virtues, wrinkles, solitude.
The nights grew older and longer.
And then, without a sign or word, a grumbling verdict
was passed. That’s right! Justice could be done!
How else can we explain that we
unnecessarily, improbably, unjustly,
were dancing slowly by the sea?
Now often, when the evening falls like snow,
a thing or creature moves towards us. And it
reaches us and in our pity-hollowed trunks,
it bears its fatal young.
from An Eye for an Eye [1963]
(after the ancients)
1 Him
My soul says, Run,
even if it costs you money and love
So says my soul
But I don’t move an inch, I can’t
Because my soul, the snake, is still mad about that little
black-haired bitch!
2 Her
An evening like any other. Nothing
to tell me you were present in the world.
I received no notification
I could have missed you
I could have stayed home that afternoon,
fallen ill, met your cousin instead of you
Someone else would have taken me that night
Isn’t it better to be made of stone?
Or am I glad it was you?
It’s better to be grass
People mow it, weed it and
it grows wild again, never the same.
4 Him
People say that a man
who has been bitten by a mad dog
sees the image of the beast
in water everywhere
Have the teeth of rabid love sunk into me,
that in the vastness of the sea, the river’s
whirlpools and the glass from which I drink,
I cannot escape your image
smiling up at me?
5 Her
Marsha said, He’s too old for you. Imagine!
Knock it off, I said. Next thing you’ll say
I can’t forget my dad. Come on!
But I still think Marsha’s great. Lovely, really
’Cept when she gets like that …
You’re old, my beetle, yes, but you find your way in me.
No one finds their way as easily as you.
Wait, I have to do my nails. Now? Yes, right this moment.
Wait, I said.
(“I’ve got him where I want him,
like a beetle on a pin.”)
9 Her
Dear bumpkin, I won’t be beautiful when I’m old
Hurry,
caress the eyes of my breasts
22 Him
Yes, your eyes sparkle star-like everywhere!
And you make me your captive
when you dance with another!
It’s true, it’s true, your secret hair
burns on the lips of your lovers!
But soon (so very soon, my bunny rabbit)
you’ll see them land on the moon on TV.
And what will still be shining then,
there in your room?
The diamond in your ear and nothing else.
from The Sign of the Hamster [1963]
Een razernij, een kuil, een pijnbank om te pijnen
Haar zotter lievers die nog in haar kercker zijn.
Bredero
(A pit, a frenzy, a rack on which to torture
the foolish lovers imprisoned in its dungeons.)
~ ~ ~
This is what I will write:
a trip from Ghent to Bruges and back.
Because I am being written.
It doesn’t rain, it drizzles
in this country in the grip of the past.
Should I emigrate?
No rock or wilderness anywhere unless this history-crazed nation
excavates it and cultivates officers there to keep the peace
and nowhere is the thought’s main seam laid bare.
This is what I was going to write:
a tater for later, a third for a verse,
allegro con fuoco.
But peevishly grieving, the hooked spire rises,
surrounded by clawing clouds and trees like antlers,
under the aluminium sky with, in it, a falcon
or a sparrow hawk.
Tower, gallows, cross.
Now that — from the days of Ursula, her virgins and her executioner—
the plague has been reintroduced
to the cocked and loaded continent
I will be intelligibly resistible.
Left Ghent
— though I, thank God, do hate this town,
there’s not a turd that doesn’t have a fly to buzz around it in the sun
and Ghent has gates that never close
although the Lys reeks of folklore (foreign currency)—
for the town where I was born among cars,
scalpels and Memlincs.
Left not unwillingly,
but with women-trouble i.e. moody
and otherwise not contemplating heavenly bodies
but more the skin you pull over your own eyes
and the disease in which you find a home — satisfied.
Now the rabbits have died in the west
the foxes (giant hamsters) feed on the sheep,
biting their udders and bellies at night.
The sun wants its shadow.
Nocturnal birds of prey (so much softer than falcons or sparrow hawks)
wear lined gloves that cover
their fingers to the beds of their nails.
Like the cross spider’s
simple rhymes.
Left Ghent among loaded smiling postmen,
following the tram tracks
“between channels, many”
and waving to relatives or residents.
Lots of streets offered diversions under skirts.
Low entertainment throbbed in wandering eyes.
Slow down, you, who used to
venerate the moment
and now return to perhaps, therefore and but
and will soon believe in Nature like a newspaper.
Cat people sleep away their days and hunt at night,
the birdman wakes before dawn,
I am the toad and nowhere to be found
unless you drag the pond
or beat the grass.
The houses here are grey and crenelated,
their skin recalls a woman with
the pox. Renovation only speeds
the rot. The houses here are dead and
tortured The residents shack up in them
quite happily.
Like using a scalpel
to search a vagina
for a foetus.
Stefan George in Heidelberg: You can ask me
to eat bread that has been adulterated
with a large amount of bark.
That’s acceptable.
But there are situations in which one must say,
“No, not that. I would rather die.”
(Which? He doesn’t hesitate,
a mountain wind blows,
the poet shines on a boy like the sun.)
“For instance.
If one were obliged to eat rats or mice.”
At that time (in the Bagne of Toulon)
they dyed the Zouaves’ trousers
crimson.
Near South Station, in the Telstar, the card-players sit,
silhouetted sharply against the day.
Present are: Horsedick and Hadji Baba (because of his slanty eyes)
Gaspipe (for bashing passers-by) Snowwhite (four years suspended
sentence) and Bugs (who scratches)
cadaverous, sordid,
the weavers’ shady descendants, joking
and hoping for a guardian angel to bring
them stunning luck and Sundays
(when they give the cards a rest)
udders.
In the Advanced Book Shop,
as academic as the lost Hebrew word in
Isaiah Two Six, as dark as Yahweh,
the toads are mating.
Her underneath, dropsical, with eyes of mud and chlorine,
and on her shoulders,
struggling yet motionless,
the father (like a suckling).
Blocked yet balanced.
No peat smoke can bother them. Gender is absent,
inflection and conjugation.
Then like a moral lesson, a celebration,
he moves, almost falls, gives a bitter belch and shudders. A tic.
Respect makes women thin. He moves no more.
Like the lure of your hedgehog
among plaster prickles.
Left for Bruges. The year has taken off its coat.
Rode through the countryside under azure skies, paling.
As always, the bandy-legged farmers came
to stare at the rain-bringing train,
bowing chastened to the ground.
No more than a legend, they dig the earth
like harnessed ploughshares. And vote compliantly.
Cherishing their farms and children Senator and priest
so sacred groaning wins over legislators
and no-one ever hits his neighbour, in astonishment
and fury at the sameness of things.
No-one vomits, skin rules and smothers the broad suspicions.
I don’t want to go on, they are contagious, I want
to go back to being wrapped in the jabbering that dims as
Death defeats me.
Come here. Now? Come on. “Look into my eyes.”
Bruges. My mother holds her babe — her prey — tight.
They have to search inside her.
The doctors at her bed compare makes of cars
and my father beeps at the gate.
Boneblack and dead I am born between
the hospital Memlincs,
Ursula among the angels wrapped in membranes.
No vine leaves or deerskin,
but metal organ pipes.
The seraphic canon: my first breastplate.
Again the year takes off its coat
in the city of lacework, obsequies and star-shaped vaults.
Oh, the old-style zinc smirks
of paladins, prelates and pimps
crammed onto panels!
On brick walls: the Annunciation.
Naked with a dagger and a feather hat: Lucrezia.
How elegantly mocking
is the past.
The fools of Bruges stand at the back
of the preaching hurtful mob.
Like the moth-
eaten myth.
[…]
from Lord Wildboar [1970]
Lord Wildboar
THE DEATH OF HIS FOREFATHER
He left us well before he died,
six months before, dull, broke, reeking, wrecked,
for all he walked intact from room to room.
“I haven’t known a moment’s joy,”
he said and tried to breathe,
audibly in the cooking smells.
He then turned blue. Like a plum.
He loved his plums. And cherries too,
the younger the better. Mother sat alone.
Not that he was dead just yet. No,
he held onto the chairs, seasick.
It was his heart that wouldn’t die,
the engine. The chassis, the bodywork
were shot but the engine was still good.
He took to bed and sometimes he was dead.
The nuns hissed, “Yes, his time has come.”
But with a gasp and a hiccup,
he started up again; just bluer.
They took him to the room
reserved for dying—
where the soul escapes decay.
His head was clearly shrinking,
the size now of a woman’s fist.
With staring eyes. But could they see?
Nature takes its course. They stopped
his food and drink, but still he wanted it;
he chewed. The nuns sang the Angelus.
When they dabbed his lips with a sponge,
he bit into it and wouldn’t let go.
They pinched his nose and he let go.
No rattle. A gasp and hiccup now and then.
Yes, his time had come. Freezing cold below the knees
and sweating up above. But the engine didn’t stop.
They gave up bed baths. Turning him
might jolt his heart and make it stop.
Eau de Cologne, not too strong, on his temples.
Don’t talk too loud. Don’t mention debt.
Or signatures. Could you please leave now, sir.
Son or not, please leave. He hears it all, every word.
The inside of his mouth turned black. His skin—
the less said the better. They wiped away the black
that crept into the edges of the sores, so fast.
Fist-sized craters in the cheeks of his arse,
with black mouldy edges. Declutch, a shock, he over-
strained the engine. Which stopped, thank God.
And suddenly collapsed in on itself.
They filled the man-sized hole inside
with cardboard and cotton wool.
And wrenched him straight, before he stiffened,
or else they’d have to break the bones
to make him look good in the coffin.
No washing even now. Each touch disturbs
the flesh, as light as pollen in spring,
Difficult sorrow came for Sir Wildboar,
beset by attorneys and family meetings
and the days of the cart and the funeral.
I was the nail in his coffin, he often said.
Even now, a fingernail, as a final gesture,
scratching the walnut of his head.
Lord, take your son into your arms.
The women went left (all lovers).
The men went right (all sons).
The time of the earth fermenting inside him now.
The time of the seasons. Quick give me a beer.
Forefathers galore — and all cut off.
His Prayers
1
The slow cattle of my days
and all those years of rancour,
bad-tempered romps in the garden next door.
I dreamt I unzipped my lashes
and gave them to you, merciful one,
and you blew them like a dandelion,
oh, restrain your punishing hand!
In my subterranean warehouse of words
the iron jams, the plum bursts open,
teeth chip and splinter.
Your holy bread won’t heal me.
Nails, thorns and Veronica’s veil.
And how the guts of the three murderers
on Golgotha dried out, the third one’s too!
Your will be done!
The temple curtain works itself loose,
falling over my eyes, my lips, my crotch
through the intercession of all your mutilated children.
2
It’s later than anyone imagines.
What’s growing in our core?
What’s gnawing on our backbone?
We carry our skin.
—Benevolent one.
And we are not scorched
though darkness falls
in the stairwell of thought
and night splits the tips of our fingers.
—Look down in mercy.
Warts from earlier crimes
are planted in the child
in its mother’s womb.
Quick. Slide Father under the bed,
put on a crash helmet.
—I plac
e myself
at your disposal.
3
The house rustles, a board snaps loose like a shot.
Then someone says my name,
nearby, more clearly than my mother used to call
in the darkening street.
Clattering leaves,
animals lapping water,
and my name again,
like the bark of a birch bursting open.
Listening to the muffled tick
accelerating in my wrist
I wait for the order that will now
descend from a hellish flock of crows.
Demolish the house, brick by brick?
Quell the embryo inside of her?
What must I incinerate?
How to smother forever the prayer
rattling around my bed?
from Hearsay [1970]
Anthropology
This nation that supposedly
moves between two poles,
excess and godliness,
believes less in the hereafter
than in its daily groats.
This nation will give alms on Sunday
for the pope or Africa,
or burn incense to venerate the statue
of the Curé d’Ars who stank of the poor,
but generally pays and prays to calm
its fear of leaner years and butter up
its docile rulers, the realtors.
In Flanders Fields
The soil here’s the richest.
Even after all these years without manure
you could grow a dead-man’s leek
to beat the best.
The British veterans grow scarce.
Each year they point out to their scarcer friends:
Hill Sixty, Hill Sixty-One, Poelcapelle.
In Flanders Fields the threshers drive