Ahren Warner

A cento Is there no when where this dream will rest? Blue smoke, wings, a plague of  walls, the city motionless, mass of mind and angst rising in the brilliance of a cloudless light [le ciel, c’est mauve comme la lavande]. Everything turns in the quiet leisure of disaster: a kind of innocence now supernatural darkness floating, trees shaking, waterways swollen under a livid sky, storm clouds forming in the blink of an eye. The thought of you is performative: blonde hair, pale complexion, downcast jewels for eyes. Your dreadful martyrdom runs its course, written in mud and butter: the human instant, in which you sing yourself full-throated. Honey, ginger, flared saffron, graywhite momentous rhythm of sea, barbarous smell of wet earth, ransacking or ravaged flowers, the landfill site, shit-hole, killing ground from which we sup as shaking, hiccuping drunks. To forfeit wisdom, atone for sins undone: the allegorical hand thrust into torture, noise, shadows of men. Between the lines, against the clock, this does not make, does not make a difference to them. This age [our age] demands an image of its accelerated grimace — an old bitch gone in the teeth, the ultimate cunt — our botched civilization, our grave in the sky: last jizz of consciousness. I could have, now, blown my fucking brains out, but for a sweet shimmer of reason, blood, lone bells in gritty belfries, the shallows of the sea, the surprise of days which slide under sunlight, the soul gathered up, exhaled as rings of smoke. Clay is the word and clay is the flesh. You drape your body against my body, like a sheet of mirrored glass; you remain,comme le dit Flaubert, melancholique devant son rêve accompli. — The word “red” is not. Forever in lust, forever in heat of fire and flood. Mule-bray, pig-grunt, bawdy cackle and the stomping of feet to the beat of some undone family portrait — bad teeth, bad eyes, beer and paint cans — the name and date split in soft slate. Money makes an inverse difference to distance, when I lift her back to me now: nothing there but that pale curly head, working a machine up and down, an ochre autumn merging into twilight. I read much of the night. Guns click and spit and split up timber, until the river’s tent is broken: old kettles, old bottles, a broken can, old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut who kept the till. Dreams nourished with tears, the sweet kinks of fists, light rain falling as mist. The hours after you are gone are a lead white morning of  hard, new ice, the snow drift of that which is left unspoken. Care and great sadness are both a burden. No gods, but a black swastika and no sky but grinding water, gasping wind, the wares of carthage, girls with peacock eyes. The churn of stale words staining the heart again: bleached wood massed as bones. Your body is white as anemone petals, your skin is stone smooth, we [as cold as the dead they load like a pile of  baskets, mound of refuse, the sweepings of a street] are pressed close together, swaying. Merely the despaired occasion of wordshed made keener by blessed rage. Scrape away the prison coating, the itchy sea; drink from this glass of pure, real, resplendent blood, its malediction, freshly soiled and snug. It’s a question of altitude, probably, walking along your eyelid again, towards your tear duct. This dance of fire that touches our lips, scorches our tongues and pulls out the thin beaten tin of my squally voice. O technosociety, where memory is tolerated, barely, as real estate on which to mount steeples of rust, lay fresh mowed grass, burn gasoline: anything so long as there’s a margin and little but commerce between us. We never have pure space in front of us, rather: slight bondage, the world’s halter, this fashion for dressing or setting our hair ablaze until we’re ash and ash in the heat of a blank but infinitely scrolling screen, flared back to scratch. We begin and end with a groan, the tongue’s comfortable wetness, sureness of soul and fluttering lips. Then: lords of unquiet, quiet sojourn, each atom which belongs to you belongs to me. All abandoned, the last rig broken, the staggering shadows of trees, fence posts, gutted cars, faces blurred and Sienese grave. I wish that I could speak only of  it all, the voices of children singing. A chapel, in spite of  it all.