Rev21

Nothing feebler does earth nurture than man,

of all things that on earth breathe and move.

For he thinks that he will never suffer evil in time to come

so long as the gods give him success and his knees are quick;

but when again the blessed gods decree him misfortune,

this too he bears in sorrow with such patience as he can,

for the spirit of men upon the earth is just such as the day

which the father of gods and men brings upon them.

       
       
       
       
       
       
–Odyssey, 18, 130-137

I

Fraud most displeases God. Of what use is humanity?

Calm down, myself, and be still. Between the

Torments and the Scaean gate,

Surviving in the valley of your speaking,

Each word a copy,

Wall before the watcher

(you beat upon that wall

til truth obeys your call

and soon tire of three enchanted fires of the Lower Empire,

never the contemporary of your own desires)

Atmospheric parting of the frieze

Sections of arcadian strata—

Dream intense, swift—

Year to year and crag to crag, procuring,

Find, as if by design, this night book of signs

In a hell sans hooks

(only writing is thought),

And tread—like a broken chariot,

Enfranchised, from the three worlds—

That path of humility which leads to reality, going forth,

No lodging for you but a cold hard confiding stone—

And shout a secret to the agora stone—

The air filled with water and stone, in a bitter blue light.

Eating the legumen of the algoraba,

Thin from eating flies, circumcising the indefinite.

Fulfilling your destiny,

Shadow-bearing lord of weak remembrance,

Dissembled, proffered, recovered, withdrawn—

Speaking silence—

(Why not just say, disheveled?)

Infernal hurricane in your breast,

Have a little drop of nothingness,

Rest, perturbed spirit—and no fingerpointing!

Confusion is the beginning of the philosophical quest.

Here are some little straws to put in your nest.

I’m blown up! Xook.

Impatient for night? Vade mecum. Every woman is. Very well then, here it is,

In the Nd-Yag drishti of the stance you have changed black eyes

and in intellectual sweetness pissed crosswise so a menstruating Jew will die

(and the images of your mind are changed).

Qui s’en vont dans l’air pur

À l’aventure

I want to know what day this is. What day is this?

Reproduce all marvels of classical architecture

In a distended platitude

Et puis?

Well, in the dixit

of a contemporary critic

what follows radiates the sort of pathologic corona

of a pestilent Prufrockian persona:

in short, an herbal installation

an asana in the assana (without straps)

of an aerie of little eyases

with most miraculous organ,

one great fact of interpenetrative causation,

four positions of the host and guest

whistle belly thumps

You send a fax:

suave vulnus charitatis

gladius amoris

me vulnera

Behold the nadir:

Tension resolved at noon,

you show your O face without a figure from the lips of your eye,

an unhorrified evacuation (full of sound and fury!)

against an art nouveau wall, de-

flowering indifference of liberation (a wonder to behold),

the separate substances: you produce a large unimpeachable

radish, ridenti colocasia, a rotted potato and la cookie

a chocolate kiss on a drop of hammered blood (a puddle

of frozen piss in the Pure Land)

A little one is separated from the body—

la goutte d’encre apparantée à la nuit sublime—

and produces an author.

And why not? Art can change too!

huc ades; quis est nam ludus in undis?

sinister filaments in a thick, gelatinous substance

outraging two enameled shady serpents which part the bears—

frigidus in pratis cantando rumpitur anguis

yes, divine justice like a sex poem, a combustion from below to make

Christian hell smell like a sweet sachet

and your back crack, knees freeze and needled, observed liver quiver.

It raised the wall, and houses too

(and silenced the Sybil).

Perchè sei tu sì smarrito?

And then a green apple quick step

Stouty lizard stampede to the hereafter!

Fear of faces and forms from this place:

Austerity of virgins, sobriety of slaves,

Outmoded shadows, children’s laughter.

I drank, from the clear milky juice allaying

Thirst, and refreshed—heads without name

Then made water at great need

Clutching seven unequal marsh reeds

One thrill sweet grass, one pulse in bitter weed

Fue una vaga congoja de dejarte

Lo que me hizo saber que to quería.

et durae quercus subadunt roscida mella

Reader, can you help observe

that some things are like big, long words?

Who then devised the torment?

Love, reinvented in perfect measure.

Io no lo intendo, sì parla settile.

Love took my hand, and smiling replied,

Who made eyes but I? You were born in the sky.

A part of labor and a part of pain (then reduced, somewhat, by wind).

The young in one another’s arms.

send out words and blood together from a tear

(there is no flying hence or tarrying here).

Sit down, love, and taste my meat.

Give me a gash, put me to present pain—

Beauty ripped by a boar.

Quick now, here, now, always—it’s Zen

Now and now

Teldeath I am coming.

He made time.

As men more like gluttinous swine

In the circus of fixed destinies

Da ist kein "humanity"—

Only time devils, The Ape’s Problem and profanity.

The medical specialist and the painter,

The light collector and the headlight child,

A nightingale named Ruth, the Green Man,

The gris-gris and the bochio, buoi and giogo,

The guey professor and the Negro twin

Brothers who are the only child of two mothers

(they perch like swallows and like swallows go),

Louis, Sir Sinister Palindrome in the sex act, his two-faced silent echo sister;

Prince Fondle, OMO in encaustic emerging from an acrostic on pride,

Hu Nu in a porkpie hat (McNamara with a mouthful of bad teeth),

Hector with his stutter, phantom Helen (her fair face) with her beauty spot,

Aeneas short and fat, that Greek chap Clitoris,

And circus animals and animulae:

A veiled Maya, secret shopper, voluptuous fox,

Scapegoats and branch-grabbing monkeys, scampering Chinese rat,

Un qui passait

Son ombre changée en souris

Fuyait dans le ruisseau

Baron Grimm the geology conductor,

hunting an Irish Atlantis in the swastika (facial?)

entrails of a greedy praying mantis,

Mr. Jimmy the mad hatter, a malignant turbaned dwarf

and eunuch deprived of the extension of his poetic unit,

Ursula Major the minor, Easter, Erato,

Suzy Sansouci and the Disappearing Master,

Buddha doing kung fu yoga in rose midair, the immoralist Goethe,

Sue Kasana and Rick Shasana,

Colombo, Sardinian Foolio, Molina,

a yummy mummy reek-of-estrogen Sybillina,

the donna dello schermo and the girl in pig-tails,

Cowfaced and owleyed,

All look down from out the stair

from the pages of the Revue nue

What minor tearless gods are there (with such hair!)

light little people sous le ciel neutre

in corresponding Tiepolo air

(a phenomenon which I have often noticed)

twining deceitful faces of hope and despair?

If life is a dream, what does it foreshadow?

Who has a bird’s head among the gods of imperturbable upper air?

Hakuryo still withholds the mantle

re-releases an immortal fox from a Chinese box

I met them all thirty years ago

for twenty minutes in some open studio

and endured a session

with poetry praised as an obsession: persiflage,

Duchamp playing chess in a mirage.

They created everything: God, money, time.

They’re not even listening.

They don’t ever care.

White raisins, beautiful virgins (blessed hoochie ladies in the sphere) and vaporized glass

Veronese and borzoi.

Schoolboy, wardrobe mistress and groom.

Fate yields to chance and chaos.

The ecstatic princesse nocturne, la Muse camarde

ici pose, and turns the worked and patient dark Marseille card

(you watch her, frowning,

as if she were speaking while drowning—

she foretold twentysomethings—

their hair uncut—who look seventy years old!):

look at yourself through inner, other eyes: normalize

aspire to taste bitter fire

avoid four (the black eagle), the fifth and hell’s wan

king; owl competes with swan:

seek protection of the serpent king,

a literary terrorist plants word bombs,

til dawn I can’t do anything.

Kingfisher and Fisher King.

Young man and girl in spring.

You have a predetermined number of breaths;

don’t hurry things—dream of me at your identical death.

Lord! You were once ideally ordered selves

who met over a rag in Munich in 1912—

you are asleep, let me speak first:

Tell me and I will tell you if you know

you resemble Foucault?

I see you’ve given your soul away,

but masterful heaven has intervened to save it.

What is the one word? Being. Who speaks it? Truth.

What is meant

by an autistic designer of abbatoir equipment?

I call you humanity: I call you cacophony.

Orderly beauty of mass destruction,

whether military or industrial I cannot see,

death eyes cannot be read with such certainty.

Byron dan les îsles, et Shakespeare encore

From morning to noon they fell

Seraphim in an avalanche, hit and hit

Apotheotic collapse joining heaven and earth

Craters through flames

Bells from gorges

Rung

From noon to dewy eve—

A summer’s day—and with the setting sun

Tone

Yet in that sound the earliest names

have all faded away;

Yet in that Word the weaker words

have long since died;

and the paler images also

have melted away in the seal of the spectrum.

Des fanums qe’éclaire la rentrée des theories, d’immenses vue

(mock) Tone

What is young and old, and old and young?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

II

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This world has forgotten many things.

Which is the natural man

and which the spirit?

Who deciphers them?

Fame is a consensus of sorts. What undermines it?

A bald face unbaptized, a blacksmith and his help,

tickled a pickle, tossed the salad and transferred data.

made a clam dive, whacked the mole,

tied up the toad and christened the cat, shaved their balls and

galloped the lizard, killed Nan-ch’uan’s kitten,

played with a fat dill piece, a turtle and waxed the dolphin.

Paratactic son of man, you who are a copy,

Distinct configuration of selves (not entirely verbal

Pace atlas and iron herbal),

Viral phallucinogenic penis rising at morning to meet you—

bootstrapped, no less alive for that

Kaum erwacht, hört’ ich dein Rufen,

Stürmte zu den Felsenstufen,

Hin zur gelben Wand am Meer.

Heil! Da kamst du schon gleich hellen

Diamantnen Stromesschnellen

Sieghaft von den Bergen her.

Me, the heart moving toward the heart

Moving through the heart toward moving the heart

Love moved me. Love has made me speak.

Todestelle.

Ist auf deinem Psalter,

Vater des Liebe, ein Ton

Seinem Ohre vernehmlich,

You who are a copy,

So erquicke sein Herz!

Öffne den umwolkten Blick

Über die tausend Quellen

Neben dem Durstenden

In der Wüste.

We move above the moving yew

Tree in light upon the figured leaf

Observe the black hunter and conversion of the Jew

And hear upon the sodden floor

Below, the boarhound and the vengeful boar

Pursue their pattern as before—

Only this, and nothing more:

terror and oblivion.

Beauty ripped by a boar.

Kill a boar and prove your name.

exultatio secura cantantium,

concordia summa laudantium,

lex mentis, lex in membris,

rixa cupiditatis

victoria charitatis

O qui dira les torts de la Rime?

infin che il mar fu sopra noi richiuso

Et son égal en pureté et son égal en piété

Ma Dame et Saint Michel

bénissez

A leper once he lost and gained a king

They had no son but the helmsman had his poem

These noisy cities are not my cities

East to New York

Far East to Japan

West to the Tyrean whore.

Gitmo and Indokorea

Tibetan Kalachakra

Merger, Japan

six great cities

Germany hears from every corner of heaven

Russia brings poetry

They’re making a circle out of a star

Pierrette in chains

The owl upon the wall

Banked

Where Michael bent proud spirits under law

[red star] We are [red star]

non iniussa cano

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

III

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the day

(and I mean this in a nighttime way)

We were alive to sunlit terrors

Syntax deceived us

With its sound-form phenocrysts

And obelisks swam in amethyst

Des noms barbares hurlés par les rafales roulés,

Sous les larmes sourdes, cases

Dans les brisants et perdus en

Chair de poule sur les marais

In ambrosial night, still awake at 4 AM, eos erigeneia,

Aiolos, word and mind eponymous,

Castor and Pollux hapax,

Parrity and disparity,

synonymous, fractious fractals,

Mind dirt and broken ash, grimy ash over exhausted ground,

We are in mourning,

Knowing neither zophos nor eos,

That is, neither life nor death, but rather,

One longing for the other.

death unrelated to life

Or rather:

And die, being dead. The world’s asleep, the night keeps phonemic silence.

Todestelle

Liebster, Liebster, der Morgen kommt.

Was sol ich allein hier tun?

In diesem endlosen Leben,

In diesem Traum ohne Grenzen und Farben.

Der Morgen trennt uns, immer der Morgen.

Wieder en ewiger Tag des Wartens.

I think there is nothing to be seen in light

But

The Muffled Gentleman and the ghost of Moritz.

No one can take my death from me.

Watered but cool in an ice age,

Before the pastoral obelisk, a symbol and its tristitia we have put away,

On the descending ass-end of space you brood,

on an unjust wandering grave and rapid cooling of nearby lands,

unpregnant of your cause, drawing resolution from despair,

Make it pregnant, and state an elegiac mood.

Over his own sweet voice the stock-dove broods.

Memory, and perception, and expectation.

Memory, and perception, and expectation.

that

what

how

where

when

why

if

March 10

if you know that you are but not what you are,

what you are but not how you are,

how you are but not where you are,

where you are but not when you are,

when you are but not why you are,

why you are but not if you are,

if you are but not that you are,

what you are but not that you are…

the hundred negations

defend to the devil the literal level,

cut off your eyelids,

nurse your habitus, brew your blood via sacred induction—

vengeance listen to a fool’s request—

manfully strive to squeeze your lemon dry

to step off the mad 51 bus, brush success

accept the armor and hoist your ass

into the noisy upper middle class—howl your howls,

but a draw a web out of your willow bowels

before the coveted crow and incestuous owl;

between the intention and the act

build a fire in the digestive tract.

It would be some kind of music.

Thus gone, you do the bars, keeping your heart

and other inner organs, in Canopic jars.

Work harder, jog faster (keeping going)

then consult the horny Wu Li master.

Take 17 different immortal vitamin and deer pills

then a hike into scores and spores of the alchemic Berkeley hills.

You must learn to confirm L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in Esperanto,

frantic to become a reactionary romantic. Wake up. Vous êtes mal armé.

Defend cliffs in stages

O captain of the rear guard,

nor trust too early to reluctant soil

a whole year’s hopes.

To make things clearer talk to the orangoutang in the subtle mirror

(in which, like a Catholic Ulysses,

you see everywhere the turnless turning cosmic face

fantôme qu’à ce lieu son pur éclat assigne—

wisdom’s reward for running life’s race—

but the finished man sees his enemies),

mirrored mirrors the mirroring mirrored;

whilst a three-legged white raven warns you: be craven.

Dead the warrior, dead his glory,

Above all, dead the cause in which he died.

Practice pinning a ghost on a cactus.

Your eyebrows fall out of the window of the hearing:

raw vegetables and cooked vegetables.

You open a door onto a constitutional

Right, the fact of knowledge (we don’t

tell the Jew!—transfixed by SM politics):

omnis feret omnia tellus

If anything, the opposite.

You’re back from where you went,

and become the constellation Virgo.

You sense a theatrical police presence.

You honor your limits and complete your partial mind.

"Right now I’m washing my feet"—spoke and set the cocks a-crow.

The stricken sun is not named, but his power is amongst us:

Scattered by winds and high tempestuous gusts,

Just, stereometric bees with smoke, and doves in mid-air with noisome stench.

And de se borner à connaître de près les belles choses, et

À s’en nourrir en exquis amateurs,

En humanistes accomplis.

Rimbaud with a cyst. A diseased face shadowed by Catholicism. Pretty as a pietà.

Bees from an unhappy cello come

Summoned by a deathless damask drum.

By wasps and hornets stung.

A dog dreams of a happy ending.

I charm asleep—and when I will, awake—the eyes of men.

Poetry from raw pork and opium.

They vibrate in the dark, and remain below language.

"You taught me language, malice, and I know how to curse."

True dat.

quia amore langueo

and endless rooms of endless houses with emerald chairs

and copper halls, violet corridors and three tumbled ivory stairs

above or below? enharmonic elevations

leading to houses and—muffled scansion—endless rooms, failures of wise

diamond corridors to lead to endless rooms of chemical red velvet houses and

Princess Eavesdrop, aka Belle Headache aka Matelda Hale-Bopp,

a yellow-mouthed baby in oppression blue, her pet

tricked out chimps, Fantoche et Josette:

"I don’t care!" she screams,

"if you invented air!

There’s a real image there!

You only have so many breaths;

do you want to hurry up your death?

Vines and creepers, my girl! You

haven’t killed your lower-case self yet? I can’t hear you.

The five vowels gave birth to you, and passion turned you blue.

It’s time you got off that sofa, Mary (she was born in the sky)

(she hides her literature: she’s drained life to the dregs,

her arms are like forelegs—

how did she get in? she preens

and eats apricots where everyone can see her naked skin,

undoes herself across nine acres,

farts up a sky and expends her yellow labor—

she’s as tarty, farty and arty as Astarte

(her lovers included Sraffa and Malaparte)—

in full view of bewildered neighbors:

the tricks of this dominatrix! the trysts of this Iscolde!

she reminds me of spilt water and my long-lost daughter).

Viewless wind always brings a blush to Phoebe avaricious of life,

The moon spots to destructive Bea cowardly as a spider

who never could bear much reality

and who, for that matter,

in thought, word and act always smells of the fish of the sea—

she’d suck whiskey off a sore leg;

silk comes out of both sides of her mouth.

To hell with her—and I mean that in a heavenly way.

Ma jolie (Rrose Mystica), you have a run in your hose—

don’t look down the dot of your reversible Roman nose

in the anger of the pose! You’re the opposite of prose.

Marianne? takes it in her recuperating can

(she was "traded" between Bellmer and de Man, but

shat on Lacan—cauterise her sinus!

she sings of anger—and of her man)

nevertheless sees in Sanskrit and Chinese

the five elements and ten degrees:

she doesn’t see the forest for the trees

(what can I say? she digs sleaze)—

she just wishes she had a brain pearl! seeks "peace,"

has applied for it to the Bureau of Release.

Lulu (the first Mrs. Milton), in five signs—qu’elle est—of an angel’s decline,

guides us all—or did, before her fall

(this Cinderella came late to the ball,

wearing a necklace of ping-pong balls!).

She has an hyperbolic eye in her forehead:

she has eyes—wha-what’s that you say?

What do you know about my image duplicator?

—for days! They rest, like Keats’ vectors, in relays.

I suppose love’s blind heart conquers all.

What a fright! with her triple sight.

Let me make this clear: she lost her mind over a mirror.

She hides her writing (her perfumed periods stink!).

She longed to see the top of her head.

She was born in an extant lotus and

flipped a coin as she rode on a shameless tortoise—

not to be believed! but what has my scolding ever achieved?

terror and oblivion. She never

comes until Hugo, her arrival, leaves (in love those two are one)—

don’t worry about this nymph, I’m giving her (too much!) notice. Enough; no more.

She’s not as sweet as she was before. They’re not people—they’re napkins.

Don’t even think about it—you have your music too! This

is a chambered tomb à la Poe, a poem: what do you care?

She’s history, she’s a closed book.

Dream on: you’ll always love her, and she’ll always be there.

You should be forced to live out on the streets,

Eating your beard.

It’s your hat makes you mad.

It’s absurd. Let’s leave the initiative to loan-words (follow that bird!), try these:

Michelangelesque acorns—and baby birds!

…les demains sont morts.

Zosted, imagine! drinking Mai Tais on the island of Ififi.

Feel into the moonness of your dog. Which is my right leg?

Ring for an oscillating mushroom. From the thigh lengthening.

Get down this way often?

I should give up tarts. Reverse swan. I should have followed the arts.

I mean, that’s not O.K.—and I mean that in an O.K. way;

you could be meaningful—and I mean that in meaningless way.

See this finger? It’s a toe. Someone shot my dog Munich. He has

a peppermint bark. You cannot be deprived

of glorious haven if you follow your star.

With time—Josette (look at her turquoise ring)! Ne touchez pas!—

I have 0 tolerance for intolerance

Thank you for your letter. We are doing very well here. We have work and we are well treated. We await your arrival. We are working towards the Führer.

weltanschauliche

vernichtet warden Bildung und Vernichtung

Whiter than butter on a ground like a shower of red coagulate gore,

I am not used to live in a cage,

I only live, I only live

In the green forest,

My goal being modest:

To turn objective ideas into myths, Lord

The borrowed language we use today, will live forever

I only live in the green forest,

Fly up on mulberry branches,

Above the silent sea

And orchids in their mimickry,

I eat pine-nuts, I drink pearl-dew, the food for glory.

Quickly, you who are a copy,

run to where the passage starts!

And was that past life a dream?

Where sobbing Idea, like a rétiaire, combs her girl’s mane in this people’s

garden, softly speaking tandemly repeated genes

(in which ontogenic concretion recapitulates phylogenic abstraction!)—

Or was that only possible which came to pass?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IV

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What largesse of bright air—

in which ducks flee M eagles, dogs attack a hare—

clothing the vales in dazzling light, is here!

in which everything, in dropped wind, is a cylinder or a sphere.

Is this the most damned city, the region, the soil, the clime

Amidst spurge-laurel, vengeful heliotrope, cypress and thyme

Of one who cannot be changed by alltime?

Hier ist kein warum.

The year is at its nicest now.

Don’t praise cosmic paired cups when you can see 100 cows,

make yellow patches, quote a sutra, or see the ship of the vow.

All things that love the sun

are out of doors. Infra wind-driven souls on gilded runners run.

Maitreya, schist, sclerosis and Farinata and

in the voiceless shady tamarisk and applauding juniper

curative fourth bear garden of a reciprocal fresco of Siena

we glimpse the fashionable hyena

devouring—its share of ecstasy—the triple refuge of a Lady

while a fawning feral impotent poet makes love to a lesbian lady

Distracted, tonal garden! Hiatus.

Painting, not prose, is the opposite of poetry

ut bos piger palaestrae exerceat

aut asinus segnis inter spheristarum ordinem celeri

This proscribed youthful land

has a sun and stars of its own

and cries out for a mythology with none to hand.

The flowers are inscribed

The exiled sky is five feet wide

Stretched taut over the last of genocide.

A pair of feathers and a long-legged fly

dance a jig on the surface of a pond.

On freshly-cut diamonds, with

white blackberries, babycakes, and apples—narcotic fare—

stolen pears, cloves and pressed cheese,

reader (or are you sick of apples?), rest

yourself awhile on these pithy green fronds—but skirt the laurel pond

(the audience is a myth) of human wishes and prolific

voiceless celadon fishes, where every maw

the greater on the lesser feeds evermore.

Gaze into the index of two ever-flowing springs of unjust water

to see the water-bearing ao fish and

tears and horns of your scavenger’s daughter’s daughter’s daughter

(you owe me a son, my raped daughter),

sip mountain tea from ersatz, named Raku for an hour,

casually, against a sky blue as staggering lapis lazuli, and,

ton irrémédiable filet, l’ennui, browse:

the Elgin marbles have come to drowse

a te convien tenere altro viaggio

fête galante of Utrillo

with the Duce the Führer and the Caudillo.

thaw your locks, feed weeping figs to buried ravenous

loyalty pigs

and suppress the urge to devour

(like that fly, I seem to see you seethe

but remember: even poetry must breathe—

at this point your hostess,

a grave old doll with a murderous gaze,

takes your order in reverse on a pad of little post-its

and muses, like nurses,

famish what you need for your verses).

Turning now to Wieland, Horace, Kant and Plato—books fairies read—

now to Benedict, Peter Damian and Bernard of Clairvaux (and perhaps Marot)

in a universal language of Latin, Greek, French and Hebrew.

Or draw from models here afforded you,

reverse profiles of Osiris in bistre upon protective papyrus,

or watch kings,

gods of their kind,

dismembered by subjects drugged out of their minds—

and that’s a good thing.

Or, finally, renounce a wish

on the cup, the lance, the sword and the dish.

Did you ring?

For this magnified penny world is a perfumed academic room

Furnished with poplar, osier, pipal, teak and wise broom

Purple robes with embroidered roses, and stone looms

Batty atmosphere distinctly "avian": goût grec, meubles Flavian.

The White Cube is not a room. Proceed freely.

Hier ist kein warum.

The topmost spray entreats the forty-ninth day of Y2K

cliché serves and inhabits cliché

puns savage reality.

Why not just say, fictive narration with true signification?

This crown of blossoms, this gay of hue:

although not heaven, this noisy earth is lovely too.

Sraffa, the correspondence theory of truth a tautology,

We have no economy now—and no singing:

we place orders in a cave,

The open kept City—where every sex club is opacity and its revolutionary committee—

as levels of human satisfaction, epidemic contagion of space.

Judicial astrology in Macrobian zone theory

Characteristica universalis differentiation without gravitas

Look! There are those who sharpen the tooth,

glitter with glory,

sit in the sty (jigger the dance)

and suffer in ecstasy—

a moral geography, quirky in the first instance.

I could not weep—the children wept.

Bavius and Mevius

neatness and philanthropy

presents and constipation:

dark origin of liberality

Here they scum again! Here comes one of the parings!

They ask the water buffalo to the bath

In Cancer above the flocks. It is July 14^th, it is

One hour and forty-three minutes.

They bring a lead rope or not.

They grab him by the nose. "Okay! Beast!"

trahit sua quemque uoluptas

Look here come two ambulatory cowpies!

The composed lady of Christ (self) and futureless Miss Virginity (soul)

beating an antique drum—on the amorous green enamel

out of council in pandemonium.

Look! Tiresias has his tit

fresh from the pallet of the posing misfit

(that forwardlooking nanogigawit)

caught in the wringer again!

He’s worse than Ruskin

struggling to master the seven laws of Tuscan!

They take us, leaving us behind, and

Leaving us behind, take us.

Autopsy of Ephesia

Some exercise upon the grassy-fields, but grass is far from them and each goat is pined,

Ryskamp the rabbit scribe among them

with the sky rooster, grinding herbs

Orpheus offending (for style is fate),

Futurum: a trepanned poet en retard? not quite yet a bard?

(What was he thinking?

Ryskamp, like Stella, always loses at cards)

Still, the darling of the avant garde,

pursuing with Ciceronian aisance

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme (stil nuovo!)—

They do say he…

The appreciation of his verse

has exceeded the prewar level.

You who are a copy,

what do you think of Nature Studies? —

That twice-dead mystery Ryskamp is a famous man,

Skillful maker of comparisons.

quae Ryskamp praescripsit pagina nomen

And what of Metamusic? he transforms himself each day anew—

They say you play it with your eyes.

Aimez-vous Ryskamp?

(That jabronie does this all the

time!—he’s especially fond of a rap around rhyme

["But it’s to lengthen the poetic unit beyond the line!—longer poems mean longer lines"]

lives like three angels terminate on the rhyme

As if, "All drama is mine"

His rhetorical bitches his sublime

as if he knows there is no genuine rhyme

That ghost in the machine

Where is the concordance with his rhyme?—he writes

The way a Czech cook speaks German!

Or a Scotch puisne judge of decidedly French origen! —

"There" as if it rhymed with "near"!)

Annoyo Babylonian! Xook!

He razed the roof

with changes to the net proof.

One has to hope

he lives in a world which rhymes like Pope

and in his bowels conceals a reciprocal global proof—or falls off a roof!

molti che forsechè per alcuna fama

in altra forma m’aveano imaginato

Concussive convulsive

Complex conventions for the sake of all people,

The convex lens of his conversation

His encyclopedist impulse does nothing but repulse—

Does he even have a pulse?

Than whom none are wittier

(Tho his doggerel stinks like Whittier!)

That he’s obscene

is clear to any reader seated in Phase 13.

"For sure, some of his lines do fall flat—

his metamorphoses are ovious—but

he is Number One—how cool is that!

He can ride but he’s the devil to guide.

Look: he simply sought images for thought

and his audacity like lion’s wings—

motivated, to be sure, by all things antiquated

and rhymes subject to extension into another dimension—

flies, a delay in glass, like time’s arrow to expression of six personal things.

It’s cornucopic, honey, not myopic:

he provides the new metaphysical foundation of the world—

he takes it with him."

Yes, I catch your drift:

you think that, like a woman, he’s better than Swift.

In incommensurate mastery concetti

sprinkled like confetti,

more twists and turns than a plate of spaghetti—but don’t cry,

feel free to dissect him before he dies.

He turns up his nose

And in pitiful prose

Turns poetry into a small Cheshire Cheese.

And worse! St. Ryskamp Demodocus!

His heart as broken as his hollowed out verse!

Figliuoli where sì is spoken.

"His literary references violate sense.

There has been a hostile influence

a sort of groping in cloacae for erotic penitence."

A Veritable Bede!

A courtesan who reads!

Ses tendences m’alarmaient!

Bad breath from reading Gide!

perceptions out of wedlock

(this poem is like his Bride,

he can’t keep his hands off of her!—

so learned his readers divorce him!—

Modulations? Discrete. Allusions? Replete.

Illusions? Complete. And the Lord knows what—

an excursion his readers take with aversion.)

Who, smitten by auctoritas, could say,

"Go to hell, Dante,"

and make hella rhymes that way—

but he has a headache today.

Even if it is not true

I can’t hear you

even in despite of truth

we must maintain it anyway.

Estraneo a la bellezza, non può essere nessuno

Poetry’s reflexive stores serve

But to renew his stock of metaphors! —

And, like Nature, half reveal

The soul within—and then conceal.

O rustice et wozzock,

ut quid opus tuum inter

scriptores indi aestimas?

qui saepius pro masculinis femina

pro femineis neutra

pro neutra masculine conmutas

The work some praise and some the architect

parva quidem et humilia, sed subtilia ac dulcia

Ce charme! il prit âme et corps

Et dispera mes efforts

Thus gone, subtly of himself contemplative, vowing

Eternal hatred of poets and poetry, a nimble dance,

no poet but ego of poets, of a better nature,

a few years late

(but well worth the wait!)—

then he appears by speech (song is a need of man)

who walks beside him on the white road? What is his Dao? Who is his guide?—

Is it his sister? We. I can’t see: fears are in the way

I do not know who is going to come,

there is no root: where are you bound up?

Two men are just, but held in disregard,

a weaver by his tooth, a compositor by his vacuous left thumb.

Poetry is the subterfuge of an age.

Perhaps he has a brain tumor.

Philistines and the Saracen

and Blake the watcher (Jesus from his tomb) again.

Do you think he wants to rival Apollo…?

finding the element of surprise

in poetry and gods’ eyes.

It is easy to kill people.

lupi Moerim uidere priores

The muffled gentleman and the ghost of

Moritz—but what is the date today?

Poetic rules, like Heraclitus, are the residue for fools. Better than you speak I know.

but to be a poet seen by a wolf

(even a pen and paper poet!)

not poetry itself

not writing poetry

but to be an azure Smyrna poet

cristal comme un conscience

a dancer and a tree

(and root beside that tree)

asphodel, lilies and the dead

mind, inky ash and mud

jade crystallized from blood

and footprints crystallized in mud

squeezing my medicinal lemon dry,

j’essaierai en choeur d’endonner la note

to overwrite is to override

thou are to me

but an invisible thing

a voice, a mystery

(the more I age, the more this weighs on me)

and a thing apart

amidst abdicated snake gods, white notional scorpions

and clever, timid rats of fixed art

in a parable of the poet—

we know not whence come

the basic beats of rhythm

Ach, wer heilet die Schmerzen

Des, dem Balsam zu Gift ward?

Der sich Menschenhass

Aus der Fülle der Liebe trank?

Erst verachtet, nun ein Verächter,

Zehrt er heimlich auf

Seinen eignen Wert

In ung’nügender Selbstsucht.

Todestelle.

Light

Shedding veils on laurels, pulled away by an arm

Slender charm lotus feet and cool statist dignity

ritual impurity! noxious magic! virginal irony

Some foot the bacchant rhythmic dance

(they have 0 tolerance for intolerance!)

transferring corn under the radar in double flaming drishti of the orator stance

in the sacred grove of smoky inframince

(the medium says will sterilizes choice and

nocturnal, knowing chance)

and, in the hour’s right mode

(cider is the liquor of this ode),

chant locked poems aloud, love in bee-loud bee breath—

distichs, eclogues, ellipses of psalms

(four syllables for the eternal, six for time),

chantefables and rational allegory in the volgare illustre

in a style proper to comedy. music as the key of love.

Chausson: Caillebotte

in another room

cantares pares et respondere parati

The Dance of Death, the Way:

choroi in northsouth progress, their foot their tutor,

…les demains sont morts

Friends neither ardent nor weak

Granite monuments to granite

Leur tête a du requin et du petit-Jésus, needless

Careless and heedless

Regarding neither swadeshi nor Hindutva

Tho some do their duty

To the Buddha and the booty

later, departed from the Greek Theatre, advance

pacified blackstone absolutist apsaras in a jetlag trance

as if at an immense séance

follows Orpheus Apollo

ad vocem tanti senis

to a green thought in a green shade: a convenient park,

a beneficent orgy in a far from cool

-.1 porous tufa grotto owing nothing to human artifice—

forgetting that recognition is begetting

hyena their emblem, fuck you their motto

Soon

Rameses the Great spits three times.

Air and world unsought

Central focus of the eternal for a week

Not exactly statuesque—Picassoesque

With a crystal visor and a knot of ice

These kanephoroi and korai,

showing but a single face, refugees from apogee

pressured by a postmodern absence

vegan cannibals of the apricot tree

who scent (their only food) humanity’s one, piddling accomplishment,

endless argument: when can wan "I" die,

beat up the light, and chase it like a kite through the sky?

burdensome grasshoppers, surfeit of data, a cacophony of maiden cicadas

(Hedge-crickets sing—actually their thought is rather messy;

it springs from aspidistra, not the root of Jesse;

their movement, their doxology,

from metaphysics to epistemology—

why not just say, applied typology?

they’re dopes, who "mope" in an erotic trope

passion fueled with frankincense and empty hope)

They are those criminals

whose crime is to invent their symbols

Danseuses de Delphes, apple-cheeked celebutants

of la période flottante in amber beads and five chignons

with tribal bling bling, fly tresses

enduring two changes, trivial systolic confinement: disciplined diastolic expansion

contracting and expanding all their flexible senses

In a Herakles knot, streaming real-time between trailing firs.

Cicadas (which are quotations) on the lifelike morning dew.

tum uero in numerum Faunosque ferasque uideres

ludere, tum rigidas motare cacumina quercus

Metamorphoses approach the epic.

Fruits, leaves and human skin.

Glimmers of light amid the silver summit.

minuet, allegro, andante ground under Ixion’s wheel—

chemical syrinx music absorptive and resorptive! sonic

doubles, Stalinist hero twins, time devils, Hoho, He He

little light people in terza rima the walking rhyme

an inglorious harmonious crowd of two in involuntary certitude

release amid the girlish sala trees

forgetting human words and

wishing what is happening as if it weren’t

pascentis seruabit Tityrus haedos

will and world-spirit unconscious

where evolution and relativity once held sway

from these notions they have simply walked away

(as from establishments far gone in madness)

rich in the simple worship of a day.

moving in silence and detached hysteria

to unbearable Schubert

terrible lightning from the harmonium or shielding lute

tunnels between worlds

in the humility of the brute

and love affair with the assassin of the future absolute

morbus in patient pursuit

in distilled panic in the circle garden, to soft pipes,

amid meteoric obelisks and phallus-bearing herms,

frenzy in the broad cold palace

("feet," also "vestiges," are a euphemism),

pruned trees by sepulchers, barebacked Priapus and Procne

(a surfeit of fruit, and dizziness),

iam neque Hamadryades rursus nec carmina nobis

ipsa placent; ipsae rursus concedite siluae

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

V

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Every woman adores a Fascist.

Which was cruel, Mother, love or you?

They burst from the sauna like Jews from a gas chamber!

One dog goes in while another goes out.

Waiting out the regulars,

They don’t come and they don’t go.

Jews and screwdogs (dogs in heat).

word and word

terrible and gay

Why are you here every day?

You’re nothing if not in my way.

I loathe you—and I mean that in a loving way.

Then what they say three times is true:

There’s just no getting away from you

(but pines and laurels weep for you).

Who knew

You were evil through and through?

Then you bit my pretty red heart in two.

They quicken their pace as at a lash,

Nor wait a second there,

But pick up their feet and make a dash.

Ebbing men, like shuddering toads from snakes,

near the bottom run, accroc de l’astre jaune, éteint.

The run of the mill are ground under foot.

Freud’s filthy image came on more and more

Yet landed with but head and chest in view,

Leaving his tail where all the unjust waters roar,

Eau et gaz rise from the floor.

Blind house of woe, shutting the door on futurity

(Shut up! They have their Vanity to keep them warm!)

Ach! du who walk alive, speaking well,

Ryskamp, you who are a copy,

We have lingered with the tips of our fingers

in the chambers of the sea

Because and because

White raisins, beautiful virgins and vaporized glass

Fanatic Egypt and her priests

To fright the reign of chaos

Falconetti

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Sitting in a park in Paris, France

Peace is despaired, for who can think submission?

Jane Fonda

The world is named so

Syncretic Chinglish

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

genoi hoios essi: the world congratulates the mind

Poetic rules are for fools:

A mongoose spews a meteor, then the circular origin of jewels.

In whose intelligences sixth in line

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought

Let us follow knowledge like a sinking star.

Leering, leering.

the clock on your wall

the clock on your VCR

the clock in your car

the clock on your wrist

(your watch must be fast)

the clock by your bed

Ransack the center

hora and hebe

divided time

My cousin, my wife, what are we here for?—you’re asleep.

I can’t hear you. You are eighty and I am eighty.

It is late

in the world and Aremideia

must be skillful in Upaya to teach it.

My wisdom is not very great.

I have turned into what I hate.

I smell a plum blossom in a cherry blossom

Blooming on a willow branch.

Shuddering orchids and narcisso floreat alnus

peony tree and chrysanthemum tea

I engage in 3-coloring.

I use Chvátal’s comb.

I think it is night

both years and days deep midnight.

And I, Asinius Gallus, held on to one word

Eyes bandaged,

With but a memory of language,

Lingering between heaven and noisy earth

In gray twilight knowing

Neither victory nor defeat.

Offered by a downy-lipped, chlamys-clad eternal boy,

a mere intersexual lad in a wide-brimmed hat,

a syrinx air, and acorns in his hair

so aloof he falls off a roof! Early and late, foot and fate

who complains of Virgil, and that nothing happens

in the faint Iliad,

Guarding sheep by an obelisk

(or on a half-reaped furrow sound asleep),

leading an unflawed complacent goat from a fruit-laden vine,

to an old man blinded by an execution

and led by an unhealthy mongrel dog,

a bunch of acorns, cookies, a cold biscuit, then a cold potato.

A set of teeth and galvanized bones is traveling upon this road

through explosive, tearstained bamboo, tattered flags

no-go zones and slag,

prunus and pine hunting the toad,

to where all loves end and all love ends,

bearing an impure load;

but better trudging through residue there—than living here—

on death’s hard royal road.

Non sum qualis eram,

there fell my shadow, there falls my shadow—a distant shadow rhyme…

I cannot endure an old man like myself. I’m tired,

the soles of my feet are on fire. Hell is middle age—and the faces you meet.

Square principle, circular knowledge and the cone of nonduality.

What pity! What pity!

Only exaggeration moves me.

Parcels and morsels, homage and regret.

I like to be alone,

my tongue’s a stone. Iron must be the heart within me.

A poached egg underground, a windbag cobbler,

an old man but no bats hanging upside down

swinging the scaly horror of his folded tail,

a white ax in the open ground.

Let me load an empty autumn:

The rug, capsa, kandys and lamp of vigil,

En bas, dans la nef dalleé de pierres tombales

A blind insightful Sicel mother pouring chocolate

and opening blindfold a plain black egg to wisdom;

in a hanging osier basket, snake and an eaten baby boy;

and Friederike, a clairvoyant restless dead child of seven: anastasis.

A kettle on the hob, some tea things on a shelf,

a mirror which does not show you yourself, storehouse key

and Cézanne’s obliterated apple and 54-skull rosary.

An indolent goddess on an urn,

a melancholy nightingale in autumn,

the soul’s assent to exquisite constraints,

the perpetual triumph of sacrifice, terror and oblivion.

Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur, balde ruhest du auch.

A red crab roasts on the hearth.

Late Vesper lights the lamp—

bid me strike a match and blow.

Scars and music—and sing the sun to bed.

A sterile supreme hour has struck and

The horse and the bull have bridled their ardor.

Darkness hangs about me like a shroud or a sheet—

tomorrow I must go and go out and with myself compete.

The perishable sound of a bell.

A hollow form with empty hands.

Youth is landscape, old age the blacksmith’s cave.

the fence of time, the geological twilight

The repetitive stress of living, and the drug of dreams.

Yes, soon.

You’ve said goodbye

when you’ve said goodbye to the lantern of the moon.

My fortune my misfortune. What I heard

In the wingbeat of a bird. Ah, misery!

Glad to be old

and not see this mess unfold

even with my trousers rolled,

soon to face the wall and not speak—

thus gone, look after my soul in the seventh week

and place a three-headed dog at my feet. I’m cold.

Voll Güt’ ist, aber fasset

Allein Gott.

So lebte er hin

It would be comforting to make love with a woman,

and sing the canticle of infinite gratitude

Tre donne intorno al cor mi son venute

for pleasure’s endless trance—

or of Kosovo or South Central L.A., in song: place it on the female body.

I would rather be free than loved.

What else have I to spur me into song?

Eyes that lured a doting boyhood

Might well fool a dotard’s age.

Lord make me chaste, but not just yet.

Silent, unaccompanied English is the language of the sea,

English poetry like sinful karma runs to the sea

And remembers the Thames valley. November 10. I want to die.

Shakespeare and "heart."

Shakespeare and "stick."

Everywhere I turn robbed by the urn.

Harp hung upon the willow, a damask drum hangs in the laurel tree.

no long time will you remain to me,

a semi-Islamic litsedei among the fissiparous—in reality

or what us humans call childish reality.

evading the chain of causality

Who was the Prince Hal born under the sign of Gemini?

(Master Frost with his feeble stylus)

I am not Prince Eliot or was meant to be—

Fascist or Jew, he was once tall and handsome as you

La pensée est la houle ressassant le galet.

What is the use of humanity?

Beautiful body as you are,

you’re dead now.

C’est la chanson des rêveurs

Qui s’étaient arraché le coeur

Et le portaient dans la main droite

perceptions out of wedlock

Ratification is a burning reality

and ransomed heart-mystery.

Di realtà e di acqua: la ratifica è un altro.

Tell death I am coming,

an old hunter talking with gods—but I am not content, I want proof

(do you hear this nightingale? named Ruth—or is it a toilet flushing?)

I will regress through age to youth.

Let me be!

saeva indignatio:

I sleep beneath the greatest epitaph known to men:

The Point of View will see me through

To my death—

or should I take arms against a sea of troubles, like Macbeth?

I have seen deep-seated Phthia and know the thoughts of men—

And my death belongs to me

and it walks with me and it talks with me.

The earth is already round.

A loud tree—but what exactly does the wolf see?

I can’t bear it.

A sighting of cacophonous humanity

Such as a Returning Angel sees,

Amalgam of life forms,

I am tired of humanity—Ryskamp,

it has been a scene well set, and excellent company:

may all these characters remain

when all else is ruin once again.

I do not ask for a wife—

I am a poet of the afterlife,

like Keats, before and after life—

sons, money or a long life.

I have no father-in-law.

And seasons have no parents.

quia amore langueo

Imagine all of

humanity leading you to death.

I know I do.

You come too.

My hands are numb, my insight dumb.

One must go to bed laughing.

Humanity is grass

And knows it. Pray you fill this glass.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

VI

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Speaking first, you address the noisy assembly:

Quickly, run to where the starry passage starts!

All those rooms, white bears and passages are gone,

as is the exacting lawn!

That music is gone: where are they? eternal west, seeking distraction

In the life it made. You were born in the paradise of the fateless west.

Goodbye. And was that past life a cool dream? a shipwreck that

in which you doubt your sanity, and wag between extremes.

Where Idea, like a rétiaire, combs her girl’s mane in this soldier’s garden,

microepic tandemly repeated genes.

You have seen Apollo and your peers anew

And venerated the lyre. Night, adieu.

Wind-driven souls on gilded runners run,

each assures the other’s life to come.

Fraud most displeases God.