A Centenary For The Fragment

Knowing where 
we are

it’s no surprise
there are no stars

A diffuse light
has brought us here

to this blue sward
where animals blanche

and casual nude
figures

recline 
in their tonnage

their wishes set
toward fulfillment

in a land of sighs
and pink rosettes

**

He remembers the dead
who were his friends

their little fingers
that grasped at laws

who ate and drank
and stunk as him

their constant moaning
like a night of strange

where lies
conjoin to make amens

and dusk- blue accents
morph the furniture

into tangled blue apes
that blur the mirror


**

One way to see it
is that everything means

there is no other
than the one we make

with ruined grins
and pale imperatives

the desires they bring
to the desire we are.


**

There are only three sources of beauty
left:

nature, art and the human body.

We have lost antiquity in a century

only to gain a new impermanence.

There is little choice but to experiment

or wind our way back to a semblance of classicism

as Goethe did and Eliot,

but a classicism formed

from some kind of future-sense.


**

In the blue collage
of the man

pinned in wreckage

Circe weeps magisterial
tears

Behind her, pink pigs
traverse a vanishing trail

Their sighs
floating upwards 

like white lufik
towards the stars

 

 

— David Hickman