As if my father’s hair
was not curled and gilded!
As if indulgences and repentance
earn you immortality!
Forget it.
God is in gold alone
and gold is the only reason
for an almost reasonable smile.”
4
“Burdened with crown and armour,
wrapped in my tentacles,
braggart and beggar,
I preached mercy and yearning.
I could bear no emptiness.
“Now I no longer turn my cheek.
I stink like a bed full of lovers
and stiff as a ram
I sometimes dance with fury.
“I only pray when I shit
(and no longer as the Son of Someone).
(What’s more, the Slut is dead.)
I only pray that it will end.”
5
When he felt the first cold
in his pores and glands
he told parables to his contemporaries
and sang psalms for the poor.
Sometimes he stopped breathing
and said to his father, “I thirst.”
When the evenings grew shorter each year
he practised dying.
He only ever coupled
with his mother’s hat.
Ulysses
I have seen too many battles,
heard too many lovers’ howls,
I always travelled too far.
A diorama has replaced my eye,
a humming top my ear.
Too much mud,
too many corpses in it.
Too much joy.
I will now hide among the suitors,
those beggars.
A Kind of Goodbye
1
A snail trail. That’s all there is to say
that I came by, a Wednesday.
You don’t need to forget yourself,
others forget for you.
And yet: as dark as it was in my ferns,
as white as I once saw the sea,
as cowardly as I died and as often,
there can’t have been a single person.
Didn’t you see me?
Who’s coughing? It’s my throat, that’s all.
Really, no. — I never saw you.
5
They say you’ve blinded me.
Probably.
Although it’s mostly misty when I lunge
at the sound of your hissing
and often the wind from your mouth is cooling
as I kiss.
You said, “Let me be your whore,”
and I asked, “What does that make me?”
You said, “I’ll give you three guesses.”
I guessed: a moment,
a wish, a possibility.
And knew: a pilot light,
an attic full of rags,
yes, a festive hockshop.
And for the others, and there weren’t many,
a ground beetle
rummaging briefly in their hair,
an itch, hardly a breath.
Introibo
I should go in to you? To you, you sleepwalker?
To ask your forgiveness? Forget it.
Must I erase my sleeping sickness
with midnight masses?
I want no peace with you,
and no prayers to you,
I recognise no dear lord,
I’m not a servant anymore,
Even if I
could see you,
I would decline
your thorns, your thirst, your death, your stench.
Hecate Speaks
IX
Only the incomplete
makes me replete and fat.
Beauty is not harmony.
Most of it, I must forswear,
and all of it, allay.
My shadow is the only thing
that doesn’t make me shy.
Even if you take my arm,
even if you’re very warm,
even if I have no choice
beyond your fingers, nose and cheek,
even if my belly swells for you
even if you bring me in from the cold,
even if you shut your mouth,
even if I grow in your earth,
I still won’t let myself be caught,
between your gallows and garrotte.
Stay in your wood,
where people thrive.
I don’t want to walk there,
hawk there, be pushed underwater there.
I won’t surrender my shell,
my shadow, my husk.
XI
I hear with my little ear
something that I don’t hear.
Whoever wants to hear me
must speak with my mouth.
Who’s this? Me.
And you?
I see that you think
that I just screamed,
and you heard no sound.
I see that you hope
that I called
for help perhaps.
It was my throat,
it wasn’t me,
it was my playful voice box,
my sweetheart,
or my rutting grief.
But it, Father, was not me.
Not once in all the days of your life
will you know that kind of delight.
XIII
Saying I hoped to eventually make bird!
Crippled wings and all!
Saying I wanted to save myself
through mortification and lies!
I wanted indemnity,
I wanted distraction,
in my secure sick bay
full of shells from the old days
yesterday’s dressings
and tomorrow’s toe nails,
waiting for someone to come
and sew me back together
with gossamer, angel hair.
I’ve been spoilt in my tent of pain.
I believe I’m smiling.
from Almanac [1982]
ALMANAC
LIAR’S SACK
Tout homme digne de ce nom
A dans le coeur un serpent jaune
BAUDELAIRE (l’Avertisseur)
1
Begin this year in glory
and hear what the young father,
hoarse and red,
whispers to his first-born:
“Leave and dread.”
5
It’s fine for Dad to hit me
because Dad likes to
with his hand of hard wood.
If I was big and fat,
I’d do it too, if I could,
to a kid
who loves his dad as much as I do.
12
“If you get married, you’ll hit rock bottom,”
my mother said,
and I felt it at once, that layer of rock,
under the soles of my seven-league boots.
20
He slammed the door.
Never going back.
Not if she put him on a throne.
But by the time he crossed the tracks
he was tired and his feet were sore.
He thought, “No-one’s made of stone.”
22
— Just go away.
To your mother or something.
— There is no or something.
— To your mother then.
— She’s dead.
— Oh, poor thing. A long time now?
— Since before I was born.
24
A she-ape, but bald,
that’s what I call her.
It’s not exactly flattering,
but what can I do,
it happens to be true,
especially at three in the morning.
31
“You alone can help me,” she said.
“Help me. Make me
forget him.”
That night, when she moaned,
I thought of him in that far land
and she heard it and turned to stone.
74
They carried off the victim.
They took the pimp into custody.
Then the mounted policeman
gave the whore
some more of the third degree.
100
“How can I ever get warm,”
she cried,
“with this ice-cold snake inside of me?”
110
The old man sat on the cow
without a stitch of clothing on.
He’d had it to here with the world by now
but the cow went on and on.
from Shards
Montale’s “Little Testament”
For Harry
That which at night like a will-o’-the-wisp
lightens the skullcap of my thought,
the mother-of-pearl trail of the snail
or the glittering dust of crushed glass
is no church light, no office light
that’s fed
by a clerk, either black or red.
All I can leave behind for you
is this rainbow, this iris,
the only witness to a faith
that has been battered,
a scraping of hope that burnt slower
on the hearth than green hardwood.
And so, Harry, keep this spectrum,
this iridescent pollen,
in your pocket mirror
when all the lamps have been extinguished,
when hell has broken loose,
when a dark lucifer lands, exhausted,
on a bend in the Thames, the Hudson, the Seine,
shakes the pitch from his wings
and says, This is the hour.
It is no inheritance, no talisman
that can keep the cobwebs of memory intact
through the wet, hot wind of summer.
(A story can only survive in ash.
Perseverance is tantamount to annihilation.)
Righteous was your sign.
Those who have seen it can only
find you. Each recognises his own.
Your haughtiness was no flight,
your humility was not low
when you lit your black light somewhere far away
there was no smell of sulphur.
from Alibi [1985]
Halloween
I
It is as quiet as the death of the dead no one knows
everywhere outside of your room,
where you dance all alone like before.
But there too I hear
what you don’t say
the way I want to hear it.
Far from bedraggled Europe,
where the deathly haze will soon descend,
we stare at each other,
almost dead like plastic chairs,
and neither you nor I admits the murder of me or you.
II
Lying on the black rubber floor,
the autumn leaf, yellowed over the weekend.
Greedily you nibble on an ice cube
shaped like a heart.
November comes and brings the bitter half
of the year in with it.
Time to reconsider.
If I were a bog body, would you love me?
Senile, would you laugh at me?
You nibble on me, but not really,
I’m too old and cold for that.
Cupid, a little brat made of cement,
arrives on cue and smashes to pieces on the floor.
III
Mountains with coyotes and rattlesnakes,
in the valley, the stinking cars,
and in the bed with twelve pillows, you on your back.
You too will lose your shine and your teeth,
but not this afternoon.
Although your mumbling has already paled
as you stumble short-sightedly out of bed.
You, once made of marble, with hair sprayed green,
grow more and more absorbed
in a story about yourself
even while listening like a blind woman
for, somewhere overseas, the beep
of the alarm in the watch on your lover’s wrist.
V
What I know on the eve of November first?
That hemp should be sown at midnight,
that the great cold will descend on a night like tonight,
that you smile at me like a cross-eyed nurse,
that the sun seeds cancer in the lung, the moon in the womb,
that it’s time to burn all the cardboard boxes
from the old days before I forget,
that everyone feeds off someone else,
that you’re like the hills of Carmel,
shining and salty as the sea,
my hobbled doe, my model with a dose,
my nun who hungers for clothes and mirrors and
the orgasms of men who growl,
and that you groan in your sleep without me.
Even Now
The four-lined stanzas are based
on a selection from the Sanskrit
poem the Chaurapanchasika.
Some of the commentary is
Paul Valéry’s.
I
Even now, gagged and bound on the gallows today,
she, who will awaken soon with swollen lips, eyes closed,
was something I knew, and then lost sight of, and how,
but how did I lose her, how does a dog bark when it’s drunk?
Sanskrit horniness in syllabic lines?
Bring it on,
for me, it’s as clear as a monad:
all seduction comes from seeing,
from the action of seeing or from the idea,
or rather the sensation that we’ve missed something.
II
Even now, her face like the moon and her body like the moon,
young, bitter young, with those breasts and buttocks and ribs.
Love had arrows once, a quiver full, you felt how sharp they were,
a torment, you were sure, for that full white moon of hers.
To put it another way,
seduction creates a necessity
that had not existed previously
or was drowsing, asleep.
III
Even now, her chewed-down nails, her chafed nipples,
the creamy thighs and, in between, her vertical smile,
and she who despised metaphysics said, “Ah, honey,
every cell of your come contains both God and his mum.”
“So she exists in a world
of autumn crocuses.”
“No, she is an autumn crocus, really and completely.”
“Sir, science requires categories.”
“Her red pussy, the arch of her back,
are they categories?”
“Um, yes, but almost abstract,
like an autumn crocus by Van Doesburg.”
IV
Even now, the welts and bruises, swellings and tattoos,
love’s injuries hidden underneath her flimsy frock,
and I fear this will just go on and on, this bitter furtive
scratching and clawing at her miniature no-man’s-land.
We’re forgetting two things, by God,
the different ways of being
and the different ways of not being.
I fear that you’re trapped between no longer being
and not yet having been. What do you say to that?
V
Even now, completely still, she lay excessively alone,
abandoned left and right, a numbness in the roof of her mouth,
and I, as motionless as her in my own cell, heard
the clink and rattle of the chain around her ankle.
“When will you be together?” my mother asked.
I said, “In the realm of King Baudouin,
when the world will be truthful,
when the Yellow River is clear,
in a month of Sundays,
at the noon of midnight?”
VI
Even now, I remember how, in the morning, tired and slow
after making languid love, she hung her head almost shyly,
a duck that slid over the lake and nipped at the water,
before diving down and biting me and then never again.
You could also say, “The roots seek what’s clammy,
the blades find the sun
and the plant forms itself
between two equilibriums,
between one longing and the other.”
VII
Even now, I tie her pitch-black hair up in cocky
combs, plumes and quills and worship her as a totem
and a cross in my house that quickly, awkwardly
transforms into a temple to Love, the furtive goddess.
Soldiers painted a cross
on their shields and won the battle.
But you’re in thrall to a game
where only losing counts.
VIII
Even now, all those rooms and nights and creamy nakedness
and all that sleeping after and before and the smell of heather.
How she snored when I asked if she was happy now and how
she stroked the bolster that had ended up between us.
Until the eighth century
one kissed the Pope’s hand.