#118 L'Eternité

Everything that looked
on turned
away,
even
small birds
whose eyes acquired

only outline, not
the detail.
Fear
frays
the hem-
line of eternity.

Who
comes to
save us now?

#117 Les Fleurs du Mal

Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre
Charles Baudelaire: La Beauté

Sometime
I must check up on
why the statues
of antiquity
had no pupils. Would
have been easy
enough to do, a
drop of paint or
use the chisel as
an apple-corer. In-
stead left blind.
Deliberate. No need
to see who calls. In-
duce the dream of
flesh beyond the
stone through
flower wide open
& eyes wide shut.

#116 La Belle Idée

I start to tidy up
the tapestry. The unicorns
worry me. Not the one
all gleaming white &
shiny-horned, it's the
other, the one with
the shades & lycra bike
shorts who's lurking –
can unicorns lurk? – who's
hanging out then, there
by the castle gate,
waiting for some corn maiden
to come tripping out
on her way to the
fields where he will follow
& (impale her)². Only
just then the Lord
of the Castle comes
riding up with his entourage
who all have earpieces that
drift down into their
chainmail & steely eyes
that scan the crowd, a-
lighting on the unicorn
who pretends he's looking
at postcards in a market stall
before sliding back off
into the background &
back to his nighttime job
in a porn theatre where
the prurient masses pay
to watch some corny maiden
get impaled by a quadruped
with a condom/inium on his head.

#115 Memory of a Journey III

 

I know we sidetracked
to see where the
troglodytes had
lived. Other than that
think bridges gone
over, under, or
danced upon. & lines —
train, coke, telephone.
Somewhere we had
antipasto, & drank. Not
too much, just enough
to make conversation
easy & company
complicated. Towards
the end the waiter
brought a bowl of
fruit. We peeled the
oranges & fed the seg-
ments to each other.
We left the apples.

 

#114 The Interpretation of Dreams

1) The Acacia

The arid regions
of Senegal
act as an incubator
for the
gum arabic tree.

2) The Moon

A soft
moon shuffle
by the light
of the
silvery shoe.

3) The Snow

The bowl of
night is
black
& filled
with white.

4) The Ceiling

ceiling
wax
lyrical

5) The Storm

The sky
has that angular
clarity that
often precedes
a change in
the weather.

6) The Desert

Only when the
last nail
is put in place
does it be-
come apparent
that all along
it was a
mirage that he
was building.

#113 This is not an apple

It is the
most realistic
of his apples.
Slight blem-
ishes, variants
of color. Leaves
& scissor-cut
stalk. It is
what the painter
says it isn’t.

#112 Discourse on Method (1)

Having
suffered
through 17
symposia
convened
by L’Académie
Francaise
on Le Discours
de la Méthode

& fearing
he was
about to be
pushed be-
yond the
bounds of
rational
thought

Descartes
discarded
his wig
& his silk
breeches
& hose
& headed
for the
nearest
leather bar
muttering

“Who gives
a fuck what
anybody
thinks. I am
what I am.”

#111 God is no Saint

Either. It is
an absolute.

Or. It is
an absolution.

The bird
is perplexed
by the shoe
size &
is unable
to decide.

#110 Le Trait d'union

     The male                       There it
       flower                          encounters
        breaks off                   the female.
          & rises 
            to the                      Birds
              surface of             grow.
                the water.
                                            The use
of hyphens with adverbs is redundant
unless an identical adjective exists.

Late-blooming sun.

#109 The Search for the Absolute (1940)

Held
the leaf
up to the

light.
Said. In
this one leaf

the
entire tree.
Said. Is fractal.

Is
blueprint. Is
the entire forest.

#108 The Lovers

Is said. Aug-
mented by
is seen. Sur-
text. Not under
but laid upon. The
emphasizing
hand, the under-
scoring smile. What
is read into by
what goes on
around. So
are the lovers
so aware of
one another
that inflexion is
nuance? Or is
there something else
behind the cliched
blindness?