Toujours Déjà
(Lautréamont’s Wedding)
Il n’est pas mal que tout le monde lise les pages qui vont suivre…
Harrowing as a small bowl without sides, the comma at the end,
as rice-paper and lace and figs.
Already Monsieur is wearying of the mice,
which are sad and overfed; and barely moving. Who gave them
so much cake? He bites the end of a tail while the delivery van pulls away.
She’s swollen, scrubbing the dishes and writing her father a letter: O,
Daddy–this man hasn’t been easy on me. If only he would find
my keys or water the plant.
Yesterday, someone borrowed the blue
fern from its nail over the door, and it hasn’t been returned.
measuring the static
when it’s hijacked the arm of a boxcutter, the knife
its veins good
when it won’t hurt much, when it doesn’t limn
when it won’t wrench the face away from you
anyone
when it takes on being what it wants to be from the wood, when it takes on being lacquer
and when it takes on being permeated
when it’s all wet, and the baseboard is shiny
when it loses its own color become translucent the night become all glass all texture
when it becomes clean
when it’s all over and there is no one, no one, that I want to talk to more, when it’s limned
when it’s like that I’ve been there with some of you already
and I’ve peeled you away from that
when it’s been there some time for you your wrists your arms your chest taped
together, and I am tape, and I appear
like an X fashioned in the window with an X on it
(and the crow is out)
when it’s cruel, and I am afraid
and a warlord
pressed hard into you
and the fear escaped me
when after having seen you your wrists we cross in a mirror that was conceived so beautifully
I come over with a knife
designed to get the shape, and I rob it
when it’s not me but my agility, your agility
when we’ve become predatory, and proud
when it’s drawn
when it’s given up when it’s pinched it’s nothing
celluloid when it comes up the whole strip
breaks, when it’s awkward, when it makes us get on our knees to peel it
Entropy
Yesterday’s smokestacks are broken
off on today’s ideas. Enter a tired
town like Birmingham (AL) on a Monday
morning at rush hour. The hills
are cobbled with smoke. The other drivers
don’t look at you, and if they did,
you’d wish they didn’t. Not one of them is
going to heaven, but to the same
brown temple with the same
bad lighting.
Even so,
it gets better. For I don’t live here,
I live underneath. Beneath you in the wall where
the roadblocks are all pushed to hell
and so is the crowd. It’s the kind of place where
you can almost hear a conversation upstairs
miles away, and if we lower our voices
enough you might be heard to say, Dave,
take that back.
And I will,
I’ll say Rockville, Bethesda, Marigold,
Disappointment, the Nile, Mississippi, Amazon,
Whodunit, I don’t know, how can you go on
without me, looking like that, Big Muddy,
Tigris-Euphrates, Boxcar, the River, …
Door One
Where it existed, you could have gotten anything–
the vacant house, the parched roof, even the dry
root cellar. I was there, I handled
the keys as you broke each step on your way down.
The jar of pesce, jar of rings.
But that won’t open it up.
The vast square above is cut out in a semaphore.
There is nothing to decipher.
No ladder to fall on.
The rest goes in,
and if you have some offering on you
become as bread, as winnowed wheat.
I tell you I’ve eaten it all up.
Fleur-de-Lys
all the ground is your bed.