Six New Poems From Amanda Silbernagel

dichotomy of grief

in the mind of a train no one exists; no
'something lovely' in noise dystopia- thrummed
from a boy-and-girl's brain: we could live
like this-- and you'd heard cancer
from the southern coast, called it funny;

corroded voice corroding a system
of wires/ an acid bath-- (not yet)
ready to join the Atlantic in forever.
falling away-- eats a path to your ear,
delta-hospice waiting six states north
to catch the contaminated Nile

(you did not ask for this. you were not born
for this) kind of waiting: shiver and scotch/
white noise trapped beneath the thrum/ a train
denies this is really happening-- dichotomy
is strange; we are. (not yet convinced)
of the tressel's strength/ that its giving out

would be tragic. theoretically- we should.
feel ashamed to be both: mute and mouthing
beautiful-- (we are not.) convinced of this
theory; and tar can be chic for a moment
like cricket decor on sulfur-- gleaming
studded as if it knows allure. is fragile:

hang on for dear-- heartbreaking awareness:
this is not a life. but a now- famous bridge
unconventionally stunning as an end/ as a
slender trickle leaves Jackson: laced
in chemical and pooled in a phone's vibration
the train negates its existence (we do
not argue) you were not born a theorist.

Green Italy

in the curious city the moon has fallen
twice through the power lines/ staggered;
like tripping-- the second; slow
enough to feel cool ivory skim your feet-
skimming the lethargic planet

[a stick pin for green Italy/ swirling Atlantic/
a fascination with painted globes]

younger. you measured the months with sleeps,
called unconscious 'night' or a thing
you'd never witness: child methods. [reassemble
in strange time zones--]

-- a pigeon abandons the gutter at the precise moment
another abandons flight; a swapping of sorts; mission
for lack there-of--

wind veteran crumbles on the schizophrenic runway
of a power line, or nerve path spread thin
through cloud/ high-strung from
undecided tug of the each-other-- dialogue.

mimics the pigeon's wings: syllable's rhythmic
pulse turns static. from effort. word-bones
weakened against stubborn will like the wind's
lost appeal: dead air (miraculously) entices

[hence still wire. stop. claws grip the cord.]

a cable measures when circadian rhythms fail; universally
marks the ivory trail--again; the moon asleep,
without you- without the each-other you long for/
warm milk; a cedar tree the size of god

to get lost in (until tired finds you) potent
branches to shroud the skin reassembling softness.
needles: resembling stick pins chart places
the each-other has not set foot/ pine:
unnoted on the globe

a week doubles in the city
as a plastic canister breaks- breeze scatters
pins through the breadcrumbed square/ tugs
the sagging runway [the pigeon positioned for take-off]

curious mix of metal
and crust-- a moon-- dreaming for you--
this is green Italy. you have so much
to learn

subjects whose names do not apply

the wild we had discussed: sequenced sand and my hair
grown out to compliment the wind and a cause we called
"asymmetry"-- we were rebels then. when days were
long and flat as wine; a drink that complimented
everything: flight notions/ two-man tent/ an inner arm
that could carry the world (asleep) through desert storms
unshaken. a planet gets heavy, i guess-- they say

it was dry fire, a dead Saguaro set off by the sun
(these natural disasters happen) i was the flower--
remember? how scary The Blossoming had been; i do not
blame you (for creating me)/ a magnifying glass
to applaud my loosened dimensions: exotic-- called
Cereus. (they say a child will become the name.
she is given; onomastics suggest we're all doomed, or

becoming-- a secret. document is kept by the fire;
nightly, when you sleep/ hard/ solving an impossible
riddle-- the journal is nearly full: i've described
what we don't discuss: the places you've taken me.
(away from the garden) i've recorded the heat's precise
degrees; exact dimensions of flame-- you'd be amazed.

at the colors a burn victim can name at an interview/
wild with dementia: first was periwinkle-- then
a deep magenta-- an index of shades (orders the names)
of suffering, i do not blame you-- for my obsessions:
list and number. violet and umber. wild despair.
for a cactus; it was natural, the disaster:
without matchbook or gas-- you named each flower...
before raising the glass

only as real

to find yourself in a vacant alley is to learn the great intruder
humanity is not. to come (uninterrupted) to the final brick/
each step a riveting conclusion to the question am i relevant:
is real. or a necessary point in the human experience like betrayal.
when i left him: a scarred field-- earth turned back like
kindling's bark from the fire/ felt the torch in my hands- horror

preceded an ethereal notion: what i carry is a common accessory
to weep in the final movement when a symphony succeeds/ exceeds
impossible; whittles senses to carve you: vulnerable, a bridge
crumbling into yourself and --all you finally feel--
is what shrinks call "breakthrough" or a crucial ability to come
unglued from etiquette-- begs a question: but why here?

(she was immovable. a stiffened reed at her father's funeral.
a blade cutting currents.) begs an accusation: but you didn't
weep in the alley-- and when you knew you were a factor
in the weight of a planet did you starve yourself a little?
with the gift-curse of influence comes compulsion to fall

to your knees on the staggered scale/ grovel at the equator
for mercy; a reaction to the reaction you casually caused
in a Universe's delicate alignment: a planet is knocked out
of orbit-- a river, sliced through the chest-- rise up,
daughter-- you are only as real as this moment--

assumed as connection

as if happening upon a budding flower (that knew their names)
they chained themselves interminably to the universe.

voodoo daughter rises
with dark-flicker; fire insists upon motion-
a black furnace masked in flame
fuels (is fueled by) her
feet circles, goatskin arms whipping night

caravans (we cannot see)
stir the dead and dead soil up for air--
an earthworm stretch-slinks desert and hill
as prophet: home is where they will have me,
hear my vision--
dust robed segments; wagon to wagon
dishevels a forest with story and wheel,
slips back under ground-cover we cannot see--

--the wasted brain stem erupt silver.
as hunger artist claws brick and bone/ dissolves
(lighter) into light.
(beneath ribs: a black furnace)
a famished neuron ignites as ash, reawakened

ash sleeps with her (body);
a leather whip laid limp by cindered logs
voodoo daughter- tangled in dreams
of budding flowers. at their center, a black furnace-
speaking. to feet circles/ a famished frame/
the caravans chained to her voice

let's discuss:

and what i wonder to the blue-locked moon
is what passes him most quickly:
the cloud seductress slinking black gowned
across his face; the train racing her (flighty)
motions, consistent over tired tracks
in a town half asleep; or your breath
-quickened- at the quivering curb where
we wait for silence

in a desolate field; knee-deep in wheat
one discovers two opposing forces:

[a young boy's voice]
what are you thinking about?
overgrown grass grazes his chin; a cancerous
seed-- cumbersome amidst pin stripe rows
sewn tight/even to fertile cloth
tied off stitches the young scientist
can't see, one awry-- infected

[mute energy] of a seamstress, hidden
in till and yarn. earth stained fingers
weave the ancient pattern/ ignore his question
-the tumor shares his breath- two beings:
mutually aware of the other's presence
presents a problem for the asker: put on hold,
cells multiplying within reach

to know a theory (to have it explained) is
a (prevalent) legitimate desire in one
seeking connection to another. call this nature.
call this lonely. the scientist is relieved
to receive word:
"results show that the brain responds as machine
to sensory data- translation precedes sensation--"

a technical being understands magenta
before the retina assembles a sunset and accepts
drowning for what it is before stark realization:
this is how suffocating feels-- standardized
knowledge provides a platform for responses
evolving endless. call these echoes.
of a single voice given/received as such:
the being is not alone--

train and seductress slip from sight
(from retinas now responding)
the moon ignores my question/ i,
your quickened breath

Amanda Silbernagel was raised in Fargo, North Dakota and currently studies English, with an emphasis in writing, at Minnesota State University Moorhead. She is taking a year off school to promote her book Centrifuge on a year-long North American tour with Minnesota visual artist el_perdido. The Lovers For Fun tour will consist of readings of Silbernagel's poetry alongside el_perdido's art shows. Tour dates are available at www.myspace.com/fairydust008. Silbernagel's poetry has appeared in Red Weather, Love Child, 27 rue de fleures, and Hamilton Stone Review.

Dmitri Prigov

5 Nov 1940 - 16 July 2007

Three Poems From Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

The Galloping Man


1.

placing, a look
a gull

or, recreation, rewards or to a mind
a perfect tool

or, law. At last
if it had been the turning of a water wheel


2.

A rope, or green
standing in, closer

to hand, is lost, in arms
on seeing, early on, a hold, or, in hand

a title, a given space
or,

as upon question, or, appellation, a spur
or, so to convey



3.

in alternating causes, in states and professions
a line on end

in cloth, in measure, in anonymity and in parodies
to vary

or,
familiar. Passing fast, in jolly tapers and leagues

and in the interest of descriptions, turning back
to rote places, to notes

and floss
a certain sun, and moon and stars



4.

and out of house, a useless emulation
getting to, or, not to use

a looking outward, in secret, deciding
it is latent, and pause

and lasting into song. how does
a body know, here is a hand, and here, is a sentence

or,
what’s riding on hearts




Catching Up


and would you could express it
with stone and bitumen

a hedge of hide and chatter
for the anonymous flip, of a coin.

and fawn,
to sing, of time and of distinctions

of cause and of case
and not to measure, the merits

in very idiosyncrasy
asserted, in room of learning and sufficiency.

the swift and stubborn and medley appointment.
the predilection, quietly, transparency

must be pronounced transparency
must be pronounced insistence

and handed on.
or did not think in terms of Sinai.

a detail of anatomy, say.
a knot in a rope.

and to be shamefully naked.
this comes in the form of an emergency.

this comes in the form of a middle voice.
this comes in the form of a pretty bride.

and this is the poetry
of having known the light of common day.

deeply. and necessarily.
readily. and necessarily.





History

to wish to pause
and planning, planning to return

are of the page, to reflect
is to reflect, of our own say

and welcome, are key, are enough
or,

are unexpected, are at hand
or sudden

and is, perhaps, again, the very room
to be in company

in company, to see
the page, or turn to see

of any sudden, or, guessing, or play
are enough

be it large or small or van or boon
or,

in turn
at different rates of tour

no inherited fit or repertoire
in mid-career

fit or altered, or pathe or incidental
and there is, immersed

in how, of, say, pretense, or lectern
another note or bar or margin

and of the eye
replaced, by sound

the ear can see
a margin or purpose

and of these, to see
not only feeling but is an episode

the chance arrival of pacts
proper to, or, gives way to new

office
is apt, or, to be permitted

done so,
the square of a face

or,
serious and hurry it

each counts, is really stands alone
or are comic, and exact

and curves, into furniture
in a turn, in a tumble

a shrub or suburb
the sudden leads to fit in hand

in no sense of the page
to capture, or ledger, or region

not to say, so unlikely
from time to time, in any landscape

a series of rushes
an arrow off a thread

fiery, and even fidgety
before whom, to quite suddenly

a madman,
which marks those who work when they need not

a great house
but because, and, so unlike it, it fits

that these are all, or, so
or,

so to reflect
reflecting is enough, and always, to surprises



Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino was born in Greenwich Village, New York, and was raised in both the city and in the country across the Hudson River in New Jersey. He was educated at home, eventually to enter Fordham University where he received a degree in philosophy. His poetry and prose have appeared in Barrow Street, The Germ, jubilat, Washington Review, Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics, Onedit, Cordite Poetry Review, Nthposition and Xcp: Streetnotes. His interview with the English writer Colin Wilson appears in The Argotist Online. He lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York, where he works as a private docent.

Un Poema Nuevo de Andrés José Dotson

Noches de Finca

Mi amor, ¿Recuerdas de las noches de luna
cuando nos disfrutábamos con platos de fruta?
Toqué a mi guitarra con dulcedumbre de tu voz
Los caballos descansaban en seguridad del corral
Andábamos por la finca con tientas unidas
Cantos profundos vinieron de los sapos
Reflexión de la charca–la sangre negra
Nos acostamos en cama de seda.



Andrés José Dotson, nació en Rota, España, en la Costa del Sol, se hubo movido a los Estados Unidos a la edad de tres años. Un niño de una madre Española y un padre Norteamericano, él experienció mucha tensión en la escuela por practicar sus inclinaciones nativas en conversar y cantar Castellano. Dotson, que tiene 18 años y recientemente ha graduado de la preparatoria, actualmente está viviendo en el paraíso de Arizona.

¡Feliz Cumpleaños!

In June, Zone celebrated its first birthday. It's been a riotous twelve months.

Writers from twenty countries brought us their poetry, translations and stories in seven languages.

Zone is, and has always been, about collaboration. It is an attempt to provide a de-centralized, ubiquitous home to writers and readers of the global plurality.

Their multifarious origins resulted in a common output. In the course of today's violent and contemptuous politics of empire and hegemony, Israel's war with Hezbollah, racism, poverty, loss, heartbreak and drudgery, all of Zone's contributors have responded with the urge to beauty that has transcended borders and idioms for nearly five thousand years.

Without Peter Golub, Andrew Haley, Mariana Calandra, Roger McDonough, Meghan Bolden and all the folks at Crack-Up Books in Palermo, our December premier of The Debut Generation of New Russian Poetry would have been impossible. It was a product of five nationalities and three languages.

Writing is useless without readers. Without our loyal following of readers from every continent, Zone and its sister projects would have no reason to exist.

All of us, despite our backgrounds or professions, come to writing as readers. Without our writers, we readers would be purposeless. So I extend my sincerest thanks to Zone's writers who have come to us from Canada, Guatemala, Italy, Costa Rica, Catalunya, the US, Dominican Republic, Russia, China, Wales, Sweden, France, Kazakhstan, Australia, Chile, India, Malaysia, Israel, Spain, New Zealand and, our mother, Argentina.

Enjoy.

-Henri Beauregard

Whose Nude and Holy Iridescence Belongs to No One: Thirteen Poems by Richard Cronshey, Part Three

The Sound of Wind at Night

Who is the girl inside the girl
cradling a crow's skull
in small phosphorescent hands?
Dirty snow and cellar stairs.
Am I the sound, late in February,
just before morning,
of wind through white pines?
Or am I the listening?
Or the suddenness without ancestor?
Shepherds in the high pastures inside her body
sit up all night beside campfires, their eyes wide listening
to her deep blue skeleton sing
her black and dreaming names into the world.


Notes To Self

Everything that exists
exists to set me free
from everything that exists.
Like a fire, learn
to erase yourself
as you go.
Abide at the intersection
where futures are consumed.
Be a skeleton key
in flames
releasing daylight from daylight.
Shining
in order to have shone.


Solstice Poem

City of almond, and the way to the city
of almond:
this changing, imponderable body,
a ladder of breath scaling the daylight
and the night,
a bridge traversing everything.
She keeps a sapphire concealed beneath her tongue.
I would be the sound of water to her,
rolling over stones.


Wishing Poem For Terra

This is given, this ritual,
this tilling:
earth turning
under earth;
brilliance under brilliance.
Here now, the orphaned storyteller
comes home
driving her herd of wounds through the high blonde grass and the haze.
For her thirst, the new moon,
immaculate black water
cupped in her cut palms,
raised to her lips.


Sweet Thing

Snowmelt through snowmelt.
Orphans of ourselves these many years.
Let the heart be reconciled with the heart at last.

....

There is a laughing power that releases itself into itself
utterly, flashing, and is here and ours.

....

We see that we must relinquish everything,
that we have always been this relinquishing.

....

Cradled in the circle of the breath,
an ember, a folding together
beyond all efforts.

....

New snow, first light, the presence
in which birth and death are reconciled.

....

Elemental space offered to elemental space,
this is our true ancestor.

....

To be here with this weaving and unweaving forever,
wedded to the weaving of the empty world.


This is the third of three parts of Richard Cronshey's thirteen poem collection, Whose Nude and Holy Irridescence Belongs to No One.

Whose Nude and Holy Iridescence Belongs to No One: Thirteen Poems by Richard Cronshey, Part Two

Lost in Probate
to my children

I leave you a mirror in an empty house.
Keep it near you.
I leave you my disappearance,
a place of pilgrimage to which you need not travel.
Be still and it will find you.
I leave you this body and conjuring solitude
sister of the widowed cities
sister of their black windows
an uncreated wilderness
where emptiness seduces emptiness,
a ring of quicksilver singing itself to sleep inside you.

And here is the sound of waves breaking far out at sea
and here is the mother of this motherless opacity.
Here are the black windows and the snow,
delicious emotions, rogue energies, nested silences;
abandoned casinos of delirium where you exist,
the ghost of a ghost for centuries listening
to the inconsolable pulsation behind the stars.

To The Root of Itself

Chapel of salt,
the night sky inside of you.
This is the blue
and motherless honey
that comes to you.
Now you are naked, like the days
undressed of their names.
Music swims through music and through you
And this is what you have now.
And this is how you live
with this transparency and this ripening.
At last, you are like the snow
that is only snow
and the snow whose nude and holy
iridescence
belongs to no one.

To Eternity's Sunrise

Indentured to what remains
after the smoke clears.
Now that I'm a ghost ship,
a mausoleum made of steam
sold to the rain on the temple stairs
and all the places I am at once in the rain.
Now that I'm a secret I keep, even from myself,
invisible, a whisper
hypnotized by the clockwork of sorrow
and sold to wrecked pianos in the rain,
and wild lavender with the weeds by the freeway.
Now that everything releases me,
brilliant poverty, blowing snow,
bird on fire in a cage of changing bones.
Indentured to buried iridescences.
Sold to every dying breath. Ah
the light blossoming out of the light.

Solstice Poem

Derelict melody
mansion of clarity
we are just lost in long grass
There is a horizon hidden inside my life
from behind which my life keeps streaming
a still light on the lee side of the ridge line
where the little life sings to the big life
like a child lost in long grass
The voice, the moving silver energy there
is the wind between black buildings,
a song circling back on itself;
grief, like an eclipse,
a river, or a mirror.

Here is a song for Mother Sorrow

Mother nothing, sorrow, shepherd me.
Let me be bread, medicine, energy, presence.
In this very body
I will bear our bleeding history
high above timberline, into the clear light.

This is the second of three parts of Richard Cronshey's thirteen poem collection, Whose Nude and Holy Irridescence Belongs to No One.

Whose Nude and Holy Iridescence Belongs To No One: Thirteen Poems by Richard Cronshey, Part One

Overcome By Vertigo I Covet The Opalescence of the Diamond

For a long time you can feel that nothing is happening.
Snow falls and you look at the snow.
You look at the snow. You look at the beautiful
jeweled escalators of the snow cascading down and down.


Two Poems With Coffins

1

Fugitive, connoisseur of thirsts
the whole of being, an intricately ripening sphere,
a silence, exists enfolding you here
at the crossroads of the body
where we are now and put down
the strange weight we have been carrying,
sand dune, broken window, cricket, caress,
empty bottle, apparition, a bone, a voice.
Who was it that wished for this?
And where had we been taking it?
Here is your inheritance,
cerulean blue to cradle you,
breath to take you home.

2

To be human and go on blushing, applauding,
saying excuse me without understanding
how it started or stopping to ask;
believing somebody else knows,
not wanting to be alone.
Transcendental burlesque blossoming in mirrors, paraphernalia,
rainbows, dolorous sombreros, days.
The same presence everywhere. Look for her, she eludes you.
Not wanting to be the only one
with a little black coffin in your heart;
a little black coffin the size of a thumb
with nothing in it but wind.
For now take this black rock and don't stop polishing it.
A golden cricket lives in it, listen;
a tiny blue loom


To All Mothers
in memory of my mother, Rosemary Louise Cronshey

This human work, look at it :
an unaccountable ripening;
my life bearing me each moment into my life.
The inconsolable pulsation that carries me.
What is that
releasing bliss from bliss and breath from breath?
Basilicas of memory, affection and breath;
immaculate solitudes where the heart is set adrift,
and the heart within the heart, such a sweet and empty weaving.
I don't understand the things that make me live.
Finally, I'm not afraid of my mind,
the crazy dispossessed luciferian energies
ricocheting around inside me don't scare me anymore.
The demonic mariachis, truncated ecstasies, phantom pleasures, baby saints
crowding the stage in the impossible fallen down movie palace of my heart,
I know them pretty well now. Not one of them can destroy me!
Because I know I'm nothing! I'm nothing
but love and suffering, and so what?
I don't believe in anything but loss and tenderness anymore
and that's enough. I will move with its motion now in completeness
and now nothing can hurt me, not even grief!
I could never live an off-the-rack life, like them.
I just want to keep walking up and down this road a while.
Who built this third hand world
over wordless and holy human truth?
Why must we resuscitate this disaster day after day?
This human work.
Look at it!
This labor we must undertake, of living and dying
and taking heart
that gives us our magnificence,
that makes our death an aprilling.
How unlikely, how finally impossible it is
that I managed to get here at all,
exactly nowhere, with everything,
every single conceivable thing
spiraling around inside me
clambering to get out,
sending me out on the street in the middle of the night
to find you;
to tell you what I saw.

Richard Cronshey was born in Los Angeles in 1966. He is the author of Adagio of the Body (1990), Three Similar Instances (1992), Afternoon in The Museum of Late Things (1994) and Mutilated Currency (1997). Cronshey co-edited Bird Full of Rain (1999), a collection of the late Glenn Parker's poetry.

After graduation from the University of Utah, Cronshey traveled and worked in Asia and Eastern Europe for ten years. He now lives with his wife and two children in the US suburbs and works for hospice. Of these poems, Cronshey says:

These most recent poems arose out of the efforts of my mind to come to grips with itself through the discipline of meditation. I've been studying meditation for several years, not very successfully, under the supervision of a teacher. In my best moments poetry is a religious practice for me. It's religious in the sense of growing out of a wish to relink with the ground of being, and then to allow my actions to flow from that root, a form of contemplative prayer. My aspiration is to get to a point where I am living and writing without self consciousness, really selflessly. There is a quality of that in the writing I most love, the presence of primordial intelligence and generosity.

Three Poems From Jason Heroux

On This Street

In the morning the mirror glows
like a brush after grooming the sun.

But at night it wanders off
like a horse unhitched
from the room’s wagon.

On this street the houses
are fussy eaters.
Windows spit out the light
and feed it
to the dog under the table.

The tiny stars
reflected in puddles
look dirty as vitamins
fallen under the fridge.

Unemployed trees
pick their own pockets.
Statues with stomach ulcers
cough up other people’s blood.

On this street it’s hard to tell
if it’s day or night.

When it gets dark
the light bulbs hatch
in the lampshade’s nest
and cry until they’re fed.


Little Nails

We’re like little nails sticking out of the wall.
And the wall is a field of freshly fallen snow.
We’ve only taken one step and we’re already
lost in the woods.
We don’t know what hangs upon us.
We don’t know what needs us to be ourselves.


Today


Today arrived
on trembling crutches
of birdsongs looking
for some place to rest.

It arrived carrying
the sky under its arm.

Like a broken suitcase
tied shut with a string
of chimney smoke.



Jason Heroux lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. His poems were selected for Breathing Fire 2: Canada's New Poets and he is the author of a poetry collection titled Memoirs of an Alias. His novella, Hello In There, is scheduled to appear in Particle and Wave: A Mansfield Omnibus of Electro-Magnetic Fiction later this year.

New Poetry From Nicolas Bourbaki

THE HUMPTY DUMPTY HIKIKOMORI

IN SEVERAL PIECES

1.

… in the refusal

To balance on a ledger – the declining

Of a challenge to step

The tip-tied tight-rope

Rope of pleasure

Deep in a warmthening pigpan

Or tight between four walls of tight dominion

Like an egg-shell speckled loosely in an egg:

If, high above the spigot of a fountain, floating

Like a ping-pong ball, one should fall –

But I’d rather, in all honesty, grow a tail

Than pull the strings that pull together in a thought.

Let words hang in the air

Between us

Like a wet tongue, nameless

While I fix myself to sleep… I know thy works,

That thou art neither cold nor hot. I would

That thou wert cold or hot. So then, because thou art lukewarm,

And neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth!

2.

I, hikikomori, high on moratory

Like black pine curtains at last cold light

In the tattered light

Of winter –

Ah, this would the divinities

In draped sheltering of them,

Cottoning the carriage of empty bottles… Ah,

Forever the divinity’s undrowning of them –

If solitude descended in suchly ways.

Like slow-hanging stars hung on wires above deserts!

In flip-books of hat-wearing monks in high forests,

The unassembled armies of Tokyo, Berlin, and Paris

Marching in slippers down air-conditioned halls

In satiety behind unbuilded walls and windows –

The empty mountain, no one seen

Sunset, light enters the deep forest

Shines across green moss.

If solitude descended

In suchly ways.

If solitude descended in such-like luxuriancies

Telegenic, irreversible, then the emperor

Might return at nectar’s exhaustion, day’s end

With his heading and beheading behind him,

And with his high bed be heading

To sleep. But finally it does not,

Finally it comes down, stripped,

Like a drop of water breaking in the heat

Pulled to the surface

Of an electric range.

3.

A Memory of My Youth

“Come one and come all, my young ones, my children,

Hold your folding legs on blackboard chairs, on folded wings,

Come and see through morning thickness the many things

Caught in the moment when a music stops,

And each chair must find a dancer, more or less willing,

To settle down under. Come and see the intermittence

In the spectacle, circulating in these morning halls

Like the unwashed breath and pinkish fingers

Of a thousand spotted feathers… Come,

Together we can gather in the paintchips, you and me…

Well let me see – there once was a shadow –

Of a young hirondelle – not yet a podium –

Waiting on a steel branch – for her parole.

Living on scalded shins with scalded hands

And when I remember I wait for the end – which is to say

There once was a copy of a hirondelle

Waiting by a lectern for a tabula rasa,

Whiling away the hours with a game of hearts.

Meals for one, good with names, overfrozen –

Yes, spare me your syphilitic moonshine.

I have seen you trotting the fields with silver cane

And I can smell your pine-tar medicines.

He placed his hands in my hair and I heard nothing

But my breath, wanted nothing.

The obstinacy of forgotten music.

On the fourth day I opened my mouth to scream

The mute wail of a carhorn

Splitting the night in three. There is a crease

By my eye that will not go away.

I pull the threads around me

Each in a separate direction,

A separate sense –”

4.

Remembered ads, remembered temptations,

Abandoned hopes for haircream medications…

To sleep the sleep of names,

Sleeps of ambrosial anesthesia and lost hours,

Hours recorded in neon by reluctant clocks

Or bulging like fruitflies in summer airs

Lying on the fat and ripened pears

Of rotten days. To be once more enthroned

In the middles of quiet festivals

In the middling of the stalls

While the tattoos snake across my walls

Like starry frescoes… I wake, I feed, I sleep,

Huis clos, in the canicular summer heat

And the flickering that rubs across my eyes

Is like vaseline across my lids

A headlight through the glass

As it rolls above the grating

Through the milkcloud of steam.

In the crepuscular sunrise, the blue asshole of regret,

I drift around the ceiling like a nodding silhouette.

5.

Let us go, you said, and meant –

but meant instead:

Diverse languages, and horrible jargons,

words of dolour, accents of rage,

loud voices, raucous, noises of hands with them,

made a whirling fracas

always, in this eternally somber air,

like the sand where blows a whirlwind.

And me, with my head surrounded by shadow,

I said: “Master, what do I hear?

who are these people so undone by suffering?”

And him to me: “This miserable state

is that of the spiteful souls of the humans

who lived without infamy and without praise.

They are mixed among the low choir of the angels

who were neither rebels to God

nor faithful, and who were only for themselves.

The heavens chased them out, for not being less beautiful,

and the profound inferno wanted none of them,

because the damned would have more glory from a soul.”

Now an old man cursing the sidewalk.

Now a scarecrow

Cast out from huddled fields.

6.

I know what I mean to say

And said what I meant to mean:

I’ve held my belly leaking at the seams

When the sentier of sing-song

Was incapable of dreams;

When the abundance

Of sickness in the air

Or dew-like

Resting on the skin

Enjoined a struggle with oxygen –

O Quasimodo, mon amour,

Like the receptive apex

Of the pistil of a flower

Disfigured by a stem

There are no words for you.

Though blue-dyed bluish green

And vaccinated in turpentine

I could hear the skinheads stomping

In the vacant hollow walls

And the hollowed Walla halls

Beating a vagrant

Wailing beneath my window.

I know the look of joy, the look of fear,

Have seen the forced contortions in the mirror –

Seen bodies sprawled on sidewalks

And understood desire, still breathing.

Leaves withered from lack of light

To quiet the shaking of a bed.

The face of an opposed building

To wonder…

Until you are

Again, in the pith path of memory.

There, in the yellow loudness of a hallway waiting,

Far from the crowd, on a winter night excursion

I felt you leaning back like a small green sapling

Your twisting arms extending

Like thin young branches into space…

You dried your hands with several paper towels

Between the tagged genitals, the porcelain,

The eternal melody… on the Boulevard Saint-Germain

A greasy film of paper

Clenched in a swollen hand.

In the sunlit four o’clock morning

Still traces rolled behind me

Of an unmistakable scent

Nipping at my back in public corridors

Pawing at my heels

In the late-night backs

Of overlit convenience stores

Until I returned for the silent observance

At the counter

At the door –

Unmistakable, still embarrassing,

The transaction will take place

With minimal harassing.

7.

You were unrecognized blood on a tissue

In the dryness of Sunday mornings.

A glory in a mirror in the redness of eyes

When out of the cinders

A flag did rise…

At the end of the line

The back of the cellar

The busy signal swallowed

With half a glassful of water:

Dead voices shuffle leaves

In whispered rhythm.

Maybe next fall they’ll set off another nuclear bomb.

Dr Nicolas Bourbaki is a poet and philosopher living in Guatemala. He is currently writing a literary Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel.