85 Lust and desire poems

Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out. Music: Known as the Philosopher’s Stair for the world-weariness which climbing it inspires. One gets nowhere with it. Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds. Paris: You’re falling into disrepair, Eiffel Tower this means you! Swathed in gold paint, Enguerrand Quarton whispering come with me under the shadow of this gold leaf. Music: The unless of a certain series. Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the opera, counting everything. Fire: The number between four and five. Gold leaf: Wedding dress of the verb to have, it reminds you of of. Music: As the sleep of the just. We pass into it and out again without seeming to move. The false motion of the wave, “frei aber einsam.” Steve Evans: I saw your skull! It was between your thought and your face. Melisse: How I saw her naked in Brooklyn but was not in Brooklyn at the time. Art: That’s the problem with art. Paris: I was in Paris at the time! St-Sulpice in shrouds “like Katharine Hepburn.” Katharine Hepburn: Oh America! But then, writing from Paris in the thirties, it was to you Benjamin compared Adorno’s wife. Ghost citizens of the century, sexual misery is wearing you out. Misreading: You are entering the City of Praise, population two million three hundred thousand . . . Hausmann’s Paris: The daughter of Midas in the moment just after. The first silence of the century then the king weeping. Music: As something to be inside of, as inside thinking one feels thought of, fly in the ointment of the mind! Sign at Jardin des Plantes: GAMES ARE FORBIDDEN IN THE LABYRINTH. Paris: Museum city, gold lettering the windows of the wedding-dress shops in the Jewish Quarter. “Nothing has been changed,” sez Michael, “except for the removal of twenty-seven thousand Jews.” Paris 1968: The antimuseum museum. The Institute for Temporary Design: Scaffolding, traffic jam, barricade, police car on fire, flies in the ointment of the city. Gilles Ivain: In your tiny room behind the clock, your bent sleep, your Mythomania. Gilles Ivain: Our hero, our Anti-Hausmann. To say about Flemish painting: “Money-colored light.” Music: “Boys on the Radio.” Boys of the Marais: In your leather pants and sexual pose, arcaded shadows of the Place des Vosges. Mathematics: And all that motion you supposed was drift, courtyard with the grotesque head of Apollinaire, Norma on the bridge, proved nothing but a triangle fixed by the museum and the opera and St-Sulpice in shrouds. The Louvre: A couple necking in an alcove, in their brief bodies entwined near the Super-Radiance Hall visible as speech. Speech: The bird that bursts from the mouth shall not return. Pop song: We got your pretty girls they’re talking on mobile phones la la la. Enguerrand Quarton: In your dream gold leaf was the sun, salve on the kingdom of the visible. Gold leaf: The mind makes itself a Midas, it cannot hold and not have. Thus: I came to the city of possession. Sleeping: Behind the clock, in the diagon, in your endless summer night, in the city remaking itself like a wave in which people live or are said to live, it comes down to the same thing, an exaggerated sense of things getting done. Paris: The train station’s a museum, opera in the place of the prison. Later. The music lacquered with listen.

I beat you with a hazel rod Come to me in madness I beat you with a bloodied rod Come like an angel I beat you with a rod from heaven Come to me like a wild boar *       *       * Ninety-nine serpents— ninety-nine flaming beasts— go to Ion Slip in by his shirt-collar squat in his heart scald him burn him turn his eyes to my eyes his face to my face his path to my house Make him see me in the distance a fine-feathered peacock make him pick me out as basil among weeds make him tease me among the girls Like following gold and silver fall in step with my words with my walk with my dance *       *       * Sweet boy don't send so much longing— send a little less and come with it yourself *       *       * Tuesday, basket full of black, how did you make me fall in love— did you clip my hair did you steal my footsteps? How did you charm me— with the hair of a mad wolf with three straws from the bed with splintered wood with the fairness of eyebrows with a chip off the gate with dark hair from a braid? How drive every other love away? *       *       * Eagle, eagle, grow into a flying bird Take yourself to Ion's house What you find in his head take in your head what you find in his ears take in your ears what you find in his mouth take in your mouth what you find in his hands take in your wings Take that great wrong away in your feathers— and what you find in your head put it in her head And what you find in your feathers put it on the table in their house

Off Highway 106 At Cherrylog Road I entered The ’34 Ford without wheels, Smothered in kudzu, With a seat pulled out to run Corn whiskey down from the hills, And then from the other side Crept into an Essex With a rumble seat of red leather And then out again, aboard A blue Chevrolet, releasing The rust from its other color, Reared up on three building blocks. None had the same body heat; I changed with them inward, toward The weedy heart of the junkyard, For I knew that Doris Holbrook Would escape from her father at noon And would come from the farm To seek parts owned by the sun Among the abandoned chassis, Sitting in each in turn As I did, leaning forward As in a wild stock-car race In the parking lot of the dead. Time after time, I climbed in And out the other side, like An envoy or movie star Met at the station by crickets. A radiator cap raised its head, Become a real toad or a kingsnake As I neared the hub of the yard, Passing through many states, Many lives, to reach Some grandmother’s long Pierce-Arrow Sending platters of blindness forth From its nickel hubcaps And spilling its tender upholstery On sleepy roaches, The glass panel in between Lady and colored driver Not all the way broken out, The back-seat phone Still on its hook. I got in as though to exclaim, “Let us go to the orphan asylum, John; I have some old toys For children who say their prayers.” I popped with sweat as I thought I heard Doris Holbrook scrape Like a mouse in the southern-state sun That was eating the paint in blisters From a hundred car tops and hoods. She was tapping like code, Loosening the screws, Carrying off headlights, Sparkplugs, bumpers, Cracked mirrors and gear-knobs, Getting ready, already, To go back with something to show Other than her lips’ new trembling I would hold to me soon, soon, Where I sat in the ripped back seat Talking over the interphone, Praying for Doris Holbrook To come from her father’s farm And to get back there With no trace of me on her face To be seen by her red-haired father Who would change, in the squalling barn, Her back’s pale skin with a strop, Then lay for me In a bootlegger’s roasting car With a string-triggered I2-gauge shotgun To blast the breath from the air. Not cut by the jagged windshields, Through the acres of wrecks she came With a wrench in her hand, Through dust where the blacksnake dies Of boredom, and the beetle knows The compost has no more life. Someone outside would have seen The oldest car's door inexplicably Close from within: I held her and held her and held her, Convoyed at terrific speed By the stalled, dreaming traffic around us, So the blacksnake, stiff With inaction, curved back Into life, and hunted the mouse With deadly overexcitement, The beetles reclaimed their field As we clung, glued together, With the hooks of the seat springs Working through to catch us red-handed Amidst the gray breathless batting That burst from the seat at our backs. We left by separate doors Into the changed, other bodies Of cars, she down Cherrylog Road And I to my motorcycle Parked like the soul of the junkyard Restored, a bicycle fleshed With power, and tore off Up Highway 106, continually Drunk on the wind in my mouth, Wringing the handlebar for speed, Wild to be wreckage forever.

Days of the ferret, a sweet fever. Someone is walking through the sun With my tongue on a leash. Say “Ahhh.” Thank goodness, It’s not diabetes or the Bolivian Rot. This morning I am a cross Between lefthandedness And pointblank rage. The sun leaks like soft ice. The infection deepens . . . My eyes dissolve In a closet of heat. I become 4,000 Yellow flowers, chirruping. O the cliché of a trek into the bowels of China. O the night that zings like a harpsichord factory! O gorgeous sun limping in the frozen dusk. O candy wrappers stacked like bricks! Snow growls on my roof. The infection deepens . . . A day on fire Placing real rabbits Where my mouth should be. I am several kinds of tigers. I am a confectionary treat. This fever fills my sleeves With pearls of honey drops. Am I too strange to bleed? I’m behind myself With a knife and fork, Revolving on a skewer. I am wild with grief As greasy children Reach deep into my fever To scoop out their revenge In double-dips . . . Come off it, kids. Next week, I’ll be raining On the iron road to Malta And perfect health, melting Like sugar in the mouth of the Orinoco.

Already his abdomen was sculpted, and already the thin trail descending from beneath his belly button. Even now it is difficult to explain it. I was, after all, only 7; I didn't even know what Turkish meant. In the dead of winter, which only meant certain flowers had ceased blooming on the island, we had driven up into the mountains to "take the waters," as our parents put it. Our parents' instructions were simple: they would be in one room, our sister in another, my brother and I in yet another. Down the dark hallways as dark as tunnels, down through the strong smell of minerals and seawater, the attendants led us to our rooms. What was that smell? Sulfur? Aluminum? There was the smell of salt, but it was not the salt of the earth, not the sea itself. The old man told us not to sit in the water for more than fifteen minutes at a time, to drink lots of cold water, to scrub the salts into our skin, to take care of each other. And then, he left us. We took off our clothes, did it without thinking. "You get in first," is all he said, his voice sounding more like my father's, his voice having changed almost a year ago. His body had changed, too. Sitting in the pool, my thoughts began to swim in the vapors, the steam, I felt nauseated. I wanted not to look at him. I wanted to look at the tile: blue and blue-white with the depiction of a terrible vine twisting and creeping around the tops of the walls. When he got out and lay on the tile next to the pool, his abdomen was already sculpted, and the thin trail . . . He knew I watched him, and he loved the admiration. When I finally got out, my head dizzy, my heart racing from the heat, I lay myself down next to him. He scrubbed my back with a rough sponge, pulled me against his chest as he scrubbed behind my ears and under my arms. There, in the steam, I was cleaner than I would ever be again.

I regard your affections, find your teeth have left me a bruise necklace. Those lipstick marks leech a trail, ear to ear, facsimile your smile. Your 40 ounces of malt liquor, your shrink hate, your eyes dialing 911. The hearts you draw with ballpoint on my cigarette packs when I've left the room, penned in your girl's cursive, look demented, misshapen approximations of what I refuse to hand over. It's a nice touch, though: a little love to accompany the cancer. My thought follows you to where you spend your days lying in bed, smoking and reading the Beats. The accumulation of clothes and ashes circles you, rising like a moat after rainfall. Often you are a study in detachment—the trigger eye is your eye, still as a finger poised to press should one refuse to cooperate, and I wonder how you can hate men so much when you think like one. Think of what I could be doing outside if I could unlock the door of myself: think bikini, think soda fountain, think tradition, a day lacking entirely your brand of ambivalence. If you were a number, I'd subtract you; if you were a sentence, I'd rewrite you. Are you the one who left these wilted flowers, are you the one whose PIN spells out H-O-L-E? Why are you wearing my clothes? If you are weather, then I am a town, closing down at word of your coming: you're a glacier on fast forward, you're direct as a detour, when I say good-bye you move in next door. You say you want to have my baby, you want to buy me a car, and you're too young to enter a bar. I should tether you to a tree in the dark park, allow the moon to stroke your white neck. I should give you a diamond collar, walk you around the block and show you off.

Watch the fire undress him, how flame fingers each button, rolls back his collar, unzips him without sweet talk or mystery. See how the skin begins to gather at his ankles, how it slips into the embers, how it shimmers beneath him, unshapen, iridescent as candlelight on a dark negligee. Come, look at him, at all his goods, how his whole body becomes song, an aria of light, a psalm’s kaleidoscope. Listen as he lets loose an opus, night’s national anthem, the tune you can’t name, but can’t stop humming. There, he burns brilliant as a blue note.

There was a graven image of Desire Painted with red blood on a ground of gold Passing between the young men and the old, And by him Pain, whose body shone like fire, And Pleasure with gaunt hands that grasped their hire. Of his left wrist, with fingers clenched and cold, The insatiable Satiety kept hold, Walking with feet unshod that pashed the mire. The senses and the sorrows and the sins, And the strange loves that suck the breasts of Hate Till lips and teeth bite in their sharp indenture, Followed like beasts with flap of wings and fins. Death stood aloof behind a gaping grate, Upon whose lock was written Peradventure.

1. without that, the river which was, a substrata is movement now. mermaid left behind flopping in the pipes. her sludge is the sewer where once they fished to watch the night sky blacken. that one, long lingering, now languishes in a cavernous underground source, fountain for none. music of exhaust and darkening horizons, her hair begins to thin, nails soften, while she waits, a siren of light slow to diminish, wasting rescue. dogs at night are frequent. the scales that once cleaved to her flesh, her skin house shelter, now a day-glow phosphorescence, luminous filth, cleavage, radiating and filtered through her. boils begin to grow, round lumps spurting evanescence, a rainbow of industry, inviting those who come to visit to enjoy her paints, corporeal, images of what might be, a river now sewer then tomb, sanctions while poking her eyes out. no sensible heat. 2. images are wanting. she studies them. let them bury themselves in: no comment no comment. a partial shutter moves through the crowd taking us up along its crest. pubises sway. incarnate and incorporated publicly. swaying us. subjects of. the sap in the oak tree the bugs in the bookbinding. for she renders and has left behind the bark. its carnality upon which I turn. hard by and solitary. the other pole. 3. she means to say or stubbornness as a means of resistance speaking about us and for us dread and ailments a celebrated day in liberating explosions of losses disparities and distances dispersed in errors mistaken detours mismade calculations faulty respirations. counter to the stream and in plumes. the pressure transgressed in hands. nor was there another road. trying to gather what is gone. first by pacing. then on her hands and knees with the measuring tape. she’s a period piece asking if. seeking the response she is the question. 4. she means to say we live among a crowded scene. overcrowding faces and malice. a crack in time painted on garden paths. inclined to our desire. we ooze we can flourish there. forward an elephant eleven o’clock rook one o’clock apple and three o’clock lightning perpendicular to spoon soiled underneath apple in line with lightning in line with two cent piece face down. all circling hunted and hunting. elephant trying to leave the scene heading out east spoon facing west constellating failure of identity with apple and rook. 5. meaning to say. given that. the uncertainty. perhaps. surely. perhaps. figures in. the shape. perhaps. calls. subtract. total. a certainty. the space between. shaped by want. by need. fear of threats. the lure of repetition. her feet admired. their figures. the fear of repetition. start at the end. work back to shape. figure that. days wait. the response. slowness as position. a gap to walk into. opposition. given an entrance. she is on your side. whirlpools of repetition. opening traps. a shape appears. groups itself. more figures. a shape in the doorway. time for gets smaller. tilts inwards. the envelope unshared. first. given that. a set of shapes plan to meet. she is faint. clouds to the west. 6. white metal teeth. describe her lips. how they reveal and encircle them. encircling me. place them in some setting. a long walk. the kitchen at night. hounding toward an untimely end. that which spawns life. one foot in front of the next. spawning more. beating out the attachments. strumming along. not refreshing that. productive and not taking advice. recognizable car engine up the road. another can grow again there. 7. unjoined. supporting that. permeated and touched. moved by injury. joining not singular. this state. that stare. meaning the look alikes and she is eying those that be. taken to the extreme. accepting even that. orchestrate a sighing. a fourth. audible sounds of presence. calculating the ooze of difference. a quaver in the voice, it’s the ask if. 8. I adopt a hostile attitude towards it. towards want. forced into the background. escaped from the cage prowls about in your life. a ghost of dead business unfinished and naked cash payments between afterglow. intolerable shadow invites back into the fracture. watching the tree grow naked. going down to the port start from the shore of calculations and yawning. it is voracious. its wanting to be included wanting to grow fast. is asunder where the first was rooted out. sifting through the outrages of lightning and blood. 9. refresh against the sightlines. in its sedimentation along the edge of the mountains. planes overhead. the love of trees indigent and muscular. exploratory chance to disappear bone by bone rancid. finally : slowly : she : exuberant and revolting forcing immobility. along the edges of the mountains replenishing asking Agnes asking Edith. grinding into their own emergence. an unlikely anger such unlikeness. sharp calmness shallow dehydration and a decomposition weary and threadbare. admit nothing turn by turn admitting a hand. expresses weariness. its evanescence its asking to be unlikely bone by bone. 10. she tells more than she knows. a knot of suffocation. strangling itself. gestures your gait and resolutions. a recipe in permanent access in diversions. the flower dies at the end. a short stifled giggle. I had gone ‘too far’ asking toe to toe. adoring and afar we attend. before talking. the horizon folding in on us. to give in advance of conductivity as a dispatch. regardless of protection she means to say. indeed. 11. indeed. I can’t declare them for what they are. the approach goes like this. the dogs bark across the street. when and how and where. despairing answers. here it is finally. the days passing as an argument indeed indeed terrestrial. carnal excavating relentlessly. inaudible slow. howling recalcitrance behind the music. beneath the ground.

O You, Who came upon me once Stretched under apple-trees just after bathing, Why did you not strangle me before speaking Rather than fill me with the wild white honey of your words And then leave me to the mercy Of the forest bees.