Tr. Rimbaud "Antique"

Sly son of Pan, around your forehead
Crowned with flowerettes and bay
Leaves, little precious stones, the eyes
Remove. Dig themselves the cheeks, stained
With clumps of soot. Your fangs flicker. Chest
Looks like a zither, blond arms circulate a shake.
The heart beats in the breast where the double sex
Sleeps. Promenade at night, rolling your thigh,
And then the right, and lift your left leg.

Tr. Baudelaire -- "The Corpse"

Remember, my soul, the sight of a dear
Summer’s dawn, where the path split
A corpse on a bed of rocks, feet
Splayed like a prostitute, dripping
And bubbling poisons, baring
Her chest with that tired, familiar
Look -- and filled with a breath...

The sun was shining on the wreck,
As if to cook it up, to render back
To nature all the parts that once
Were whole. Like a flower the sky
Watched the body unfold, and it stank
So much you thought you would faint.
From the stomach battalions of larvae
Streamed, while just above flies buzzed.
Everything rose and fell like a wave
Or bubbled out from the gaps;
The body seemed to multiply
In mutilating gasps.
And the world exhaled
A haunting air, like the sound of water
On swaying wood, or the rustle of wheat
At a reaper’s feet. The form was effaced
-- No more than a dream, the early mark
Of what is to be, a picture to glean
From your memory. Meanwhile a mongrel
Over the rocks spied with a hungry eye,
Looking for an interlude to pick a bone.

That’ll be you, someday:
A fume and infection, sun of my sight,
You, pupil’s star, my cherub, my heart.
Queen of graces, upon the final sacraments
Lain beneath the clover and the grass,
You’ll go to mold with the bones, like that.
So, pulchritude, tell all the maggots
Who come to steal cheeks from your kiss,
That I at least have kept alive
The memory of the lips.

Token

You will go into the forest
-- Where the water will drip --
And put your knuckle under your chin
And lean into your legs
And think,

While the vermin run under your feet
And the clouds fly overhead,
And the sun sets.

Below the ground the dead are blind
And the sky is dumb with angels, whatever they say
You are deaf.

Why did you go in?

You were waiting for something from the trees,
You were waiting for an original voice;
Now you are out among everything.

You had to be there.

Retreat

How does one light the fire? A flame
Goes out in the cold,
Because the wind breathes it,
And the wind has a searing tongue
Of ice;

The flame was not meant for that wind,
Just as a flower ought not to be buried
In certain grounds:

Climates of the cold
Soil under the skies
Always swollen with rain,
Where the sun winks
Like a sleepy eye,
Are just not meant
To hold flowers:

Here fire wilts, even if
There are brilliant stars in the night.

The Dancing Snake (tr. Baudelaire)

I care much to see
My careless
How that voluptuous
Skin of yours can
Spin like a top!

Through tresses in a fog
Of incense,
Ocean odorous
And vagabond, floods
Of brown over purple
Folds,

As a sleeping ship shifts
In the scents of
Spring,
My daydreams
Drift above the ceiling
Of the sky.

Your eyes that shroud
Neither succour nor sin
Are two cold ornaments
That glint with gold
And iron tints.

The way you fly at rhythm,
Bold in your abandon,
One could liken to a snake’s
On twirling baton.

Under langorous load your
Head keeps the dainty
Tread of an elephant’s
Child on a

Fence and your tense
Form stretches like a little
Sloop slips
From side to side and wets
Its canvas.

Like a flood inflamed
By the flutes of grating
Glaciers, when the tide
Of your lips climbs back
Above the teeth I dream

I’m strung on Bohemian
Vines in a bitter
Conquest, a liquid
Limit whose floods arrest
My heart in the milk
Of stars.

Baudelaire in the Mouth of Leopold Bloom

You’d submit the universe to thrall,
Harlot, whose soul it is ennui hardies?
To keep your nails in point of play
Sharpen them every day on another
Heart? But eyes bright as a shop-display
Or a Christmas tree exploit insolently
The ever obscured berth of their own beauty.

Stealthy, blind machine, parturate in cruelties
At regular intervals, of health an instrument who drinks
The world’s blood, how no shame or not observed
Have you that mirrors make pallid your approach? Scholastic still
In misery, never did recoil from the shot? The shock
That nature uses you, Her dark
Materials, to its own ends though would-be queen
Of sin, a vile creature, just a work of art?

O fanged grandeur, what supreme
Ignominy.

A Stream in Three Epochs

Window, clear glass, door to the world,
Outside, I mean, and in lower concentrations
The wide distributing fewer particles and more
Interchanges, divisions, intersections the streets
Movement quick as lightning seen through the eyes

First epoch. Second consider a fire consigned
To its place how it eats the logs the gas the smoke
Pours and soots, rushing, drawn, sucked inexorably outside into
Waste, dumps, collected bags, baggage, things have been
Used, expired, what is filled – or emptied shards glass plates
And plastic, tissues, dangerous fabric, etc. et al. and and and

Epoch the third enclosing, what I hold in my chest, heart
Pump-a thump, a thump-pump, chiasmos the crossing (X) central,
Station where the baggage the luggage filled and empties in, put out,
“Going somewhere?” “To…” “Away…” Taking something,
The words, stream of sound moves even along this line,
Metal lines production this unfolding this filling
The heart for all or all for the heart love
Reproduction the children going somewhere?

Out, out to in, the out to the in, these are at least the epochs of the air
The shore, street where it meets, where the inside, the outside
But these are not things the heart for instance or the fire in the coven
Looking bricks pushing out pulling in we think these things we think
And inside it feels warm outside it is cold and wide and fresh.

Paradox

There was a tone, half-tone, stroke of the harp
Divided among precious trunks, whose bark
Bloomed over long nights and found the stars
Proclaiming virtue on the brows of czars.

Half shadow of the sun by day and night,
Carved from the leopard skins of stones
Most musically, in combinations made of bones
That stand behind suggestions in our tones,

Sphinx and specter, spectacle:
Hear a prayer of augmentations, sounds
Stretched on the strings of strangers,
Not the flower or the fruit,
Whose sap is instrument and song.

Love's Old Sweet Song

Some pain does not go away put
In boxes it squirms like a roach
Piles and piles of moving parts
Pieces of little pieces of a little heart.

I remembered eyes your
Slivers of the room, white
Crescent round the moon
That drank in light: eclipse --

I have packed my life into boxes.
The room is cardboard;
I have brought it down. Once
The clock would touch, pendulum
The pending varnish: we were such.

Survey of Eastern Phil

The ideal is to delve into whatever is there,
To take up each item like an expensive
Rock and cultivate its edges, peering down
From pince-nez, lips curled into half
A smile, half sneer, while the giddy prospector
Mines the chances of transaction in the wrinkles
On your face. Is that what Buddha meant,
To treat the senses like a rara avis,
Always under watch and kept in cage? “You must,”
Said maybe, focusing intently on his feelings,
“Let it be.” -- And that was that -- enlightenment.

And some have thought the thought profound, they saw
A swathe of cars hurtling down a lane and the windows
Of the houses half cracked up exhaling sleep and knew
That “this much must be true”, a ‘this’ that takes in everyting
Like a sop of crust in soup or soggy cereal, now I don’t know
A lot about the thing myself, just joyous for a rhyme between
(Or even in) the lines, but it does give a man something
To write about when he scrunches up his face and asks,
“What’s here?”

Romantic Self Pity

How far I’ve left a home behind,
Long lived without it, wandering
Through the streets and the fields,
Either in a sun’s blindness
Or the lamps and the glow of signs
Beckoning “Enter! Enter!” to bars
And the sop of bitterns fuming
Disorientation, while dancers disclosed
Live flesh and revealed their shame.

There are men I have seen like a dance on the river
Swimming upstream in patterns and schools,
But so far I have felt as if only I looked
And refused the cold plunge, alone;

My reeling incomprehension twinkles
Through obscurity, when it is cold,
Also before the dawn’s darkness
Deaf and dumb. So I call out again for a song,
To speak with myself but not to be overheard
Or perhaps not to hear -- or to cut the rough timber
That it will require, to set to the work, to forge
The cardinals and the keys and nail down the floors:

For a home is the only foundation, and homes
Are never empty: the gods dwell there,
Greet the moment that you enter and cry good-by
Like canaries when on the way out you shut your door;
All the corners are carved from significance,
And the windows’ assurance keeps shadows at bay.

But I am over-incarnate of shadows, so never will settle
On slate of planes or plateaus resting firm
In the earth’s raw crotch anymore
Than a cloud can come in from the storm.

To Whom It May Regard

Here, the moaners, faces stretched like masks
And white as paint wear the cistern on their feet
To fill it with their tears. I see of all forms fashioned
From the template like an after-thought, in each a hymn
To difference widening or lengthening and dressed
In every color I can tell -- but always the same meager bodies
Slumped in trespass of the cleft, rounding and stumbling
The deep, dim distance while a star calls and a fire sets.

On Stage

We are the dancers, we are the stars
Quiet in constellation on wooden
Flanks of the stage where we leap,
Galavanting, tapping quick as a song
Without diphthong -- like gerunds
We sail through the endless routine --
And what is amazing, are silent all along
Except for the patter of feet on the beams.

Dialectical Materialism

The material aspects of life
If there are any, a little tea
(One always says 'little',
Fascination with the small,
The tadpole containing its essence
Still in the thickening wideness
Of pools) bathed in translucid honey,
Amber beyond all horizons...

But things are ugly too, the tea is in
A room with a floor that is sticky as the honey,
A mother sucking her bright boy's scrape
To make it heal, that's how it clings,
And the blue bowls drip positively in a morass
Of dirty plastic cups and shoddy glass, strewn
Beer-cans, heaps of etc.'s and etc.'s. Still
There is the little cup of tea, small as we
Are, really, a kind of parable, a kind parable --

And it isn't all so bad as that: it is a hot
Cup of tea, a material thing, a small, resilient joy
Greeting the sunrise and throughout the day,
Shared by grubby hands and fine fingers,
Available in rilling curls ground black or bags
Of chopped greenery and standing neatly in rows, picked
From the dirt of harvests or risen high
In machines of irreparable hum, accompanied

By the most distinct thoughts and various persuasions
(Of which one is this 'poem', but others
Are God, lice, cancer, mice, poodles,
Euclid, wages, wages of sin, puddles of substance
Beyond substance, without substance --
Superficialities, makeup, flights
Of fancy, fights and partners making up,
Then other minds or perhaps robots
And maybe narcs)...

And there is really not much more to say about it,
Not much you don't already know.

More Observations From the Garden

The garden keeps itself from the winter:
In the garden it is perpetually
Spring and the coriander remains green
Because it has nowhere to go and the pink buds
So pubescent and raw
Are like scars by the scalpel of time
Sown into the earth's scalp
That rupture quiet leaves leaving
A harmony. Wounds heal: the earth knits
Her memories into the needle-
Work of the past and is still
As she always was --
While underneath the insects cut
Into miniscule thousands buzz.

In the Play of Light

Now moving into the garden where pools
And the little thrush wetting its wings
In the rippling water while sounds of the street
Fly over the walls and the bees sprouting color
From flower to flower is still
As the air: one image into a bubble
Contained in the matrix of bubbles reflecting
The froth of a whiteness
Boiling over, bubble
Of the world in the bubble that watches
The little bird tinkling its leaves.

Imagine That (A Musical Interlude)

What was unwritten slithering onto
The page like a friar’s fat
Thumb tracing the lines
Of the syllables unspoken
But heard silently in the mind
Like an argument for
The existence of God or
His image…Psst, brother
Are we still going to go
Through with it? --
Go through with what? --
With the question? -- I will allow
No questions… And the man
Walked up the hill with a
Cane, it was made of
Birch, and he leaned his weight
Onto it and it rested on
The ground and the ground rested
On the earth and the earth
Was on the Earth below
The stars to the right of
The sun and the moon
Winked and the birds were nodding their
Heads in agreement
Or they were puzzled or cocked
To one side like someone
Listening intently
For a sound or a song…
I will be getting along
To bed now. Where will you sleep?
Under the hills…There is a tapping
Tap that comes --
Like the rain there is a tapping
Tap that drops and crawls across
The earth -- like a snake,
It is like the presence of a snake
Leaving slime, this tapping is like
The residue of a trail
That is traced, he traces it
Across the moon…All things
Are connected. -- What?
-- In principle; they call it
Fate: when I was born,
There was no early
Or late and this is capital,
This is the capital of the
World. The world
Is like a sign hanging over
A garden; it swings
In the breeze. We swing
In the breeze. Please.

Definite Descriptions

Spreading out white like wings (Doves
Circling the sky or falcons,
Imagine the swooping
Of birds) in a fan-tail whooshing round
-- Its own -- a rotation of plastic
Circularity belongs
To the little table-lamp,
A globe in the glow of something
Very powerful and small.

Traveler's Guide

There they are, the tree-sliths,
The horny-toads,
In the furrows and groves
Of the ceiling.

It is a long way
Up, and the requisite stuff
Is missing, I mean,
The supplies,
So it will be a tough
Climb.

And when we get to the top?
Of course there are the trees,
Raised pillars to the sky;
There is room to worship there,
And expect to get lost

In the intricacies, the details
Which are ravenous for travelers

-- And I have often mistaken a traveler
For a detail,
Another furrow in the furrowing folds.

Diamond G

Why is it that,
At the center of the sky, I see
A blinking eye, turning
On the lashes of the land?

I see, but does the eye
See me? I know
I cannot touch...

(But feel it,
What travels from a long way's
Away I can feel: its gaze, the rays
That pull me to it like a fastened
Rein or gripping hand)

Because I do not understand
What it could feel like,
What it sees, because
I cannot feel it feeling me

Do I even know it's there?
When I grasp at nothing,
Still I reach at least the air.