“Come Godard, come, here, Godard, here ...”

A cento

Is there no when where this dream will rest?

Blue smoke, wings, a plague

of walls, the city motionless, mass

of mind and angst rising

in the brilliance of a cloudless light

[le ciel, c’est mauve comme la lavande].

Everything turns in the quiet leisure of disaster:

a kind of innocence

now supernatural darkness floating,

trees shaking, waterways

swollen under a livid sky, storm clouds

forming in the blink of an eye.

The thought of you is performative: blonde

hair, pale complexion, downcast

jewels for eyes. Your dreadful martyrdom

runs its course, written in mud

and butter: the human instant, in which

you sing yourself full-throated.

Honey, ginger, flared saffron, graywhite

momentous rhythm of sea,

barbarous smell of wet earth, ransacking

or ravaged flowers, the landfill

site, shit-hole, killing ground from which we sup

as shaking, hiccuping drunks.

To forfeit wisdom, atone for sins undone:

the allegorical

hand thrust into torture, noise, shadows

of men. Between the lines,

against the clock, this does not make,

does not make a difference to them.

This age [our age] demands an image of its

accelerated grimace —

an old bitch gone in the teeth, the ultimate

cunt — our botched

civilization, our grave in the sky: last jizz

of consciousness.

I could have, now, blown my fucking brains out,

but for a sweet shimmer of reason,

blood, lone bells in gritty belfries, the shallows

of the sea, the surprise of days

which slide under sunlight, the soul

gathered up, exhaled as rings of smoke.

Clay is the word and clay is the flesh. You

drape your body against

my body, like a sheet of mirrored glass;

you remain, comme le dit

Flaubert, melancholique devant son rêve accompli.

— The word “red” is not.

Forever in lust, forever in heat of fire and flood.

Mule-bray, pig-grunt, bawdy

cackle and the stomping of feet to the beat

of some undone family portrait

— bad teeth, bad eyes, beer and paint cans —

the name and date split in soft slate.

Money makes an inverse difference

to distance, when I lift her back

to me now: nothing there but that pale

curly head, working

a machine up and down, an ochre

autumn merging into twilight.

I read much of the night. Guns click and spit

and split up timber, until

the river’s tent is broken: old kettles, old

bottles, a broken can, old iron,

old bones, old rags, that raving slut

who kept the till.

Dreams nourished with tears, the sweet kinks

of fists, light rain falling as mist.

The hours after you are gone are a lead

white morning of hard, new ice,

the snow drift of that which is left unspoken.

Care and great sadness are both a burden.

No gods, but a black swastika and no sky

but grinding water, gasping

wind, the wares of carthage, girls

with peacock eyes. The churn

of stale words staining the heart again:

bleached wood massed as bones.

Your body is white as anemone petals,

your skin is stone smooth, we

[as cold as the dead they load

like a pile of baskets, mound

of refuse, the sweepings of a street]

are pressed close together, swaying.

Merely the despaired occasion of wordshed

made keener by blessed rage.

Scrape away the prison coating, the itchy

sea; drink from this glass

of pure, real, resplendent blood, its

malediction, freshly soiled and snug.

It’s a question of altitude, probably, walking

along your eyelid again, towards

your tear duct. This dance of fire

that touches our lips, scorches

our tongues and pulls out the thin

beaten tin of my squally voice.

O technosociety, where memory is tolerated,

barely, as real estate

on which to mount steeples of rust, lay

fresh mowed grass, burn gasoline:

anything so long as there’s a margin

and little but commerce between us.

We never have pure space in front of us, rather:

slight bondage, the world’s halter,

this fashion for dressing or setting our hair

ablaze until we’re ash and ash

in the heat of a blank but infinitely scrolling

screen, flared back to scratch.

We begin and end with a groan, the tongue’s

comfortable wetness, sureness

of soul and fluttering lips. Then:

lords of unquiet, quiet sojourn,

each atom which belongs to you

belongs to me.

All abandoned, the last rig broken, the staggering

shadows of trees, fence posts, gutted

cars, faces blurred and Sienese grave.

I wish that I could speak only

of it all, the voices of children singing.

A chapel, in spite of it all.

Notes:

After Ashbery, Auden, Baudelaire, Beckett, Berryman, Bunting, Carlos Williams, Carson, Carson, Celan, Creeley, Dickman, Dupin, Éluard, Eliot, Elliott, Fisher, Forché, Forest-Thompson, Frost, Ginsberg, Grünbein, Gunn, Harsent, Hill, Kavanagh, Levertov, Levine, Lowell, MacNeice, Mallarmé, Middleton, Muldoon, Phillipson, Plath, Pound, Prynne, Reading, Riley, Rilke, Rimbaud, Stein, Stevens, Verlaine, Waldron, Whitman, Williams, Wright, and Yeats.