Saint's eyes were scratched out
or smashed
Alabaster concepts shone
There is work there is
work to be done
old gunpowder energies
They like to retouch the scene
Somebody has to get fucked I suppose
her blistered kisser smiling in the corridor
Work it out without remainders
as clean as
Raw liver sits
on a plate and seeps
Here there's a clock angled to next
not victors
maggoty footstool hunched unkeeping secrets
Dress shirts hang
about the room like persons
photographs
Obama smiling and fading
over hairline paint cracks
bags full of
person in shaky hands
You and me were speaking at coffee speed
with living teeth
What were we wondering at?
A see saw creaks
Wild plum ripens
making a map of wrong turns
past the place
of the friend who went yampified
She holds a
finicky breath
patterning
doxa coats on
a glut of tidy cheer
wheat ears between fingers
blood smudged semolina cake
unfeeling brightness
He picks the red thread from
my lapel
rubbed between finger and thumb till gone
Vital poem... colored/contoured, too, by shadows. Again: the Fecund Minimum!
ReplyDeleteGoing through an awful phase in which I read few poems (for sanity's sake), then, when I do, I exhaustingly demand to know what they are on about.
ReplyDeleteThe answer is almost always nothing.
That's never the case here, however.
Following the thread of the poem induces me to conclude it's about the lapel thread.
Fashion statement, one would not want to settle for that.
That fading smile reminds that history is always slipping away under the door even while the paint over the cracks is not yet dry.
Introducing history opens the door to that grand historical myth the story of the bible.
I first thought of Rahab, she of the wondrous humanitarian red thread.
Then considered Leviticus 1:6:
And he shall flay the burnt offering, and cut it into his pieces
All that blood, for what? Just to weave an anorak for Eve?
It's like all those chinchillas who had to die to assuage Joan Rivers.
But the Legion of Honour, Streisand, Wiesel, Sarkozy and John Ashbery keep rushing in through the unpapered cracks in the associative consciousness to complicate matters wonderfully.
It isn't lint, it's a distinction, officer.
That's the longest time my mind has turned over the wonder that is Babs Streisand.
ReplyDeleteThere's some disparate fragments here; I'll have to come back to this in time. The material's always from the world about me. Communication matters too.
Though Rahab didn't figure for me at the time of writing you've got me thinking.
Joan Rivers is an implacable god.
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ReplyDeleteShadows show things up and make them someway graspable. Thank you, Red.
ReplyDeleteI may give this one a second run on the site in a few months time, given revisions.
"The material's always from the world about me. Communication matters too."
ReplyDeleteUnderstood, and appreciated, Duncan.
I don't mind a bit thinking about Rahab, even if it's on my own bat.
Being made to think is living.