Christopher Middleton

Local his discourse, not yet exemplary, Nowadays he is old, the translator, So old he is practically transparent. Good things and otherwise, evils done Come home to him, too close to the bone And so little transformed, Him so transparent, They float in and out of his window. Killing fields and the pumpkin patch, The combat boot putrid in a cherry tree, Stroke on stroke the mortal build-up, All the constraint, all the letting go, So insistent in his attentions That he needs a breathing block. For lack of a monitor he might levitate, The testy old bird, at his wondow; He needs an animal, a sure thing, One to imagine, at last. Speechless As bedrock, a rough reminder of that. A dog might be vigilant enough, Intact, all heart, a yellow desert dog. Avoirdupoids. A leopard? Markings Regular, talons to swat Any hurt away. Knowing Hunger, not the greed. Sufficient Unto itself, svelte, clean of limb; Free through self-discipline, yes, Yes, through self-discipline free, And fierce, yet doing no violence The wild by right he will restore To a holy place, in time. For want of that sort of a beast, He might make do with a frog.

Celebrated, the moustache, And near enough ignored His “beautiful hands”. Capable on a keyboard, improvised A polonaise, his own artistic Compositions “dull and decent”. He could see, some, but much swam, out there: Knives and forks, print, street signs. Then, his mind made up, he laid about, Sank immense nets into the cultural acid. When we winched them back in, on fingertips, They rippled with rainbows—herring and sprat He could fling, raw, in the teeth Of the Bürgertum, God rot it. Ah, no God: So to invoke the impact of quanta on quanta And extirpate for keeps the German cabbage, His fingers, subject to whim, and rounded Like objects in a metephor, made good the feeble Peering eyes. Each tip housed a labyrinth, Circling in or out, from ivories an octopod Pressed the torrent of a tune. From Cretan pots Their gestures, snaking out, apprehended, Turn on turn, a tumbril in the stars. Those fingers must have held, no less, the comb To bush his hairy icon out, to primp. On long mountain walks they jotted Gothic Letters on a page, deleted angrily Brainwaves, on a page one trouser leg Segregated from his knee. What a joy, At long last, to know the knower not deceived But disobedient, at his word. Underneath The creams of language here’s a tongue can taste A universe, cyclopic, but propulsive, alien To a species blocked by self-torment, To shopping, authority—all the cockahoop Engines of flesh not fuelled by despair. When Nietzche, squinting, trimmed his fingernails, Did he care for suchlike slighter things? To a turning pot a potter’s fingers do not cling.

What if I know, Liebknecht, who shot you dead. Tiegarten trees unroll staggering shadow, in spite of it all. I am among the leaves; the inevitable voices have nothing left to say, the holed head bleeding across a heap of progressive magazines; torn from your face, trees that turned around, we do not sanctify the land with our wandering. Look upon our children, they are mutilated.

Just seen, running, and silver-gray along the top tube of a fence between myrtles and me, too slinky for a bird and even at this distance unmistakably a quadruped and nimble, some sort of unspoiled animal, but which? It ran as if away from a threat, peril was everywhere, a footsole crunches it, it is mangled by a tire’s treads, hawk scoops it, turkey buzzard pecks at it, no speech mitigates its pains, even the cat fools with it, until, inedible, it is kicked into the gutter. There she goes, the slinky silver-gray Atalanta of reptiles vanishes in no time, for the wind whisks from her feet such tenuous gusts of air — brisk now where turnpikes stretch their webs, and not forever can an earthiness so sweet as this propel such grace. She’ll have got to the mantis eggs by now, at each gulp of hatchling she slowly blinks with satisfaction.

Four buskers almost balkanized, tonight, August 4th, the Place de la Contrescarpe. Every one of them in wind and limb complete, The accordionist all but a hunchback-- After the first melodious flourishes were done, The clarinet began to take his instrument apart, Blowing shorter tunes, to show the way it worked; But on a keyboard hanging from his neck The carpenter pianist banged out routine chords And the violin a beanpole man was fingering Sliced through the edges of catalpa leaves With long shrieks, rat trills, and all in fun. Cars now orbiting the quadrangle of trees Turned into tubes filled with human meat, Notes took the scent of carnage from their lager (Even so, the buzz of talk, no way to stop it) And cherry red the track suit of its rider, The sliced leaves, iron chains that link Old mooring posts around the beds of flowers. Fogged the eye with fright, and meaning trouble Identical white camper caravans Rolled into view, the one behind the other, For things to jump from, us to be flung into. Rohmahniyah! he shouts, shaking his money pot, The clarinettist,Ceausescu, fini! Whereupon, Classic features, stepping light and fresh From reeds that told secrets of a beauty parlour. A nice Missouri girl, in gree, with pearls To plug each earlobe, pushed her wicker chair aside; Showing a dainty midriff, on steady legs She strolled across the street, as if to depollute With every breath, every stride, the air Our music for a moment had iunhabited. Then the white, lost caravans came back again, Carnation milk inside, stringbags of potatoes, Family snug inside, in each a Belgian grandpa, Peering every which way, at the wheel.

Sometimes you watch them going out to sea On such a day as this, in the worst of weathers, Their boat holding ten or a dozen of them, In black rubber suits crouched around the engine housing, Tanks of air, straps and hoses, and for their feet Enormous flippers. The bow, with such a load on board, Hammers through the whitecaps, while they talk; Junonian girls, Praxitelean boys, pelted on By bursting clouds, by spray, eventually heave The tanks upon their backs, the boat drifts at anchor, And down they go to the sea floor, by the foggy headland. At least, you can presume they kick the flippers And plunge to where the water is more calm. The cool Instructors must keep eyes and ears Open. Accidents out there, they happen. You might imagine scraps Of cultural débris, a broken pot, a ring, a cogwheel Come up, clutched in a palm, and interesting, A wave pattern in it, the blade of a sword, When a lucky diver breaks again the surface. Time, Time and again frigate and schooner cracked Blown against the rocks, holed below the water line. Even an inscription Might now be coming up from those green deeps. Yet the divers do their silent thing. On the sea floor Expect only the sea, a multitude of sand without an hourglass. Round somebody’s ankle idly it swarms. A diver Hangs by a thread of breath in solitude there. Some go down In all simplicity curious; to have tales to tell; And who knows, what they learn Just might, long after this, be usable.

1 Meryon saw it coming (who was he?): No people, so no noise. As it should be. The Bridge. The Morgue. Ghostly round his bed Antipodean atolls and tattoos had fluted, Volcanoes puffed. Then borborygmic sea Forked, at its last gasp, into a V: Down that black gallery and backward slid A syrup, foul, ovum and sperm concocted, The foggy groan of Antichrist. 1863: People mattered nothing, live or dead. Paris by his impeccable etchings emptied: Pointy turrets, windows, not a single head Poking out—and there across the sky, Tortuous, the skeleton birds creak by. 2 As if all the steps had stopped As if all the takes had token As if all the creaks had croaken As if all that weeps had wopped As if all that flips had flopped As if all that mocks had moaken As if all that speaks had spoken As if all that drips had dropped As if all that hopes had hopped As if all that leaps had lopped As if all that aches had oaken As if all that peaks had poken As if all that creeps had cropped As if all that peeps had popped 3 The old aquaforte art is back, thought Baudelaire. Multiple majesty of stone piled on stone; Obelisks of industry discharge into the air Their coalescent smoke. Almost airborne Scaffoldings roped to monuments under repair— Very poetic, beauty so paradoxical I never saw the like; and the sky over it all— Eagles. Tumult. Perspective deepens there With all the dramas that have come and gone. The artist: Once a sailor, now he’ll seek In nooks of masonry a sphinx. I think you’d get a scare To hear him talk