in ever tighter rings around the winding lines
of hardened sandbags, the bowels of death.
The local butter
tastes of poppies.
Memorial Statue in West Flanders
The grazing of the nearby cattle.
The farmer sitting in the shade of the pale statue.
The trees that bow for the wind from the sea.
His parents bought the patch of land
where he was buried in mud up to the jawbone.
He was a gifted student.
“Maths or something,” the farmer says.
The sculptor worked from an old school photo.
“Two years later the parents died as well,” the farmer says.
“It’s getting cold. I have to milk the goats.”
More bones somewhere else.
Corroded by the acid of the polder soil,
a childless son with a guilty stare,
as if looking down at his geometry,
his grave in the grass.
A Bed In Bruges
“I work in the chemical industry, Sir,
where you die by degrees.
After ten years you get to retire
because of the fumes in your lungs.
“I’ve been there fourteen years, Sir,
the last two as a driver.
And in those two years I haven’t had to vomit once,
because of the fresh air.
“We Belgians drive better than anyone else in all of Europe,
and I’ve been everywhere.
Because we drive dangerously.
It makes you more careful of the others,
who drive dangerously too, but won’t admit it.
“And you know the most beautiful thing I’ve seen?
And I’ve been in the Sistine Chapel,
and I’ve seen Gisele lift her skirts in the Mocambo.
Well, it’s in a shop in Bruges,
a wine-red bed. Empire. Or is it Louis Quinze?
“In that bed, with Gisele, I would forget my three children
and the entire calendar.
Love, Sir, should be in satin.
And death, Sir, is the feeling you get in your stomach
when you know you will never be able to afford a bed like that.”
The Farmers
Thirty pigs, fifteen cows, a tractor 75 HP,
a TV, fifty chickens, no kids.
(“We’d have liked some, sure, Sir,
but we’re not keen on doctors or hospitals,
’cause what if something happened to the wife, Sir,
who’d take care of the stock?”)
Villas—“Morning Glory”, “Spring Breeze”, “Bambino”—
are planted in their fields.
Their rye and wheat dissected by
the Flemish Touring Club’s recommended walking path.
Sundays, after Mass, they shuffle,
wearing shirts, transformed, clean-shaven, awkward, over their fields,
staring at the earth they don’t see on workdays,
with their short-sighted grubbing and grabbing.
Potatoes and bacon weekdays
and every Sunday a chicken out of the freezer.
When the air boils and the crows are gasping, they drink seven
slugs of brown ale
leaning on the oil tank in front of the house.
They only tremble after a day tossing hay up over their heads,
or filling in the deposit slip at the Municipal Credit.
(“Three to three and a half percent. Is it safe?
The notary says it is. But what if they get in trouble, Sir?”)
Does the tolling of the village bell
preserve them from their fate? To avert the evil eye they nail three
bats to the barn door, alive.
The Rubens Room in the Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts
Faced with so much irrepressible flesh, the girl in the museum smiles
like a young nun in the sun.
Such excessiveness is hardly human;
the human, as her ethics teacher taught her,
is a mammal, true, but these women,
this endless flood of fleshy quince (the perfect bridal fruit)? No,
the girl laughs. She hugs her Avenue to her breasts,
two underdone fried eggs with lots of runny white.
Does she have the same tissues?
Will a similar surrender one day melt her skeleton
into such filthy, sloppy tumescence?
If this blubber is divine,
then life’s a thing that suffocates in gravy and jelly
with udders and tangled hair,
a thing that strangles by embrace.
The girl laughs. Chastity, as far as she’s concerned, can triumph over love
and death can triumph over chastity.
The vulva deificata is a different commodity,
installed in her it’s quite a different thing,
1965
(in reply to a newspaper survey about the previous year)
Year of atrocities, year of TV screens and stock reports,
Year of milk and honey if you’re asleep,
Year that weighs on your stomach if you’re awake,
Sweet year, good year for sleep-walkers,
Year that 25 billion Belgian francs went to NATO
for tanks, flags and jets
(mosquitoes in death’s unbounded clouds)
Year of Mobutu, we send him assistance in dollars and cents knowing
they’ll
blossom into percentages,
Year of Voeren, which people want to rescue for a language they only read
in
advertisements,
Year of freeways for ever hastier sheep,
Year of rot in Belgian skulls,
Year that licked at the trough of folklore,
Year (fortunately far from our piggy banks and our folk dancing)
of the escalation there where children grey with fear
dig themselves deeper into mud
(Give them this day our daily napalm
and later our canned food and later our prayers)
Year that freezes smiles.
That was the year I went to live in a village
with books, a woman and a child
that grows
while I tell stories about tigers in the East.
Home
III
The singular sky
That brightens the earth.
The path that leads our steps
And in it our track: a dotted line to the end.
Nature: bordered.
The land: bound in.
In shades of salmon and metal.
The posts that sway when you move.
The reflection of the saffron field.
The pigeon behind wire.
The mouse-grey on the floor of the cage
Is the old seeds.
Speckled and striped.
The world seems trapped in a grid.
Your eyes pierce the pattern,
Mottled, almost hidden,
The hole is a mirror.
The simplicity of a bucket.
And finally, awake, present,
Never ready-varnished, only limited
By walls of gradual lines,
Turning on the spot,
The man bending down to his bucket.
Home. Almost a world of its own.
In Memory of Ferdi
In the Paris I now hate,
in ’55, in rooms that were scorching,
we were hungry,
you showed a lot of breast that summer—
Your lips: scornful of all others.
You’re in the night now and in water
and I — do you believe me? am senseless, sleepless.
You who made velvet ferns
in what I must call
“back then”.
Even now you confuse my thoughts of you.
They flake and chip, chattering away
in this disenchanted canto for a slight, lost lady
Ah, the emptiness of my regret
and the wandering desperation
of my provisional present tense
with you in many coats, flowering flesh
in the bygone, bygone zone.
Female Friend
She said, “I would never kill.
Not even if a man a meter away from me
was strangling my little boy.
All life is sacred.”
And I saw her in sodium light,
the sibyl with her outrageous law,
in heat with suicide and prayer.
How the clay hungers for the skeleton
and the earth for the dung
and the mop for the blood!
And how I dance in my bestial sweat
and would kill and how!
Early December
(for the New Year’s guests)
Shall I ask them for New Year’s? To celebrate together here
With punch and feeble grins? To see the New Year in.
Who? Not those who are too wild, not those who are too mild,
Not those who count too much, but those who tell too much.
And most of all the ones like us.
I will soothe them with booze until they crack.
Should I make them pay? Would that enhance their thirst?
Quail? Waffles? Shall I also ask the self-generating
Toad full of poison gas who guesses at family secrets
In my transparent verse? And the greasy connoisseur
Who sits up and begs at the slightest crumb of protestation?
And that shrunken beetle who writes in his paper so brashly
To deny the migration of souls in my poetry? Ah,
Even his corpse will never crack a smile!
I will invite them. No, you ask them, madame, as
I, homunculus in my menthol cloud of dread,
Am like Mickey Spillane, weathered out of my own desires.
Ah, together we will all compulsively pig ourselves
To a full-blown rectal cancer,
We, miniatures more at home in heraldry
Than in nature. Ah, to greet the New Year with
All its whims and grudges, its freezing cold, we’ll scream
dozens of Quantanamèras and Yesterdays.
Yes, again, again. Shall I ask them?
Diary Pages
6 (
On Thomas’s Fourth Birthday
)
Later, my son, you’ll be a man,
later you will yearn to learn the how and why.
They’ll stamp you like luggage.
They’ll hurt you for your wishes and your dreams.
And you will try once and for all to photograph
the how and why of the woman
who turns between your sheets
who sings as you expand in her skin.
And later still, son, your life
will be a scrapbook.
But not for ages yet, no, not for ages yet.
17 (Translation)
Translated Borges’s Tango today.
(qua propter quod bene factum est in una lingua)
Jesus!
It creaks in every joint, it waddles,
this dirge of a dance.
In Spanish: a hard box with music inside,
a sparking flint, a coiled spring.
In Flemish: a band-aid. The metre slides under the table.
The link to the music is lost.
(non est possibile)
Faithfully ailing, how else could it be?
A Flemish tango on two-timing feet.
from Morning, You [1971]
Mad Dog Stanzas, traditionally reserved for poetry by drunkards and lunatics
~ ~ ~
I see her thinking: My kisses
are cold tonight. — How she then hurls
herself into that trusted void!
Mechanically prodding me from
her vacuum. — Towards her smell.
~ ~ ~
I count the steps on the stairs
and then subtract her age.
The number of times the clocks strike
are the thirteen letters of her name.
I tear her like a wet newspaper.
~ ~ ~
Will I ever grow used to time
that wears us down together?
Or will I, like her, become a coincidence,
an aperture in time? —
Her slit is my sign.
~ ~ ~
You lie there naked, but no more naked than at the doctor’s.
Your wound no more naked than your knees.
As if it’s a habit. My own body, I’ve come to see
with different eyes. As if, after all these years,
the rejection no longer applies.
~ ~ ~
Your palm glides more softly, you’re starting
to get it. Your breasts are fuller too
after three months of caresses. The dance
of your hip finally echoes our first nights
with all those teething problems.
~ ~ ~
Close to her, I think: our story is
cold metal, something for half
a day a week, a passing madness.
And I’m just the table leg a bitch
pisses on out of longing for something else.
~ ~ ~
Getting dressed. Pressing what I’ve worshipped
into stretch panties. Arranging your segments.
You raise your foot & I think
you think I’m a part of you.
Something like an ingrown toenail.
~ ~ ~
“More. Don’t stop. Faster!” No, she didn’t groan
it, she swore, “Oh, God, oh, God damn it!”
And then, “What have you done
to my face? It looks years younger!”
And then, “Oh, boy, if you ever cheat on me!”
~ ~ ~
It’s finished. Adieu. Hidden under make-up.
Or rather, did it ever exist? Or is there
a corpse still lying here between the sheets,
looking like the two of us and panting still?
Her mouth: my lock.
~ ~ ~
The smell of her cunt and arse confuse her,
the taste in my mouth shames her.
She’s not that fish, she thinks, with piss and sweat,
but some other animal, deodorised and in another land.
That’s why she’s sometimes hated by her glands.
~ ~ ~
Her name which you say and yawning
spell out over and over again, snowed under.
Her name which you groan
until the neighbour calls the police.
Her name which you swallow / like she swallows her pill.
~ ~ ~
When she sleeps I open
her finest pages and read
the wiring of her soft,
warm television—
a circuit from her to her.
~ ~ ~
Ha-ha! I had a heart, I swear it,
trembling like any other. And chattering.
Truly, it lay there waiting for her.
— She took her iron and placed
it on my heart and pressed and pressed.
~ ~ ~
“Do you want to?”—“If you do, so do I.”
“Then I don’t want to.”—“Me neither.”
Who wanted to? Who wanted to?
When tenderness is in the majority,
there’s no one to open the door.
~ ~ ~
“He took my virginity,” she said.
“Every day I’m scared of him,” she said.
“I can never trust him,” she said.
“I sob for h
ours at a time,” she said and sobbed,
“and you, you’re just my lover.”
from Figurative [1973]
Five Polaroids of Jesus Christ
1
A stick insect
with something feminine around the ribs
an iris in his midriff.
(Death is in my hipbone, the left,
my jaws already calcified;
once I was as bright as a flower,
as bitter as blossom.)
Mutant. Transformed from man
to mantis by paternal wrath.
He is edible, digestible
like the crickets of the sea.
The sun burns him
to blisters and shreds
and ash that drifts to the water.
2
At the village pump he let the children
play with his crown of thorns.
He pointed at a comet and said,
“Look, my father’s winking at you.”
Then his mount grew restless.
“I would like,” he said, “the greatest sinner
among you to take a bite out of my ear.”
But they kept staring at his girlish hair
and sullenly he spurred his pony on
across the crushed-ice sand.
3
One of his manifestations preached
the following: “Hey, followers!
What’s going on? People,
God help us, with the hots for purity,
want to replace gold with white!
They want to shuck off their senses,
unsullied by minerals, changing
the gold of thought
into bland half-hearted white!