Last night I dreamed I ran through the streets of New York Looking for help for you, Nicanor. But my few friends who are rich or influential were temporarily absent from their penthouses or hotel suites. They had gone to the opera, or flown for the weekend to Bermuda. At last I found one or two of them at home, preparing for social engagements, absently smiling, as they tried on gown after gown
How did you come How did I come here Now it is ours, how did it come to be In so many presences? Some I know swept from the sea, wind and sea, Took up the right wave in their fins and seal suits, Rode up over the town to this shore Shining and sleek
Stretch’d and still lies the midnight, Two great hulls motionless on the breast of the darkness, Our vessel riddled and slowly sinking, preparations to pass to the one we have conquer’d, The captain on the quarter-deck coldly giving his orders through a countenance white as a sheet, Near by the corpse of the child that serv’d in the cabin, The dead face of an old salt with long white hair and carefully curl’d whiskers, The flames spite of all that can be done flickering aloft and below, The husky voices of the two or three officers yet fit for duty,
Am I a character in the dreams of the god Hermes the messenger? Certainly many of my dreams have nothing to do with the common life around me. There are never any automobiles or airplanes in them. These dreams belong to an age in
This morning, between two branches of a tree Beside the door, epeira once again Has spun and signed his tapestry and trap. I test his early-warning system and It works, he scrambles forth in sable with The yellow hieroglyph that no one knows The meaning of. And I remember now How yesterday at dusk the nighthawks came
Act 2, Scene 2 Clindor, a young picaresque hero, has been living by his wits in Paris, but has now drifted to Bordeaux, to become the valet of a braggart bravo named Matamore. He is chiefly employed as a go-between, carrying Matamore's amorous messages to the beautiful Isabelle—who only suffers the master because she is in love with the messenger. clindor Sir, why so restless? Is there any need, With all your fame, for one more glorious deed? Have you not slain enough bold foes by now,
"What you are struggling with," said the psychologist, "is a continuous song, something like a telephone's tone. Nebulous, noncommittal, unrelenting, pretending to give you messages it can't deliver.
Because the body is unattached. It is," he said, "like a valentine sent out cold, beautiful, brittle as tomorrow's deja-vu, but distortedly misaddressed. These pills will help you find yourself somewhere where the lace ends up loose and the paste is still humming
On a wall shadowed by lights from the distance is the screen. Icons come to it dressed in capes and their eyes reflect the journeys their nomadic eyes reach from level earth. Narratives are in the room where the screen waits suspended like the frame of a girder the worker will place upon an axis and thus make a frame which he fills with
I go separately The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands it is the dungaree darkness with China stitched where the westerly winds and the traveler’s checks the evensong of salesmen the glistening paraphernalia of twin suitcases
The night winds reach like the blind breath of the world in a rhythm without mind, gusting and beating as if to destroy us, battering our poverty and all the land’s flat and cold and dark under iron snow
The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder, Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment, From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.” Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant To spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye,” she scratched Her cleft chin’s solitary hair. She remembered spinach
And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach. “M’love,” he intercepted, “the plains are decked out in thunder
All night I hear the noise of water sobbing. All night I make night in me, I make the day that begins on my account, that sobs because day falls like water through night.
All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me out. All night you abandon me slowly like the water that sobs slowly falling. All night I write luminous messages, messages of rain, all night someone checks for me and I check for someone.
The noise of steps in the circle near this choleric light birthed from my insomnia. Steps of someone who no longer writhes, who no longer writes. All night someone holds back, then crosses the circle of bitter light.
All night I drown in your eyes become my eyes. All night I prod myself on toward that squatter in the circle of my silence. All night I see something lurch toward my looking, something humid, contrived of silence launching the sound of someone sobbing.
Absence blows grayly and night goes dense. Night, the shade of the eyelids of the dead, viscous night, exhaling some black oil that blows me forward and prompts me to search out an empty space without warmth, without cold. All night I flee from someone. I lead the chase, I lead the fugue. I sing a song of mourning. Black birds over black shrouds. My brain cries. Demented wind. I leave the tense and strained hand, I don’t want to know anything but this perpetual wailing, this clatter in the night, this delay, this infamy, this pursuit, this inexistence.
All night I see that abandonment is me, that the sole sobbing voice is me. We can search with lanterns, cross the shadow’s lie. We can feel the heart thud in the thigh and water subside in the archaic site of the heart.
All night I ask you why. All night you tell me no.
But how choose the appropriate sticking point to start at? Who wants to write a poem without the letter e, Especially for Thee, where the flourished vowel lends such panache to your carnet de bal (OK, peons: pizzazz to your dance card)? The alphabet’s such a horn Of plenty, why cork up its treasure? It hurts to think of “you” reduced to u In stingy text messages, as if ideally expression should be limited to formulas like x ≠ y,
Where the respectable truth of tautology leaves ambiguous beauty standing by Waiting to take off her clothes, if, that is, her percentage of body fat Permits it (a statement implicitly unfair, as if beauty, to remain sublime, had to keep up Lineaments already shaped by uninhibited divinity); implying, as well, fixated onlookers, i.e., Men and women kidding themselves that full-front-and-back nudity is the north Star of delight rather than imagined nakedness, shudderingly draped like a fully rigged, fully laden ship without a drop to bail,
Its hidden cargoes guessed at — perhaps Samian wine (mad- making!) — or fresh basil
I say to the named granite stone, to the brown grass, to the dead chrysanthemums, Mother, I still have a body, what else could receive my mind's transmissions, its dots and dashes of pain? I expect and get no answer, no loamy scent of her coral geraniums. She who is now immaterial, for better or worse, no longer needs to speak for me to hear, as in a continuous loop, classic messages of wisdom, love and fury. MAKE! DO! a note on our fridge
Clarice, the Swiss Appraiser, paces our rooms, listing furnishings on her yellow legal pad with a Waterman pen, a microcamera. Although I've asked why we have to do this, I forgot the answer.
The answer to why is because, inscrutable, outside of logic, helpless, useless because. Wing chairs, a deco lamp, my mother's cherry dining table—nothing we both loved using looks tragic.
Most nights now I sit in the den reading the colorful spines of your art books, Fra Angelico to Zurburan, volume after volume
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