pass and I remember
how once I shielded my flame.
top
to find the origin,
trace back the manifestations.
Tao
Between being and non-being
barely there
these sails of water, ice, air -
Indifferent drifters, wandering
high on freedom
of the homeless
Restlessly swithering
like ghosts, slithering through substance
in puffs and wisps
Lending an enchanting or ominous air
luminous or casting shadows,
ambivalent filters of reality
Bequeathing wreaths, or
modesty veils to great natural beauties
like mountain peaks
Sometimes simply hanging there
airborne abstract art
in open air
Suspended animation
continually contorting:
great sky whales, now, horse drawn carriages
unpinpointable thought forms,
punctuating the endless sentence of the sky.
top
between the real
and the Ideal,
rejecting the one
rejected by the Other.
rack of extremes,
the slightest touch
and I reverberate
awful music.
top
I visit my grandfather quite often, lately
sometimes, he knows he is dead
and is almost apologetic for it
with a kind, sheepish look on his face
As if guilty of securing a reprieve
yet still grateful for a little more life
the way he was in his last days
treating every morning as a gift
Other times he’s not sure himself
(as we tend to be about mortality)
and I suspect he’s there to teach me
something to do with temperance
When he lived, and wanted to tease a little
with mock awe, he’d pronounce me a ‘Philosopher’
a stoic of few, considered words, it was not for him
ponderous conversation or the big questions
In his final act, he was a humble man of the Book
which meant he found the echoes of my many books
(delivered in world historic accent, no less)
either amusing or frankly incomprehensible
For such talk, he reserved an arsenal of smiles
from the indulgent, to the gently sarcastic
hands folded neatly in his lap, legs almost braided
I'd tell him he resembled a human handkerchief
There are some, like Nietzsche, who take the noise
within, and send it out into the world, much amplified
Giddoo, as I called him, was un-Nietzschean that way,
he took the world din in, held it close, and hushed it.
top
...'t woord is zichzelf
gedicht niet
tenzij niet op papier
zoekt het zich
in geblauwde inkt die druipt en bulkt
van handen en van taal
'ongesproken' per 'definitie'
voor eeuwig
top
het raam loste stukje bij beetje op.
contouren lossen een beetje op,
ook geluiden losten een beetje op.
een groot gezoem.men hoorde klink
dichtgaan van een allerlaatste deur.
een tapijt van lege uren en
beloofde regen. stil nu maar.
water knabbelt aan het zand,
herfsttij van de twijfel.
blijven of niet. schuim smelt
in schuim. het getijde van de maan
spoelt in het lijf, klotst in het bloed,
slijpt de rand. kruim aarzelt op het woord.
zal het wel of niet. ongehoord zal het
in het water schuiven. voorbij het niets,
als een vlakland dat de avond lost.
een beetje gloed, stil, gewoon wat later.
top
ik ken de nacht niet, ik
ken de honden van de nacht niet
en niet de lucht tegen de ramen,
de geuren en de stemmen niet.
ik ben misschien niet eens. ik denk
dat zacht vallen een vlucht is.
ijswater sijpelt en dribbelt over het vel
met een blik geklikt op fel wit licht.
hoort halve geluiden waaien in de kieren.
waar lacht dit licht mij op, waarin
ben ik verdwenen als ik
de nacht niet ken, de honden niet
en die nachtlucht tegen de ramen.
top
indigoblauwe noten
rijpen diep
onvoorspeelbaar
aan de branding
van mijn binnenzee
als wrakhout
spoelen woorden aan
uit taalloze nevels
trage boodschappers van verten
ontsteken in mij
een onblusbare stem