"The poet is of no party." Baudelaire
Emily,
Do you believe it’s possible
to be dominated
and respected
simultaneously?
I’m interested
in getting to know you better.
I felt endeared, repulsed
and bemused
viewing your photos.
I spend a lot of time
thinking about
tits, ass, what I’m going to be
when I grow up.
You should message me if
your lower body resembles
these buffalo wings I once ate
that were so plump and tender
they should have been wrapped
in sweatpants that say
Juicy on the back.
Girls often notice
my pecs, biceps,
symmetrical facial features
bone structure, crotch, etc.,
and guys, their feeling of envy.
I’m really good at
all. You should message me if
you like a man with a few rough edges
and won’t secretly plot
to smooth them out the whole time.
Do you feel like you can write well?
For a white girl
you look like a decent rapper.
You look pretty gangsta
for a white girl.
Can I sleep with you?
It would really help.
I could never do without
water, it’s so pure.
Do you love hot sex?
Hello there.
You have some very atypical pictures, hello.
Hey! You look like you like to have fun.
What are your days like?
I’m just hanging,
going swimming whether summer or winter,
taking trips to tropical places,
going out to eat.
I’m diligently striving
to live a life of true purpose
and trying to find
true purpose while I’m at it lol.
There’s a grammar mistake
I your what am I doing
with my life section.
You could probably create
a killer erasure
if you were stuck in a cave
with all the food and water you needed.
I always love to see other people's
creative processes, so forgive me
for what I imagine will be
the start of a barrage of questions,
but what inspires you to write?
Who/what has influenced your style
and, I guess, to a further extent,
the principles that guide your writing?
I'm constantly making simple, overlapping
generalizations about life as a whole
in an attempt to actively examine
the world as I pass through it.
I'm always focused on something or another.
You should message me if
1. You’re not shy
2. You like coffee
3. You've got a great personality
and you want me to know it.
My humor is dry as a dessert
but my moves are sleek as silk.
I love bad puns, cities, and life in general.
I was also on Jeopardy once, as a subject.
So, take that as you will.
I'm a huge Velvet Underground fan.
I saw Lou Reed live in 2007,
he played Femme Fatale,
and I was the only person in the audience
to sing along.
I could never do without thoughts,
Science, Kindle, Beaches,
Friends, Beer, The Atlantic,
The Economist, The Liberal Elitist, Skylines.
Honestly, I'm having troubles
putting my life into a confined box.
It tears at my values of being human.
Hi there!
I’m enjoying my life
through and through.
I’m a city person.
Good morning.
I just visited your profile.
I don't know you anything
special or important to say.
I’m a great guy if you get to know me
but mostly pissed off lol.
Ever been with
two European guys?
Would you be open
to an ongoing, casual relationship?
Your profile is very intriguing.
Artists are a dying breed it seems.
Welcome, stranger.
Have you ever used the word
dreamy to describe someone?
I used to live on a road
named after you.
It was a beautiful place
that Google maps couldn’t find
where I could wander out into the yard
almost every afternoon.
________________
Note: “Emily,” is built from messages and profile excerpts found and received on OkCupid and Tinder in 2015.
Another Poem About Birds
The nest outside the living room window
Contained a brood of four eastern phoebe hatchlings
They were getting huge
Stretching their wings
Too scared to leap and fly
One evening we noticed a rat snake under the nest
Right where the shit accumulated in a little chalky pile
About eight feet below where the babies were seated
It’s casing the joint we joked it’s coming back for the birds
We thought we were overestimating the snake’s sense of geometry
But the next night we heard a thump against the living room window
It was one of the babies having fled
And when we turned on the porch light
We saw the rat snake dangled next to the nest
Like a slick black pendant light
Long cord of its tail pressed against the beam
Geometrically to support its weight as it hung there
It was halfway through swallowing one of the hatchlings
The wing poked out like a ragged sail
The rest of them had fledged
To avoid the predator’s jaws
It was one way to learn to fly
*
I had been documenting the birds on Instagram
I felt obligated to update everyone on what happened
Which also felt kind of sad
I had taken a picture of the snake
Dangling there with the bird in its grip
But I didn’t post
I just shared in words
The picture felt too close to something I didn’t want to touch right then
Because even though I am not afraid of death
I have a dumb soft heart
*
Every night when I put my baby boy to bed
In order to avoid being pulled out of my sleep
By the vivid hallucinations I am prone to
Where he’s missing
Or not in his correct location
Or otherwise in palpable danger
I have to tell myself just before I tumble into my dreams
The baby is safe in his bed
The baby is alone and safe in his bed
The power of these words is enormous to me
They let my brain unwind into nothingness
They let me drop into the chaos of my sleep
And let my ears be blocked by the metaphysical sound
Of the spinning plate of existence
Like a sound machine in the baby room
Of the universe where I’m baby
I have to trust that something will let my words be true
Even as the uttering of a statement
Creates also its opposite statement
*
I’m not equating baby birds in a nest to a baby boy in a bed
I’m not equating myself to an instinct-driven adult passerine
And I’m especially not equating all the worst fears I have
To a snake driven by hunger
That would be too easy
And much too hard on snakes
*
Neither rat snake nor eastern phoebe
Is endangered at this time
Neither is facing habitat loss
But as the climate shifts to warmer
The birds will get the urge to nest earlier in the season
And the snakes will shift their energies to nocturnal foraging
To avoid the uninterrupted sun on their scales
And overwarming and the need to move to shade
They will begin to hunt more often at nighttime and the crepuscular hour
Surprising adult birds as they sit the nest
It’s not one influencing the other
It’s that you adjust one setting
And the equilibrium of the whole system changes
Perhaps in this case it will mean additional snakes
And fewer birds who want to use this particular nest
I’ve spent so little time thinking about the settings
And the systems
My own systems
A little shortage here or there
A little change to what I eat
I’m not in the business of strangling birds
But sometimes I can’t find my fake meatballs to buy
Or my husband can’t find his bran flakes and so what
There’s such a variety at the shop that we don’t care
But what careened on earth in order to make it so
Who lost a job and whose crop withered and whose water supply
Was diverted by other corporate interests
I feed my baby avocado for his first food
Even though it’s imported
And out of season besides
*
Eastern phoebes mate for life
Often reusing the same nest
The same pair will return here
To the site of the snake scenario
Maybe the snake will return here as well
To the site of its convenience meal
And I as the audience
May also return
Dread in my eyes
Oh I have such
Sympathy for babies
I find myself sad for them
The one that got eaten and also the ones
That sought cover in the heavy foliage of night
But the snake was also just looking out for itself
And the little birds had to fledge sometime
Why not then said the snake
Why not then
"Enter ghost ; ; ; ; ;All the beautiful rooms"
Enter ghost All the beautiful rooms
are empty
All the accounts deactivated
Calendars vacated of all spectacle all spectacular affairs
We no longer touch
each other’s faces
We dream of vengeful animals
escaping their electrified enclosures
Suspiciously low flying airplanes
Houseplants sickening and dying from the burden
of our smothering love
"Where is the daughter the son"
Where is the daughter the son
The monogamous swans
tucked in for the night under their white wings
Have you ever seen a swan in flight
I have never seen it
The winter sun bleaches everything
Blanches the snow-dusted hills
There is no swoon no afterlight
Have you ever seen it
I remember when we were ravenous for the sun and the sun
was ravenous for us
_from_ O
In a court masque from the seventeenth century, twelve Ethiopian nymphs travel to beg for a favor from the river god Okeanos: they want him to wash them white. The ladies of the court, who portray the nymphs, diligently smear their hands and faces with black paint. They are now the river god Niger’s daughters. Over their elbows: gloves made of snow are another tragedy.
There’s something womanly about water. It enfolds and dissolves, it attracts and repulses in equal measure. When the world’s very first woman explored the garden, she leaned over a green pond and saw herself emerge from it; she fell in love. The twelve black nymphs see themselves in their father’s mirror and weep, sob, dissolve back into water.
O watches the masque with a vacant expression. Her mind is elsewhere. Her red dress exposes her left breast. SUSAN SONTAG: It is easy to think of death in Venice. O wouldn’t know; she’s never been to Venice. NIGER: “As one of Phaëton, that fired the world / And that, before his heedless flames were hurl’d / About the globe, the Aethiops were as fair / As other dames; now black, with black despair.”
The last time O thought about death she told herself: “One day I will bury my mother in this soil.” Out loud she said: “I will never bury my mother in this soil.” There is black despair in water.
* * *
When O gets home she tries to recount the play from her scattered notes. O reads:
At first there’s a sketch of a landscape
Small woods and void places
Resembling an artificial hunt
The waves break the billows break
Almost as if rushing forth
Aside from their skin and hair
Their temperament is human
The orderly order
Music rushes in from the sea
In shape and cast a daughter
For variation’s sugarcane
The shadow of an ornate mantle
Encircled by black backs
His hair markedly kinky
The top of his head a radiant light
Niger is a daughter
* * *
The sea might rush forth
As if flowing
An artificial temperament
Murex snails and radiating
Various shapes and expressions
Encircled by black daughters
Others’ faces various ways
The torch-bearers have various ways
Some backs were seen from the side
Forehead, ear, wrists
Best set off against the black
Best set off against the black
Present the players
* * *
Waves seem to move
Imitating disorder
Upper parts human
Save their skin
In shape and cast nymphs
The head turned to the side
They’re seated one above another
Decorated with bulrush
Presenting shimmering
Carefully selected
Niger’s daughters are best set off
Algae and red seagrass
All were alike
All were artificial
* * *
To start with, a sketch of a landscape. I wish for an orderly disorder. I wish for a mantle of rain. I wish for a harmless sea that billows and breaks; I wish for scrolls of taffeta and mother-of-pearl. Blue hair. Blue skin. An Ethiopian in shape and disposition. When they carry the torch, a glorious light, I wish nothing were human. Multi-colored and wreathed with bulrush. I wish for a harmless sea. I wish for a different temperament. When the forehead, ear, neck, and wrist are set off I wish nothing were nature. Ornate in shape and disposition.
*
The two figures are, for the sake of variation, choice pearls set off against the black. Differences borne on their backs. Water to touch the face, azure and silver, my hands break. Everybody’s hair was on fire. If Ethiopians were commonly found in nature their desinent parts would’ve been human, their necks mother-of-pearl, their heads attractive dressings of feathers. The stage is built from snowfall. He turned to me on the train and said: You all are Niger’s daughters. When we present the players it will be in the regular disorder.
*
Turn the other cheek to better set it off against the black. Behind these were extravagant, artificial daughters. They were bearing light. From the underpass streamed airy pieces of taffeta, blue light, a stench of urine and the scream traveling sideways. Others’ faces are shimmering, singing pearls; mine is an excited dance. Present me, the player, and I’ll give you sea monsters. The hunt dominates the void places. It is not hard to raise the world above your head and let it fall. Imagine having a human form.
*
“O, the more angel she, and you the blacker devil!” O yells at herself in the bus shelter before she hides behind a trash can, howling with laughter. Afterward she buys a bag of banana gummies; they swell in the mouth.
O’s task is simple: to carve out so much of herself that an audience can fit inside her. The audience is not black; the court calls it a refinement process. When she goes to see the alchemists they turn up her palms, pinch her thighs, and conclude that it’s going to require both time and patience. But it is possible. O: “Is’t possible?”
* * *
Where common landscapes
That light befits
Press an ear
Pressed against the shell
Which wasn’t blue
What, then, do you hear
A red pearl
Be identical
Be honest
Be fine hands
Ornate heads
Homelands
Shimmering black
Braided
Back to back
* * *
A parted light
Can make it seem
In one part
Like a partial account
One over another
For my part
I have tried
I have trained as
Painted moon
It streams behind
Practice different
Angels and angles
* * *
People like to take an interest in the subversive potential of the hybrid. O is, in some ways, a hybrid. But in discussing hybridity we indicate simultaneously a closeness to power and a distance from the other, from that which is much too foreign, that which cannot be embraced and neutralized. What happens to the other when we center the hybrid? In some ways, O assumes, it’s that same old debate about reform or revolution. She’s snuck backstage and is silently watching the ladies of the court wash off their dark color into silver bowls. Their scoured skin is so red that they must paint it white again: they smear themselves with amber, powder their faces with crushed alabaster, almonds, they paint thin blue veins over their decolletages.
O squeezes her exposed breast. Is it full of milk, white milk, is it good enough to feed their children? Or is that dark ink, leaking out of her and into their pens?
* * *
“It is not words that shake me thus,” O explains. During a private language lesson she looks with surprise at the notebook beneath her damp hand. She reads:
Lay down close to the pain
But not so close
That the contours of the wound
Are too obvious.
Don’t be inscrutable.
Who are you running from?
You’re the only one here:
Your hair’s round shadow.
Translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson
Pleasant Morning Walk
Just a few cable-lengths from my room, I was sometimes startled, my morning walk only just begun, by dissonant clashes of copper emerging from the demolition of a charming little brick house. Based on the chosen themes of that mysterious orphéon of ruins, I’d imagine behind that sad plaster façade a full procession of ingenuous morning arbors, where electricians in red overalls, blond streetwalkers at dawn, professional corteges in costume facing the rising sun dispersed nocturnal mists in a few of those finely wrought pewter tankards that look so lovely in the foreground of a comic-opera bacchanalia. Could anything more charming be imagined, before the morning rush to work in a uniform’s froggings and pleasing galaxies, than the choir fresh with dew, fanned by extinguished girandoles, and raised toward the sun by those ingenuous stagehands condemned, for the entire day, to hide like delinquents in the dustiest wings of a modern city? A hasty ball, the flight of a lace petticoat in twilight’s darkness was the limit of what I could imagine of the scandals behind that tiny enclosure hidden from land surveyors by the ordinary spring of a plaster curtain wall sure to be demolished in three strikes. But already a lovely tavern with uneven crossbeams was letting its shutters sing in dawn’s light, like the elytra of happy garden bugs unfolding in the morning. Already the street was warmly beckoning me, the misaligned cobbles taking their places in their cells—nothing, isn’t it so, had happened—and like a domino mask on a coquettish woman’s most seductive face, after their morning entrechat the streetlamps and rickety trash cans had resumed their collective watch under the military eye of the city’s sweepers.
Translated from the French by Alice Yang
On the Banks of Fine Bendemeer
I had wandered a long while, in the fading hours of the afternoon, through the cool streets in the neighborhood of cemeteries and riots near the mixed-style cathedral. A pronounced nonchalance, like that of ringed fingers drumming discreetly on a jewelry box in the penumbra of antiquarians’ elegant Merovingian salons, made my step heavy with each turn in the blind spiral of buildings. The transparent prison of air spread the sound of gongs. The only respite given me now and then came from worm-eaten benches that evoked the funereal stations of the cross blazoned with Roman emblems and phalerae, as complex as the metro’s canvas. This labyrinth seemed to serve as pedestal for some shadowy Calvary, some outlying Babel. Doors swung mysteriously here and there, though always beyond a bend in the road, and the dismal pursuit of that sordid opening to the outskirts excited an itching desire within me. Those calls deep as horns, that anxious pursuit through heaps of rubble, ladder scaffoldings, rows of blind shops barren as the Hoggar Mountains, suddenly brought me, behind the screens of a fine rain, before the apse of the most ambiguous building I’ve ever seen—then slid me the password that neutralized the sentry at the postern, and under the wide beams of light, smooth and sea-green from the stained glass windows, with tears in my eyes, I felt the lower half of my body melt in the vigorous, tufted grass of an oceanic meadow.
Translated from the French by Alice Yang
Ross Ice Shelf
One must rise early to see the day ascend over the ice floe’s horizon, at the hour when the sun of the southern latitudes spreads paths onto the sea in the distance. Miss Jane carried her parasol, I an elegant double-barreled shotgun. At every glacier gorge, we’d kiss in the mint crevasses and take pleasure in lingering to see the fiery sun carve a path through a lacework of glittering ice. We liked to walk along the shore where, the cliff breathing steadily with the tide, the sea’s soft, thick rolling predisposed us to love. The waves beat against the walls of blue and green snow, and threw giant crystal flowers at our feet in the coves, but the day’s approach was especially perceptible on that faint hem of phosphorus that lined the scallops of the waves’ crests, as when capital cities set sail at night on the stillness of high seas. At the Cape of Devastation, in the fissures of ice, grew edelweiss the color of midnight blue, and we were always sure to see, day after day, a fresh supply of those seabird eggs that Jane believed could brighten one’s complexion. It was a daily rite for me to repeat Jane’s words on her mouth, as if to gather them with my lips. Sometimes the clouds concealing the cliff’s foot announced an overcast sky for the afternoon, and Jane asked in a small voice whether I’d taken care to wrap the Cheshire cheese sandwiches. Eventually the cliff grew higher and chalky from the sun: that was Desolation Peak, and on Jane’s signal I spread the blanket over the fresh snow. We lay there a long while, listening to the sea’s wild horses beating their chests in the icy caves. The horizon of the open sea was a diamond blue semicircle submerging a wall of ice, where sometimes a flake of vapor emerged, protruding from the sea like a white sail—and Jane recited Lermontov to me. I could have spent entire afternoons there, my hand in hers, following the cawing of seabirds, and tossing chunks of ice into the chasm and listening to them fall, while Jane counted the seconds, sticking out her tongue in concentration like a schoolgirl. Then we embraced each other for so long and so tightly that a single channel narrower than a baby’s cradle formed in the melted snow, and when we got back up, the blanket among the white knolls brought to mind those Asian mules that descend from mountains laden with snow.
Then the sea’s blue deepened and the cliff turned purple; it was the hour when the evening’s sudden cold detaches from the ice floe those crystal castles that crumble into a dust of ice with the sound of a bursting world, turning over, under a blue wave’s gigantic scroll, the belly of a liner with dark algae in its cracks, or the heavy snorting of swimming plesiosaurs. For us alone there grew brighter and brighter, up to the edge of the horizon, that apocalyptic cannonade like a Waterloo of solitudes—and, for a long time, the freezing night, in the great silence, was punctured by distant ghosts gushing forth from tall, white-feather geysers—but I had already squeezed Jane’s icy hand in mine, and we were coming back to the light of pure Antarctic stars.
Translated from the French by Alice Yang
_from_ The Billy Ripken Fuckface Card
The Billy Ripken Fuckface Card
Voice open
like a dictionary
of pleases—
to briefly hold
what I am
supposed to want.
__________
The Billy Ripken Fuckface Card
We either die
or live forever
like a tag
spraypainted on a church:
HORSE BIRTH
DR FART.
The dead
are only open
to the living.
__________
The Billy Ripken Fuckface Card
A crumb of poem
only feels like a meal
to those who're already fed.
We each need something
only others can make.
Make what only you can make,
never knowing who needs it,
only knowing someone does.
__________
The Billy Ripken Fuckface Card
Dig through the mirror
& unearth a garden.
Write your name in dirt
until your name is dirt.
Time blooms,
then blushes,
& bleeds.
A few days
I came yesterday
on the Empire State Express,
eight hours of boredom.
Once again,
it’s another day, a gray day,
damp as a dog’s mouth,
this unlikely August.
If anybody called me
by my camp name
nowadays
I’d sock them—
A few days:
how to celebrate?
It’s no day
for writing poems.
Or for writing,
period.
There aren’t any novels
about blindstiffs
these days:
Tramping on Life.
I’d like to spend part
of this lovely day
in a darkened
theater:
only there’s nothing
I want to see.
You suddenly look
like an old
woman,
the old woman
you may one day
become.
She sits all day,
a monument to patience,
almost eighty-nine
if she’s a day.
Like the picture
in my grandmother’s Bible
of Judgment Day:
Rembrandtesque beams
of spotlights
through cloud cities
on a desolate landscape.
Sunday, “the worst day,”
and we all sit
snowbound
in drifts
of Sunday paper.
Monotonous days,
daydreaming
of any place but here.
The radio is on:
perhaps this will be
a lucky day.
Today,
the color of a buttercup,
winds on the spool of time,
an opaque snapshot.
It’s cool for August
and I can’t
nail the days down.
Tomorrow is another day,
no better than today,
if you only realize.
Today
is better than yesterday,
but I still feel cold.
I mailed letters
today:
Denver Art Museum,
Chemical Bank
(that should bring
in money),
Savitsky, my lawyer:
he pays my bills.
Good day,
Signor Oscari:
are you still a grocer
by trade?
Thirty-five dollars
for a dozen roses,
Sterling Silver:
not today.
On the last day of August
I feel much better
than I felt
in June,
heaven be praised.
But Queens
seems awfully far
to give the day
a gentle lift.
It’s Wednesday morning,
but later than
I got up yesterday:
the sun is off
the balcony.
People say,
“Ooooh,
you have a balcony,”
as though I stand there
every day
surveying Twenty-Third Street:
Chelsea Sewing Center,
Carla Hair Salon.
Today is tomorrow:
the dead time.
What will it be like
when there’s no more
tomorrow?
It must
have been horrible
to live
before the days
of modern medicine—
all those greats
going off their chump from syphilis
or coughing their lungs out
with TB.
A few days,
spend them riotously.
I wish
I could go on a diet
for a few days:
to reduce the outer man
to weigh
what he should.
For today’s repast
remembered.
One day
the telephone:
it’s Hilde.
Here it is
Labor Day Weekend
and all my friends
are out of town:
just me
and some millions
to whom I have not yet
been introduced.
Now
tomorrow is today,
the day before
Labor Day, 1979.
________________
Note: “A few days” is a poem from my housebound, pandemically composed complete English-to-English translations of the Collected Poems of James Schuyler (1993). For my poem, I’ve excised, sometimes transformed, and collaged every instance in Schuyler’s poem “A few days” (originally more than 25 pages long) where he uses the words “day,” “yesterday,” “today,” or “tomorrow.”
"Today is the fifth day"
Today is the fifth day of the rest of my wife. If I were to sit across from you in the board room, meeting room, interview and say read me, fine, tell me all the things, you could say, card shark, first, then blond card shark, then trickster, muffin, potato acer, ship runner, overland comer, movie longer, Garbo hoarder, with a wrinkle under your so’s your uncle for your favorite rock. I am looking forward to a time when I can compete. Until then, I am slavering in the mix and no I don’t know what that means but it won’t stop me from translasting it. I was born for it, you say, this movie is great, it’s got a crazy lady, you say, you’re not a turnip. I like that very much.
"You’ve got the brains"
You’ve got the brains I’ve got the books let’s lose lots of money. It’s all come down to shade. Shadow fill in the blanks and box checker, is that the new dead job, the one they’re handing out with diplomat diplomas these d-days. Did you just say disciple or am I fantasizing again. Like at the grocery in line for crepes and the little boy with the twister shirt on begins to sing into the microphone like he never left it. There I go again you say, what is it with the world and percentages. I am nine times nine of myself and still too much. If he wasn’t that kind of doctor what would he be. This referent refers to nothing and I draw a tree to prove it. You and I decided these rules long ago when we were babies, the babies of humanity, decided it all. That might not be the problem.
"Flaming in the installation"
Flaming in the installation
museum the one with the
mattresses on the walls and
the big pink puffy bed and
pillows and the art of dark-
nesses and they say minim-
alism can’t be beat unless
you try. The number of
Russian artists trying not
to make a statement out
numbers the number of
everyone else. Three steps
forward into the polka
dot turns you into a cat.
These are the muumuus
you wear for yourself
and these are the ones
you wear for someone
else and this is how you
put on your glasses the
wrong way so everyone
knows you know what
you’re saying. The ones
deep inside the café wear
the best overalls patted
over all with abstract tulips
sakura daffodils buttercups
and other common spring
wearing flowers. Political
statements you can truly
sink your nose into, like
an installation on the very
top floor you walked miles
to get here together and
the guards watch you watch-
ing their phones. You could
really get into this if you didn’t
have to be somewhere else
soon. Everyone is talking
around you about how they
don’t know what they’re
doing. The tiny white socks
someone took time to sew
individually covered in beads
they look like little penis
covers or maybe hoods
tiny ones. You want to
take a picture of these
ladies in their large match-
ing print wear that could be
from Finland but isn’t. It’s
from here. The sick sock
sculptures represent the
Catholic church and their
abuses. Ties to ropes from
the ceiling dangle them
at your knees and shoulders
at first sight looking like a
bunch of bowed head flow-
erring classic rock cloths,
at last reading themselves
into the century light, blue
light, red corners, white mid-
dles. The note at the end of
the line explains everything.
Moravian Beeches
for Claude Louis-Combet
after a long sunny walk
there came a rough footpath
then crossing the Ondrejnice
by a libidinal bridge toward
the dark forest facing us down
off the slope
crisscrossed by roots
rocks heaped here and there
the path passed by the foot of a white ash
scraped into its bark a mandorla
and its vulva arch
the last rays of the afternoon were tickling
the naked beech trees
their trunks with scarred eyes
things took a turn
at the spiderweb
in the trunk split into a trident
two large orbits the mouth hole
under the nose hole a filigree and
vibrating death-mask
that left us speechless
witches rode the Moravian
mare of nightmares
those maleficent ones unleashed
storms and desires
into the country of the Inquisition
where Institoris searched for words
and plants to hammer open the spirit
then disappeared once and for all
near the Hukvaldy beeches
Janáček composed in F
the melody torn from rumbling thunder
to expand music
these same Hochwald beeches were
the little secret paradise of Freud who
in ingenious insight dreamed of
leaving behind the empire of his empiricism
the unconscious made of sonorous sylvan groves
full of white holes was up till then
the domain of female fortune tellers
Freud no longer wrote vain love poems
we never found Janáček’s bench
the storm took aim at the little hills
where Janáček dawdled
and Freud delayed leaving home
Translated from the French by Matt Reeck
The Lone Willow of Saeftinghe
for Elke de Rijcke
in the memory of Franck Venaille
muck instep in the clay banks
the community of stuck
bleating behind it—the grass embankment
of Emmadorp staunching the first fear—
beneath the lines cutting through the distant fog
toward the center of platens
among the shifting sands where everything’s
in between and everything delves into the muddy
betweenness as much water as sugared
echo of the grassy odor
fearing coming onto stage
floral rusts of the gales of the galerne
sea onions bulb sucked by
wild geese without counting the
grassy leaves of lamb’s ears
taking over in the struggle
between strata of clay and grassy growth
the fight of the sweet frothrubs against
the odious brine in the disgust of muds
what dies out dies down reassures
among the perfidious stirrings
up to the melodious clay-chirpings
these word bubbles in fetid schist
footfall on the skin of a somnolent
stomach the tremulous film of browns
rising from the clay grays
where the insouciant shadow of tires
oscillates down the road toward the dune
engraved with crow’s feet
the immovable bay of the movable space
closes upon itself it insinuates extravagance
in a choreography of canals
but then opens onto the sky
when the festive skein of geese laboring
through a slow adagio rustles by
like wings of the convoy’s end
pressed down by the howl of
the wind into silence
only thoughts of the loss of landmarks
tramping through dense drowned wool
of the mute wave
each step sucks up from the streambeds
on the path wetting the grassy isle—if the
water flows up it’s being pushed up—
patchy milky bacterial mud
puddling on heaven background
the salty coating is thrown off
spasmatic space will shout out
the sea ejaculates
in the arms in the vase
the galloping respiratory allure reversing
in a pansensual final acme
recovers its name in oceanic verse
rising to prose in solemn cadence
in this shard weaving together tiny rambling islets
that would be darkened underneath sod rolls
it’s time to turn toward the tree
the lone mast in the flattened wave
the area constructed from a wild stomach
full of a monster to be born
the mound of the crumbling cabin
surrounded by streams and nettles
where from the horizon are seen
what are ostensibly the melancholy of tramps and
the adorable steam of the nuclear power station
the wind soliloquizes over this stretch of stable earth
isolating
this irritating body so out of place
that powdery clay-blanched hands
want to fell it
the cafe corrupts as much as the old random willow
so hospitable offering a nest
to the baby crows that will never pass by
Translated from the French by Matt Reeck