LE BATELEUR
8/16–
(The Alford pages)
Mice on the roof, chromatic fantasy
bow to stern, the horizon is a hinge
for two axe handles: I propose to describe
sphere upon falling sphere
falling like pearls like clothes through the whirlpool
of this blade my shape my little ship.
Swirl the clear cool water, music dips
its fingers in the fishbowl (convex
as we are, round eyed, watching the trees
get bigger (let your lover loom, mother
in the oven, up a cliff)) calls
its old stories, pears and satin drapes
smock flour smudged and king acting weird.
Desires stumble back to their names,
any name, never the same one. The heart
a keen but soft edge, flashes out
cut of water, heavy hands
yearning away at the air: fall back down
through itself, full or empty or can they be the same?
Who are you anyway but someone’s mania
to fill every seat, someone where something
else isn’t, knees cramped under the seat in front
in your little box so much smaller than you
desire happening out there, wide stage
where they pull the strings of anybody’s
listening. We’re all dramatists
he said moving the cards on his desk in that
not careful but touchy way, feeling his place
asking for something is too great a presumption
the future is how you use your being, pull
a card and follow the words–: LA LUNE:
Lobster on a graph. Cloud behind power lines.
I didn’t know I could read music, pluck a cherry
tomato off its stave and eat it but what’s left then
a sea’s empty bars pulsing across your steps
sky after sky dropping its empty skin harmless
harmless as the man in the moon whose blue horse
is bigger than his house, you ride this picture
between the eclipse of now and now and now.
And now? LEMPEREUR: An eagle encased
in amber. When trees were this big, and the Emperor
was his clothes, we walked under the leaves
it would take a day to cross, were they close enough
serious as children, fingering our grubby money
of silk-worms and clams. Bring forth our tithe we must
before the Emperor had any palace, before anyone know
who he was, someone holding something, straighter than his
spine, whoever forgot who he was, that was the Emperor.
End Toccata in D Maj.
Or the sun behind a cloud, the whole blue Sunday Times
of the air swings down on those Lucretian rats that are
themselves the air, scurrying Maxwell's packages. It takes so little
to start talking, so little to silence us, the
wonder of happening out there, drama
with its Greek god-things it’s all as simple
as being born. Cordial. Cursory Partita
bowing into existence,
the smell of Virginia tobacco still on your hands.
Dissection of a heart-ache, put a mirror up to it
and watch the Kabbalistic steam
remembering its firstness then divide us graciously
-what’s the word, rhymes with dyslexia?- huddled in shawls
from the crazy sun and moaning for as long as
water lasts can’t even read a sea in one piece
so unsure of what you mean I don’t know either
can turn sticks into snakes see, wobble this
pencil so it looks like rubber, can listen to the rain
and tell its sexy story, say how the radio says and I quote
what’s most urgent is often the quietest things unquote
roll the windows down see it doesn’t
take much listening to get silence to speak
and he was silent then jinxed by the great roar
of the plagues of the unseen. Le Bateleur:
varlet. or the other way around, a saint
playing pea and thimble with your wrong-headed
faith (is there such a thing?) on the three
legged table propped up on his thigh
you’ll have to get close (of course that’s how
he gets you) but who does a saint cheat or a good guy
turning greed into silence, drunkenness into flesh, now it’s here
now it ain’t. This card is a lesson in picture.
This is the card you see everywhere, in any guise–
Then a voice I’d never heard before said:
when does something cease to be a blade
and to whom? A good question, better
to understand than to answer. To saunter
under the sword clash sky and up the narrow
steps of uncle’s chateaux or Whitby
the last week of vacation…
If only life didn’t tell so many stories
she said over the souvenir ashtray
years later at the garage sale maybe then
we could say what we mean, the way we just
stood there on the veranda and you were anyone
any of my eight husbands, pool-boy, mailman
you were a window pulling into the train-station
letting them all run through errand boys masons
I still don’t know which one you are, on their way to an empty seat
quivering on the Quebec line, a stone table rumbling on its own
somewhere in Estonia or Catskill the stories go on and on
you come to believe even your own, arch invention!
but how well it remembers,
the essence remains I look up like Bacon and see its characters written
in the sky of my mind.
[…]
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