Blocks

1

If I could write the radiance of birds

Or name the births of all the continents,

Would I be closer to your secret mind?

Others have touched the penetralia

Of your obscure recess, so why can’t I?

When will the azure of your voice proclaim

The feasts of patience come?  Never?

So I lose you among the guests and ghosts.

2

Let’s dip into the monologue of someone else.

Wow.  It is noisy in here.  Like windows

Thrown open on the loudest city ever built.

Things are always different from what they might be.

Time is moving away from itself

Like a train whose cars are getting farther apart.

Some things will never grow old.

Mysterious things we have no use for.

3

The languages of flowers will revolt the mind

Seeing into the long dark passages that never add

Up into constructions, like the gusts of horses

That galloped away before these hills rode in.

The obstacles are supposed to have some use,

Like an opportunity.  Optimism fizzles like a drink

While unknowable rendezvous arrange

The flowing substances, the dark necessities.

4

Walking around naked on the moon,

I stop only to consider the coffee stain

In the glass of the soul.

The house is defenestrated with griffin claws

And a leopard is laughing at emptiness.

Some people are never

Satisfied they didn’t discover the Pacific.

Not even I can wish you away.

5

I suppose I ought to love the sea.

But I hate it.  That’s why

I don’t return to America.  I love the land.

The great thing is to love something.

If you wait for things to change, you’ll never do anything.

I don’t know whether you know.

The masses are seething beyond the portico.

If only we would bother to perceive them.

The River of Silver

The turning seasons add, almost imperceptibly,
Another layer of grime and mold
To the houses of the aristocratic necropole
Where the patriarchs fume as they decay.

The houses of the populace, less grand,
Caked with plants, wires, the slogans of yesterday,
Streaked as with mascara by the rain,
Accumulate like cereal-box facades.

The bel apartments are layer cakes
Or ocean-liners basking in the sun.
A toothless horse pulls a wooden cart
Loaded with scrap collected by a boy.

A foreigner looks up from his guidebook.
An idled crane drifts like a huge weathervane
As the clouds take the shape of animals:
Tiger, dragon, seahorse, rhinoceros.

While the more dangerous passions are alive
In the faces of the loved and the spurned
That one encounters on the shady streets;
Like destinies, they must remain unknown.

How to Lose One's Identity

I no longer have the strength to believe.

The absence of belief is my one belief,

Like a hole in my private ozone.

These spectacular flames, these oblique rays,

There is no speculation I might have

That has not already occurred.

It has been handled by everyone and you

By the time I finally take it up.

Wisdom would have to be something

Felt by all from all eternity,

Something fallen nearly into neglect,

Shined up, and placed, exactly, here.

One loses confidence in one’s touch.

I drank the broken gate before it closed

To me forever.  Some sightless man looks back

Now from a respectful distance.

I wish I could move forward or go back.

I, the statement of fresh water

El Desdichado

I am the Inconsolable,—the Widowed,—the Dark Sire,

The Prince of Aquitaine of the demolished Fort:

My one Star is dead,—and my constellated lyre

To the Black Sun of Melancholia pays court.

In the night of the Tomb, You who did console,

Give back Mount Pausilippe and the sea of Italy,

The flower that so pleased my desolated soul,

And the trellis with Vine and Rose in filigree.

Am I Lusignan or Biron?...  Eros or Phoebus?

My face is still red from the kiss of the Queen;

I’ve dreamed in the Grotto where the Siren swims...

And twice I’ve crossed Acheron singing hymns,

Voicing, by turns, on the strings of Orpheus,

The Fairy’s cries and the Saintly Woman’s spleen.

Gérard de Nerval (1853)

Welcome to My Magazine

Another summer left us rich in bikinis
And rich in friendship. My friends
Let us toast the acres of air that separate us,
The forests of people who come between.

Indeed, we share many of the same habits:
Staring intently, listening closely,
Hiding behind curtains, even on Sunday.
Je ne puis demeurer loin de toi plus longtemps.

But I can! It's surprising how close
Long-range photography can bring us. I know
Your begonias are growing nicely,
And we're on opposite sides of the park!

Some day, I want to be inside the radius
Of the perfumes you apply so liberally.
Some day, we'll think of the whales,
Probably almost at the same time.

You could say we're inching closer
To intimacy. The slow creep where
Neither of us occupy the moment,
Yet the moment, like here, wants to be there.

The Boat, Drunk (in progress)

As I traveled down impassible Rivers,

I no longer felt the pull of the guides:

Loud Redskins had emptied their quivers,

And nailed to dyed posts their bare hides.

As I went down impassible Rivers,
I no more felt the pull of the guides:
Howling Braves had emptied their quivers,
And then nailed to bright posts their bare hides.

Frack This

When I pooped Detroit, I was only kidding.

The quagmires of capital have soaked the galoshes

Of future gardeners (rat poison!), I mean goddesses

Splattered with snatch-burning honey.  AOI

The furnaces in your eyes remind you of yourself—

How saintly—before you were born, raging in vitro

Like violent oyster sewage as delicious

As turnips in a musical.  Ovarian meat-grinder!

I won’t harvest you, fat morass, without a note

From your physician.  Please inspect the timbers

Of all strings and woodwinds prior to fellatio.

Must you refer to me as “my cabbage”?

Every third line I vomit in the solarium.

These marble stairs warbling since 1066 sag

Like the tits of an old dog, thousands of them

Arranged in a cloistered spiral ascending

To a locus amoeba, all fish in the trees, of course,

Because it’s spring and I’m in love with a shoulder blade.

Thibaut, send one down to the princess of hell.

I did some work there but the fornicators kicked me out.