In writing of him. I just fict.
Unfashionable if you wish, or even unreal
So to evict the owner from his acts
In propria persona; spit out the bones
When once the bloody platter’s licked.
Of course things experienced or overheard
Swarm up the wall and knock;
But we disperse them as they flock
And redistribute, word by silly word.
But when Totals turn up and insist
We give them way; and only then you see,
However chimerical or choice or few,
One cannot copy to unearth the new.
1966/1966
CONFEDERATE
At long last the wind has decided for itself,
Skies arch and glass panes shudder inwards,
My shutter croaks and now you tell me
It is time for those last few words. Very well.
Epoch of a whitewashed moon with
Frost in the bulb and the quailing local blood.
Very well; for not in this season will kisses
Dig any deeper into the mind to seek
The mislaid words we have been seeking,
Delegates of that place which once
The whole of suffering seemed to occupy—
O nothing really infernal, a simple darkness.
But because I came both grew abruptly
Aware of all the surrounding armies
So many faces torn from the same world,
Whole lives lost by mere inattention.
1973/1967
OWED TO AMERICA
I
America America
I see your giant image stir
O land of milk and bunny
Where the blue Algonquin flows
Where the scrapers scrape the ceiling
With that dizzy topless feeling
And everything that simply has to, goes!
II
Land of Doubleday and Dutton
Huge club sandwiches of mutton
More zip-fastener than button
Where the blue Algonquin flows
Home of musical and mayhem
Robert Frost and Billy Graham
Where you drain their brains but pay ’em
Then with dry Martinis slay ’em
Everyone that drinks ’em knows.
III
America America
Terra un peu hysterica
For me as yet incognita
I see your giant image stir
Here no waffle lacks for honey
Avenues paved with easy money
Land of helpless idealism
Clerical evangelism
Land of prune and sometimes prism
Every kind of crazy ism
Where the blue Algonquin flows.
IV
America America
So full of esoterica
One day I’ll pierce the veils that hide
The spirit of the great divide
The sweet ambition which devours
You, super duper power of powers—
But for the nonce I send you flowers.
V
If there was a cake you’d take it
If I had one heart you’d break it
Where the blue Algonquin flows
Looking forward, looking back
There seems nothing that you lack
America America
Pray accept this cordial greeting
Rest assured I’ll soon be back.
1980/1968
THE OUTER LIMITS
The pure form, then, must be the silence?
I’d tear out a leaf of it and spread it,
The second skin of music, yes,
And with a drypoint then etch in quick
Everything that won’t talk back, like
Frost or rain or the budget of spring:
Even some profligate look or profitable
Embrace—here to imprison it,
So full of a gay informal logic,
A real reality realising itself,
No pressures but candid as a death,
A full foreknowledge of the breathing game
Taut as a bent bow the one simple life
Too soon over, too soon cold; memory
Will combine for you voice, odour, smile.
1973/1968
SOLANGE
Author’s Note
This poem was originally written at the same time as ‘Elegy on the Closing of the French Brothels’ (c. 1938), but I wasn’t happy with it and the draft was left behind in a notebook until 1967, when I retouched it and lengthened it by about half.
I
Solange Bequille b. 1915 supposedly
Far from Paris towards April sometime,
Familiar of the familiar XIV arrondissement
four steps up
four steps down
two three four five
where the sewers discharge
by the turret of an urinal
six seven eight
steel ducts voiding
in shade and out of the wind …
Relatively impossible despite so much practice
To word-parody the tantamount step, but easier
Copy for the lens a powder-blue raincoat, beret,
Cicada brooch, belted and bolted waist of wasp,
Dumb insolent regimental shoes, sheeny rings,
The whole of it amberstuck through twenty winters,
Carried round the globe in damp suitcases,
Some pedlar’s pack of visionary ware like
Her rings of a vulgar water reflecting
black testicles of buoys
tugging at the Seine
lovers in leaden coffins
pelting the dead with crusts
the prohibitions of loneliness
being twenty-two with a war
hanging over them, its belly hard,
noting the orgasm of Hegel
defining all death as ‘the
collapse into immediacy’.
Ah, dangerous salients of youth,
loving in a crucial month.
II
Over the bridges the meandering scholars
Deambulating flowed over the Pons Asinorum
Of the five arts between the capable white
Wide-flowing thighs of their seventh muse,
A sharpshooter by a steel turret
Waiting to smelt down whole faculties,
Captives of youthful salt with their elaborate tensions,
They passed and passed but always hesitated,
Leaving their satchels when they could not pay,
The score was kept on a matchboard wall.
A hundred a quick one, five the whole night,
Whole doctorates granted in prime embraces.
The arts of the capital being matured and focused.
Five for the collective wisdom of this great city!
baisers O noirs essaims
desires grown fair of dark
the cross-roads of smiling eyes
complexities of season, spring
or winter’s black water
bridges of funereal soot
working with pink tongue or tooth
towards some mystical emphasis,
in the forever, so long ago,
so far away from all this
contemporary whimperdom
Solange
sole angel of the seekers,
their prop medal and recourse
faces crisper than oak-leaves
your burial service covered all
the coward and the brave
the perfectly solid fact as
symbol of humanity’s education
less a woman with legs than
something, say that oven into which
Descartes locked himself in order
to enunc
iate the first principle
of his system; the oven Planck
consulted after all the
spectroscope’s thrilling finery
to deduce the notion of quanta.
Always the same oven, never any bread,
the XXth century loaf is an equation
Solange
be like mirrors accumulating nothing.
III
The change from C major to A flat
Is always associated with summary thefts,
Certain women powdered by suns,
Street-lamps’ fresh breath in cradles,
As simply as birds reacting to rain
We recover small fragments of the unknowable
To render back to nature her darkest intents
In allegorical bandages of old hotels
Receiving into their no-womb the anti-heroes,
Tang of the metro and rotting dustbins
Needles seeking the iron vein
Astrology’s damp syringe
a woman of good intent
distributing the river winds,
drawing with scarlet fingernail
on foggy panes high above Paris,
one glassed-in balcony
with tubs for plants’ green hives
so apt for tall trees’ dews
days robbed and nights replaced
whatever the single vision traced
four steps up
four steps down
wherever the emphasis was placed
whoever the woman’s image finds
dyed into living minds
By the dead butts of infernal cinemas
Or at the Medrano lulled by some old
Circus animal’s tarnished roars,
See the heads discharged by guns in baskets falling
Smelling of new bread or blood. The muscles
Now hanging in Museums, the thoracic cage shaken
By typical sobs, the eyes of congers’ spawn,
Then the plumage of soft shrieks in dark streets,
The running feet, silence, and something lying
In Paris on such April nights when stars
Crunch underfoot the Luxembourg’s cool gravels,
Night poised like a lion’s paw
Where her prowl crosses some angle of the abstract town.
four steps up
four steps down
where the sewers discharge
by the urinal’s turret
stairs too narrow for the coffin,
minds too narrow for recognitions,
hearts too severe for introspection,
different categories of the same
insolent vision marrying
four steps up
confederates of the darkness
soon they must all die or
go away, soon you will be left
alone, writing wholly for yourself,
struggling with the idea of a city
a whore of the city’s inward meaning,
animal intents all bruising
the wingpoint of other myths
outmoded or outvoted gods
the muffled censors of the time
ripening in the latest ages
beyond the scope of liveried men
past the intentions of the wise
towards a death promoted by the sages.
IV
Even then was he somehow able to undress his dolls’ thoughts to sleep beside the sleeper, lay figures of the dreams which uncoiled among the mnemonic centres of the mind which thinks without knowing that it thinks, slips, punctures process with ideas. Faut-il enfin dépasser le point de tangence qui sépare l’art et la science, tout en les traitant comme les religions primitives en faillite? Oui mais comment? Even then, even then; but his snores might not awake the tiny amorous snores as of the congress of guinea-pigs in vivisectionists’ cages, unaware of being watched, syringe in hand. Et le chaos même, dandy ou nègre? Faut-il éprouver la plénitude charnelle d’un acte spontané? In the cheap edition of ‘Causality’ she had given Leibniz a moustache and printed a lipstick kiss to hide the crucial figure, adding in the margin the proverbial merde. If only she could have delivered him from the vices of introspection, the verses in p’tit nègre, the torn paper tablecloths with their thorny sketches; but alas vers libre is like le ver solitaire. The head shows and the atlas of the stare; it can be broken off by the forceps, but there will always be more packed in the gut. Beware.
the communes raise their walls
around the dreamer’s bed,
cold crusts of cults devoured
the science-mocking magics spread
like viruses distributed
by the redeemers’ dreams
on altars sourly smoke
the witnesses disperse
among the smoke of thought
to share the ignoble joke
some medieval urinals
mingle the proferred wine
to pour from snouts of stone
the griffins far below
on the river’s quays
famous star-waterways incline
turn water into wine,
the simple torturers go
when night undresses all the trees
unsleeping gargoyles tell you so.
V
Born of torpid country-folk versed in cumbrous ways and too haphazard to chime with this spawn of factories with anvils and poisonous oxygen, this decomposing fabric of stone, the sepia cards of churches begging for disablement pensions; but kindly stubborn intractable stock, she imported into the deadly estate of the town frail rural virtues, rotted in a primeval humus. Gone this Solange or that, but the mould remained unbroken revolving through worlds of dissimulation, spheres, hatcheries of unique sensation, seen through the pinshead of a tiny mind. Turning slightly towards the sun as winter flowers may do, the bonfires and speeches and the eternal inquests within the frontiers of the self, still the fated questions yawned as they do for all of us. And what then of Pascal, the man she loved: sullen, morose and leaden when not in the air flying from ring to ring with an acrobat’s fury, the webbed feet, sympelmous toes, O rabid specialist in a bird’s beauty. They exchanged wordless days, and doses, the sempiternal clap. In full flight over the city he took her like a ring, swung over the edge of the abyss. I studied their famous loves to reimburse myself. Once I saw the expression on his face which must have settled her fate—in mid-air swinging in an orgasm of fear and stress, but shriven too; this look had impaled her mind. Then he went, without saying goodbye, perhaps on tour, but never to return I believe; perhaps much later to dangle from some whore’s rafter or at the end of a silken parachute illustrating some mysterious law. But his undertow haunted her body for a season, celebrated in absinthe and funereal silences; many profited from this experience, many coupled through her with the wiry loins and loafing smile.
statues on cubes of frost
equestrian pigments of the snow
somewhere the carrefour was crossed
munching footsteps trail and slow
stealthy gravels underfoot
sectioned by the tawny bars
street lamps fiction up the dusk
world unending of past wars
when will the exemplars come
four steps up
four steps down
where the sewers discharge
by the urinal’s turret.
VI
The dreams of Solange confused no issues, solved no problems, for on the auto-screen among our faces appeared always and most often others like Papillon the tramp, a childhood scarecrow built of thorns. He turned the passive albums of her sleep with long fingers, one of them a steel hook. Papillon represented a confederacy of buried impulses which could resurrect among the tangled sheet, a world of obscure resentments, fine and brutal as lace, the wedding-cake lying under its elaborate pastry. His ancient visions sited in that crocodile-mask fired her. And such dreams as he recounted revived among her
own—Paris as some huge penis sliced up and served around a whole restaurant by masked waiters. And the lovers murmuring ‘I love you so much I could eat you’. She takes up knife and fork and begins to eat. The screams might awake her, bathed in sweat, to hear the real face of Marc the underwriter saying something like: ‘All our ills come from incautious dreaming.’ There were so many people in the world, how to count them all? Perhaps causality was a way of uniting god with laughter? Solange avec son œil luisant et avide, holding a handbag full of unposted cards.
Add to the faces the Japanese student whose halting English was full of felicities only one could notice; as when ‘Lord Byron committed incense with his sister, and afterwards took refuse in the church’. He too for a season cast a spell. Then one day he recited a poem which met with her disfavour.
She was eighteen but already god-avowed,
She sought out the old philosopher
Expressly to couple with him, so to be
Bathed in the spray of his sperm
The pneuma of his inner idea.
Pleasure and instruction were hers,
She corrected her course by his visions.
But of all this a child was born,
But in him, not in her, as a poem
With as many legs as a spider
In a web the size of a world.
Then Deutre, the latest of our company
Who believed all knowledge to be founded
Deep in the orgasm, rising into emphasis
As individual consciousness, the know-thyself,
Bit by bit, with checks and halts, but always
By successive amnesias dragged into conception,
A school of pneuma for the inward eye
Reflecting rays which pass in deliberate tangence
To the ordinary waking sense, focuses the heart.
Patiently must Solange pan for male gold
White legs spread like geometer’s compasses
Over her native city. The milk-teeth fall at last.
Gradually the fangs develop, breathing changes,
And out of the tapestry of monkey grimaces
Born of no diagrams no act of will
But simple subservience to a natural law, He comes,