I amuse myself with my country. I glimpse its future approaching on the eyelashes of an ostrich, I toy with its history and its days, I strike it with stones and thunderbolts. I extinguish its lamps and light its windows, and at the other end of day I inaugurate its history.
I am a stranger to all of you. I am from the other end. I live in a country of my own, inflating the sky to see its ashes, and in sleeping and waking I open a bud to live within.
Something must be born, so I bore caverns in my skin for lightning and build nests. I must pass like thunder into lips as sad as straw, between stone and autumn, between pore and epidermis, between thigh and thigh. And so I sing: “Form worthy of our demise—advance.” And so I shout and sing: “Who will give us the maternity of the cosmos, who will nourish us with mines?”
I advance toward my self, toward ruins. The silence of calamity takes me—I’m too short to gird the earth like a rope, I’m not sharp enough to pierce the face of history and plunge in.
You want me to be like you. You boil me in the cauldron of your prayers; you mix me with the broth of armies and the pepper of tyrants, then pitch me like a tent for the wali and hoist my skull like a flag. (My death, Nevertheless I run toward you, I rush rush rush to you.)
Disguised in my mouth as a swampland nailed to my teeth like a rising sun you come out in the middle of fish-scales you bleed into gourds wrapped with red ants you syncopate the air with lungs like screams from yazoo like X-rated tongues and nickel-plated fingers of a raw ghost man and somewhere stripped like a whirlwind
From a blue keg, the barrel's thumb-tuned goatskin, the choirs of ancestral ululation are psalms and pivot for the prodigal in a dirt yard at Piaille, are confrontation, old incantation and fresh sacrifice where a ram is tethered, without the scrolled horns, wool locks and beard of the scapegoat,
Abolished, and her frightful wing in the tears Of the basin, abolished, that mirrors forth our fears, The naked golds lashing the crimson space, An Aurora—heraldic plumage—has chosen to embrace
I remember when I wrote The Circus I was living in Paris, or rather we were living in Paris Janice, Frank was alive, the Whitney Museum Was still on 8th Street, or was it still something else? Fernand Léger lived in our building Well it wasn’t really our building it was the building we lived in Next to a Grand Guignol troupe who made a lot of noise So that one day I yelled through a hole in the wall
Rose of fate, you looked for ways to wound us yet you bent like the secret about to be released and the command you chose to give us was beautiful and your smile was like a ready sword.
The ascent of your cycle livened creation from your thorn emerged the way’s thought our impulse dawned naked to possess you
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle, Out of the Ninth-month midnight, Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot, Down from the shower’d halo, Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive, Out from the patches of briers and blackberries, From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
This day, whate'er the Fates decree, Shall still be kept with joy by me: This day then let us not be told, That you are sick, and I grown old; Nor think on our approaching ills, And talk of spectacles and pills. To-morrow will be time enough To hear such mortifying stuff. Yet, since from reason may be brought A better and more pleasing thought, Which can, in spite of all decays, Support a few remaining days: From not the gravest of divines Accept for once some serious lines.
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