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 last week you tasted of ginger,
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.”