ROBINSON JEFFERS
1. night passed in a room--the turnings of twilight,
turned humid, drab turned unkempt, lipstick on
perished glass. a roar in the night over the bridge
& the bellows of new jersey over the hudson
wasting down into a wasted blood-pulse...try to picture
a sky full of moral agony, everything naked. even here
i am lonely for you & our century's lucklessness--
its ghost hustles at the door. behind it a picture with
figures coupling, asleep or awake beside each other
as though beside a wasted idea--thin & pale as a cut
vein. diogenes laertus squats on the fire escape
cursing the heat. such things exist only if we read them.
who were we then? a gross noise echoing through
time, whether it be heard or not. because you
cannot believe accidents occur without consequence
for the things that aren't accidents. dogfaced
on a ledge above george washington avenue--
what should progress sound like: a knock on the door
or a bed-head butting against a wall, thelonius monk
at the five spot? the problem is not how to
kill yourself, but how to stay alive, balanced on a thin
crust. i at least want no more than this: to isolate
the organism of paralysis, to laugh in private
at the grey distressed figure that comes from the
shadows to meet me, now that i demand
nothing of it. so much for the preamble--
is this all that dreams offer? noise mingling with strange
lucidity. & what does it matter if we melt into contr-
adiction--if the old tempers no longer with-
hold themselves but slacken into something
fleshlike, joined, in a room, compassionate for what
opposes them? or exposed to an eye that sees everything
in quotation marks--& you, who have seen it too,
stubbornly holding to the facts. as if you or i would
automatically awake & find the same evidence as before
2. an impotent wind that stirs nothing, not air--drunk
3. it begins with a sound like a great
NOSTALGIA
a revenge-like moment followed by the
compassionate grin, the soothing fable:
"that things are indeed as they seem"--
concise histories of an oversight too
complete not to have been accidental.
you also are to blame, if only for wishing
otherwise: digging in the old trunk
where the stories were kept-the ones
that always had an alibi prepared for
the lacklustre hero, hat & coat
& blond nemesis. there they stand
on a boardwalk with cut-out bathing
costumes & chiselled good looks: yellow
stars light up their breasts where rib-
cages undulate with great cascading
shadows & tide marks groove the sand
around the open shower blocks. yellow
& maroon flags & beach umbrellas & a
lifeguard who grinned at you then--
perched high on his umpire's chair blue--
eyed & muscular. had no-one drowned
that day, no sharks been sighted, no
submarine broken the bottle green rim
of the sea--who can say if it might not
all have ended differently
BOATS AT COLLIOURE
scarred sheets, they lay out in squares
on the rockstrewn beach
under a redoubt, timbers rooted in the
breech between tidemark & ebb
& upturned hulls--pristine
from before the war
they lie senseless there with dusk
petering out, keels planed back against
a stew of knotted bodies, coppergreen
all toughened
sinew & raw underflesh. what god
did they glory in their kill? they are like
a tribe of homer gone to seed.
inharmonious voices
plucked on an achilles tendon &
canned laughter receding up the hillside.
a motor cuts-out, a voluble
backfire, what life but this?--scale
blackened among the embers, gutstrings
scavenged by stalking nightgulls,
fisherman's mutts. they too
have their mythic demeanors, observed
from a distance, unsure for whom
their rite is performed
LA FOULE À VERSAILLES
you were distressed? someone in a newspaper
had been shot for the wrong reasons. remember
that scene from pierrot le fou; the village
was obviously a fake, even the postcard
is unconvincing. in tokyo they expect you
to provide all the data in advance. this is how
it would ideally appear: a crowd on a
boulevard overwhelmed by choices--she
was bowled-over, he was fed-up with
waiting around. a flock of pigeons
monopolising the stairs, a murmuration
of starlings. the elevators were supposed to be
unique; we hung there suspended on a string
while everything below circulated.
a pair of scissors would have been enough, but
night was falling, there was nothing to see