St. Andrew's Eve
Andreju vakarā, build
a woman or a man build
a bridge over a stream & place
have placed a bowl of water
place a split of wood, a splinter
across a bowl of water
slid below the bed
& at night you will see a dream
& who crosses the bridge in dream
will be your husband, wife
The older, Slavic oracle:
build a model of a well from kindling &
who comes to draw water from the well will be your
spouse,
Or sit with a mirror looking into the mirror
& from the mouth of the stove will
place soap and water, a towel &
Will come out of the mouth of the stove who chooses you &
wash itself & go back into the mouth
of the stove
On St. Andrew's night, & if she does not dream about the bridge
No one will marry her
& if he gets wet crossing the bridge
he will not be her true husband
After Straubergs' Latviešu buŗamie vārdi (Lettische Segenformeln / Formules magiques des Lettons) -- for RK. This poem previously appeared in Shearsman and in Vilenica (in French and Slovenian translation, Ljubljana: Društvo slovenskih pisateljev, 2000).
(ZUTIQUE (capsule, crepuscule)
In a dark pantry, street-lamps on waxed linoleum, trolley lights, I was talking on the black telephone to ( ) / tho I love you I can only love you across the insides of my self /across the blue bananas and the misshapen pomegranates,
albino snakes darting across the acid ground of beryl / I read you the thing where no one ___
scurried & you spoke in low tones (yr clipped, fuck-me voice)
(slight sleight of white hand (crying &
the magick ash again, albino snakes flying through polaroid innards)
In a dark pantry along a blank wall / in the dream I could not catch your words
the ancients (only the Victorians here) had things they really saw, vision machines, bowls of water
("of attic clarity") / & then the buried responses, in the way a poem comes back, a phrase skewed,
a phase, skinned / a metaphor screwed through a "body"
"a body" / it was an art (Dichtung und Wahrheit (respond, despondent
opening triptychs & ovoid openings, "it was not a book, it was just a curious hinged double mirror"
& all of it fixation, the volatile skin (also she was herself
only the surface of her body / no eye in a filthy void
(blank passed through & not in a dream either, some Thibetan terrorist
aethyr, looked in on me
suspended in the cumulus of myriad intent wormed
through by glowing arabesques
/that I would brush by you trembling
a peacock's tail
& you --
youth is a period of being
able to want
things clearly
(with the television off)
to say the sea
the mind before & after ejaculation in this same vedic wind
/youth is the ability to seize
was evacuated
the sweet abysmal words last night, kept them from their poison prism
was, saw were
delicate exiles
in tatters the color of the sea
.
for MAL
from VIELLEICHT UNTERWELTSKÖNIGIN PERSEPHONE
+
She has something in a dream.
What little girls do behind the property
without the property
is a mystery the sky has
weather we aren't meant to know
or have gold it matters little.
Trains bear women gleam like rails
of deciduous metals, intimacy
& cuverture
tramp dreamers and the trains widen into meadows
while she rides her ring
to work, giddy
uirga, supple one.
The mercury in an ant farm,
pus in the spine.
She works in a uterine whisper,
nothing else in her
charms
changes.
The matter is closed.
+
Call thrice under the shifting face in the bare white trees,
Persephone's breasts so far apart to show the memory spent
there. Herzschlagentext. But love is a solvent.
The Pergamonmuseum like her dreams,
some are missing hands, some everything but their faces,
others are only their veils.
Handing the lady little origami islands to earth about her
in the dark,
about face, the face in dream, surrounded by the twentieth century,
a mouthful of remorse I eat rather than spit out
before I drink from your lap again.
Convivio forgotten into forgiveness, & so easier to bear,
to bare the face, it hovers in the white trees.
Thrice yesterday, a potion,
your name flowers by the shifting face.
+
Ter Yoorup! whose refinements in her dark silences
can even be Persephone
They want you for a face pulled from the river
may you be naked in death, beryl, kickshaw bulwarks
To suck the water from her diamonds,
when she moves out of life to stay her
glance in the stone
"Vielleicht Unterweltskönigin,"
palpable as rain.
But her warm young move into their own natures,
mind the conjurers.
Yesterday sleight the wet sun, smelled like spring we won't know again
till April midnight what wanton light is.
She comes out then.
Little things breed in the volupté.
Is not below but outside, Persephone,
milky sobriety, field glass.
There is a queen even a woman below
else everything would be lost cold light none can be naked in?
Sorrow is a power,
the more I see the less of me, & the seen things
& outside the day in any light not hers.
.
Lietuva
coming back into this
country I am ignorant of
& tired of being foreign to
everywhere, in a way as in she is in
a way -- back in after the brief curve through Belarus --
the border-guards asking not for passports but whether we have them
-- will be border by November --
remembering Irby, I am a citizen of that state that is a haziness in the air
& long for that color that is the eye of love like a body for its clouds
between cars for a smoke a man gestures at the frozen fields & says vot,
your America, your Plains --
NO RELATION
ate apples fall, ābolu gads, apple year,
till could hardly stomach them --
apple eaten
at dawn down the bright law the Gypsies made
forbids them to sow,
keeps them moving
to youthen this cessant Europe
I have come to stay at the stalk of
where it pushes up still pale from the bloodied ground
here Lith. the earthen smitten,
the generations
come put their mind to it,
as their mind came from it
some stones say are
or aren't, past
oblivion some thing you know
about stone or the hair in the trees that mean you
can't go back, a matter of how much it hurts
not to, lost in the hands.
This poem previously appeared in Shearsman in a slightly different version.
A Pair for Harry
UNDER THE THEORY
"tout le monde couchait nu et rarement on couchait seul" -- Harry CrosbyWhen we are done with Fontainebleau its curious salamanders
in the fire, the road seems to lead us & seems to lead to love.
No one has ever seen her naked before.
No sun.+At a slave, eyes averted, denuded. Venus
visible to the instinct. Eyes brine, I can do a thing
& a thing but beauty is not mine. Venus visible
to the slave but indistinct. She dreams
noctiluca covers his eyes, the sea, she is --
she is encrusted with senses, hides
studded with stones, furs.
Denuded, lapping at a slave.
I can name it what I want. Saxifrage.
Love makes lucid, she is not used
to this, to sleeping together.
A Period Piece
"and where we thought love was, we was, without it, right?"
-- Kenneth Irby
"A love story without love. I speak too soon. There is love. There's love in the same way
that I went out the other night and observed: there's wind tonight."
-- Alejandra Pizarnikthe barge Katie Ann on the river I read katherein
& glared at the wake till my gaze became it, gone, & a blind
woman searching for the door felt me with her quivering hand
-- a ruined eye, a slimy luster --
(azugoi
(canto of can not)
held breath of love, hollow, stygian asphyxia
dispermatic masks entwined in crabgrass,
o sphynx,
we say,
au coin,
o coin
o obverse, tailed head,
shadowed observer, disturbing one ---
but every element against me
in the world of things
stones drop, glasses fall, demons enter
Mannerist thugs
& their freeze-dried Aristotelian molls,
dragged to the granite mouth
of the eternal now snuffed out
flame in Dubrovin's Garden,
the moon is frozen vinegar
the heart is plastered
& my love
tears at her face
while wet white witches mangle the moon
& even Tovarishch suddenly Gospodin Vidavsky
back in power, in different clothes, with all new attitudes
won't pay gas for the eternal flame
leer door,
breaded malady
leaves a house
& in squalor to worship at
her,
for Wakefield where Vaughan fucked his wife to death
articulate a tantric fiasco
as I once kissed her mute white mouth
& tongued her forehead open
...
you yes, I needed to find a way, over water
eyes yes, the starry essences hiss,
blood flows beneath the wrought
iron bridge
psyche'd opening
destitute,
subsisting
on a substitute
for love our estrangement searched,
drenched to the marrow of her bones the mad
shake the dirt from the roots of sleep (marooned,
canto of She-
who-cannot-be-obeyed
odalisque
star legs, what would be obeyed,
a certain serpentine gesture, a slinky arabesque
under the cover of time
gloriosa donna della mia mente,
meant lamia
& may be love
skin by skin I have known you alone
& there would be among those mornings her
carelessly wrapped in stolen linen
would go out upon her skin
& under her own power
taut across the toy village the toy want the toy necropolis
Hunger takes care of Eros, & if not, Kronos
-- not --
ejaculate india ink retch blood inscribe skin then
-- efface the face --
milk spurts from her recent breasts,
pregnant by her ancestors, she
in a grand dream a final indifference wed
to scribe destroy, to destroy her in the bargain
basement remnant, clothes horse, milky gargoyle & was
it is not terminus to rasp to web
you marry death fuck, hard at harem
(the three disgraces
you have not suffered enough
-- not that --
have not
suffered dispassionately,
all was passion, were-things
world vagrant
vacancy graven
& then efface the face / flowers for it
to describe her to
herself hell in a chemise
/ chemical sham
shall, should,
shrouded
by boreal days cut
dully it writes through low cold scarlet
ego scriptor elegant the center seems
is turn-of-the-century
but birches sprout from the rooftops
acedia, malady of saints
great birches stretch from smashed mansards, penetrate defaced sky
-- is this nihil fertile --
as dark grain does grow from our dreams
Jove's-ears,
contra naturam
suicide, crows flying at the house (oracle)
suicide, crows passing through a locked door (oracle)
red wine at morning sailors take
-- few signs for suicide --
-- it is not done --
limpid oracle slammed in thrall of sleep
seeks death, it can be found
mora lies, blurs her inky slutty eyes
to a single thing
as a hare hops into the heart stew fate or accident
as a neverending sense of the impending
watcher through the mirror her
beings browse perception
or was it only security
in postorgasmic cold
a postsexual landscape here
a crawl space
-- these the sodden archives --
a crone conducts the men
come here to clean cloacina
memory: lost
inside
midday
(found papers,
meaning - lost
obscure because you some being
brought to mind & lost again inside the memory, as in, I am inside you,
inside you always, finally gone
all liars are eternally virgin
consequences of such fearsome sex to take
by causing game to fall "becomes the antilogos"
"the vision of the unknown God, on entering...
an unbalanced body...becomes the Anti-Logos"
oblique odalisque
being led from total experience, being haunted
not reminded,
are you remembering?
are you remembering what?
torment (in this case
not erased
not having been in those parts of the brain
reached in ecstasy
since
-- so deformed
ecstasy --
two huge tanker trucks carry cloacina off
the footbridge from the cemetery-cum-quarry-cum-dump
collapsed, a sign went up
CROSSING OF BRIDGE FORBIDDEN
replacing the sign DO NOT MARCH IN STEP
(icon) miserable senex climbing useless staircase
(icon) jackdaw suicide
(the epic note she leaves) each day
another heap a step a sloshed
progress dying was the wild desire
for eternity or terminus
to get inside her
this before earthenware this before seeding this before
this the earthen virgin this
before the moon comes back
"they toy with one another until some new babe will out"
hurl promises of at
"and one more going nowhere just for show"
& even a meager love
kalabadi galdiņami
father the long
hours at the slaughterhouse father the slaughterhouse
father the long tables laden with red red food
neighbors whisper endearments he is head
bookkeeper at the great slaughterhouse at Stropi
the stink drove him toward the daughters
not some misplaced sympathy for squealing swine
why are the legs of the table bent, not from gold or silver
but from great heaps of heavy food,
food forced down his memory
for a child a war is mostly not eating
for long hours at the slaughterhouse
& never ate a sausage ever again/ stood empty in the dead of night
no corn because they fed him that
when no longer a child the war ended
& that was the vision you had & Europe ended
,that one,
walking in what was left of it, wall, magisterial
o I become you like a dress or daughter
yr handwriting appearing where yr mind was not, your sense of duty where
( ) gave out
-- I come back from death or the department store --
"the war started this morning, in the afternoon we went swimming"
totalled the car now afterworld cringe bereft in a bank of snow
as an amorphous intellect creeps to the end of every desire
dives in, swims back, pukes all over itself
dare sphynx declawed want steams into the terminus /tenderness not
ride me like the subway nor rococo nor
...
the dream) as daughter is, at pains
to be raised as water is, drawn
mirare, to lavish
her with such attention as can't be taken, is
in exhausted morphea to form
trails with her bare feet along the bottom, making believe
the river is, sticks
to the rock of the robber barons, made believe
mud balls men, cyclamen, cored pears, board, molestus
come to the house now to bare her new breasts to radiator
& map the hidden in the heat
.
for MAL
"Qu'il vienne, qu'il vienne,
Le temps dont on s'éprenne."
[This poem includes instants filched from Pierre Joris, Robert Kelly, Gerrit Lansing, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Stein, Charles Baudelaire, J.F.C. Fuller, Latvian dainas, the Greek Anthology, Kenneth Irby, Fiddler on the Roof...]
"An incessant syntax her..."
an incessant syntax her
organ-dark children crack like corpses
no bird feeds upon the poem night
(in real time, in the poem,
a magpie swoops into the garden
(here is a garden
no bird no girl of human sleep denuded
in a pretty paper boat
sails along her map
a sign in blood
no fresh hearts for sale at the garish gastronomiya
no hairy tails now bottled oxen naked pressed against the glass
home make tail soup,
add
hard little hearts for extra meat
(No bird is terminus to you,
our city in that shade of blue that flies detest,
the builder gloated over cold
canned heart
gargoyle supper but suffer no bird
-- now run along
-- now empty cipher
you pass through in the dead of night
like the bare shadow of a homing bird
& longing wake the hooker past blazing noon to booze (I want to get fucked up with you,
dark friend)
where no mail comes and no bird sings into the waiting room but then (What is a garden?
her apparatus is not yet
because no spectral aperture
& such an one to sleep
in smoldering leaves, her names torn
like bark
from what kind trees
All the cuteness domesticity
makes the book ruthlessly,
nature morte
the mommy-dolls akimbo drown did
us oblivionize, their word will not her
swan-lit waters disturb
elegant suicides float past
us in the dark canals
an adrenaline gimlet dear a word, nighty-night her chaos vainly husbanded
ida decant breath
as a swollen Hadith-particle is fed
a husk his inky gusts blow to & fro
as a pea inside a featherbed is hid
to hurt the princess high on reason
is to remember all of it now
a muse a must, her
intolerable beauty
crooked through hardened arm
& sent into the honeyed ear while whispering the mystery
(eyes yes eyes yes)
que ce bras durci ne traîne plus une chère image
nurse what she might say
a pale herd out of earshot
hung upon her every word
umbrella was my father was
parasol my mother
other memory a rare a rancid dream
crudely translated from a rainy sky
unfocuses my eyes now, say
me go away now
snatch some apparatchik's sparkling sleep the girl inhuman sleep is
(but at thirty I forgave the snack bars,
cheez whiz in moonlight o
queasy tequila & shiver peacock flashback
up for a game of metaphor interruptus, my self my semblance my phosphorescent satyr?
& a silken exile eye contrived
to lurk in her devices
hidden then
fold your exile upon your back again
Five Short Poems
The work father stands in all tenses at once, his arms ka'd to the shimmering guts his goods to see so caught up by inactive wilderness .history of the sun) on ur, he plastike tekhne, her on her knees dark wheels her infant sun down her crack into mantic hands, leaks to larkspur sheets remains surge through sleep singular, neuter wrecked & heavy-lidded, likely alive . Taken by the rose she stalks above all the dark one, washed up & straitened the eye, gone out to buy gamey cream bouillon & a bulb for the lamp, mortuary sun, no water Ever a wall weak doe drag itself to a clearing, or veal at closing doth shine & shiver immutable cities seduced from the earth She dreamt again like someone truly evil & you & I were there, in a house, in a maze, & on & on we went through it like it was our own mind, hour after hour sovereign, no bracken. Those shimmering nets, even if they do catch fish. If you love them that dissolve, a snake with no tail. Like death warmed over, then cold as a witch's teat. Grotesque multiplication is a god. Or a single deer of Chenrezi's, vanishing into the trees. So much shifting & shimmering that it seems not to shift or shimmer anymore. Boils dry. In the morning the flowery coat skimmed off. Look for them outside then. They feed. They awe. .
From a door a voice begs change, seek her dark, the stars are interruptions in this waste, a woman asking change, sought her the dark stoppers the vision. I came to this city to see crone climate I am always in, sea chrome, dark foam & flotsam stars & handed her a wineshit-gray nickel warmer than other coins, put in her hand I now saw stretched from dark door & far from the heart. Ordered rose -- hips absolutely still -- water turned to blood -- at bottom glass cup, returned to her with more change. Something utterly transparent curtains the nothing that is not transparent & hard to know -- fire escapes by nostril & cruelly through the eye -- & forms baroque inattention spawns flower at the mouth, spare, some change.
"The human face is an empty force, a field..."
The human face is an empty force, a field of death.
-- Artaud
[allegro, sotto voce]
hole or bath an orchid chute for sorry ecstasy
that broth awaits a wind to bear her seedy words as in
a bind and bound for depths of ecstasy
where worship of the shifting face would beat a baculus to in,
an age that time was rare for her
and broth a bone with meat and water maid
samadhi made where dread abacus flies
hymeneal and brute obivion in bacchic faces oscillate
and face disowned in salmon grass
to bring it to a head of late
and head for earth through strangle reed of acrid ecstasy
a rood mignon would have to have
and then recoup the memory
how virgin down alembic masks a taxidermy lovers seek
and fertile mirrors hail
a fishy cab a written down
so you don't want what can be seen
and seem to see desire out
to shroud what is not like itself
in subtle hairshirt transparent
where stud a tusk at dusk is meant
and minarets are penetrant to clotted milk in salty sky
crow an intestate man's effects
pulchritude of naked not
and pitted olive sepulchre
in spectral grass this earth this rot
a labored roar the weed the masks
I did not see your dogma through
underdog my dirty doxy
when an energy that evening swift undressed
articulated want to come
to luminary back to turn
itself again, a liminary
stone the words in father drive
She gone now now not mourn her
so slept fingers forced into the eyes
bare except for mask and speak
into an urn of air
and there a girl is getting in
-to the sky & one of her
makes it
how cornflower so drooled a thigh
is thrown over gibbous moon
fallen in spermatic snow
the others left her
all of them
