“What I investigate is only what,
without sinfully defiling myself,
remains as a residue after conjugal coitus.”
XVI
Even now, when I dare to think of my lost bride,
my legs tremble beneath me imagining who plucks her now,
my wandering oleander of a bride who won’t stop tearing
the weed that I am out of her garden of delight.
If you dare to think? Although while
constructing a consistent image
of your lady,
you forget time, mass and velocity!
Strange. Eros: a blind photographer.
XVII
Even now, with the bees of death swarming around me
I taste the honey of her belly and hear the buzz
of her orgasm and stare at the moist rose
petals of her pulsing carnivorous flower.
These symbols are multiplying
at an alarming rate. They’re a threat to existence itself.
Can’t the babbling in our tower of Babel
be a little clearer?
Maybe you should limit your writing,
do it on the wall.
XVIII
Even now, our wide bed that reeks of her and her armpits,
our pale bed shat upon by the birds of the world.
At the bird market she said, “I want that one, the wild one,
the one that can’t stop tapping its beak on that tit of hers.”
It is dangerous to believe
that you understand the least bit of it.
Much more than the unknown,
you should fear the known.
XIX
Even now, the way she resisted and refused my mouth,
lying limply only after I had floored her with my nails
in her breast, and then, while I slept, drunk on her abundance,
stoking me up again like a fire that had long seemed dead.
You can see it like this:
the physical corset in which a beetle grows
is responsible for the mental straitjacket
that regulates its patterns of behaviour.
XX
Even now, her supple breasts lying in my hands
and her lips thick from my nipping, biting teeth
and her chewed-down nails and her chafed nipples,
and how she squinted in the cruel light of morning.
“Now, now,” said Monsieur Paul
“Speculative thought never imagined
what the microscope has seen.
Come now, le vent se lève. Il faut tenter de vivre.”
XXI
Even now, I tell myself that in the straitened time
between me and the Arctic night, she was the stars,
the grass, the cockroaches, the fruit and the maggots,
and how I accepted this and how it delights me yet.
The beauty
who gives you the greatest pleasure,
what is her purpose?
At most she’ll scare the fish
when she jumps in the water.
XXII
Even now, how to describe her, what to compare her to?
Until I’m in my grave I will arrange her and paint her
and spoil her and, head spinning, blow her back to life
with my irritating complaints, my nerve-wracking moaning.
“You can say that again!
But I sympathise. After all natives
paint their faces
to protect themselves from the sun.”
XXIII
Even now, with her mascaraed lashes and her eye shadow
and her painted lips and her scarlet earlobes pierced.
“I’m burning up,” she said, “I can’t go on, I’ll murder you,
those fingers of yours, nobody else ever, nowhere, never.”
Not seeing something for what it is
is more treacherous
than faulty reasoning.
XXIV
Even now, she’s still nineteen despite how much she drinks,
and though the tracks of far too many tears have worn wrinkles
in her cheeks, carving through her camouflage and war paint,
the mould and freezing cold of her life without me.
We should examine
her biorhythm, her hormonal ebb and flood,
the behaviour of her enzymes, blood sugar and amino acids
when you’re not around.
XXV
Even now, if I could find her again as a fairytale
from the moon after a cloudburst and lick her toes again,
back on the road with my heart of stone I fear it would lead
to another horribly soppy song à la Cole Porter.
I’ve seen many a heart,
being a coroner, and I’ve yet to see one
that’s worn out nicely at the same rate
as the other organs.
XXVI
Even now, her more than the water in her miraculous body,
a salt lake on which a duck would float and stay
and that duck with a dick was me hear me quack! — and she
being a lake rocked me on her surging waves or pretended.
This is completely at odds with physics.
Although physics itself can also be seen as a protest
against the cult of common sense.
XXVII
Even now, if I could see her again with that short-sighted look
of hers, heavier around the hips and with a bigger bum,
I would, I believe, embrace her again and drink from her again,
a bee could not be happier, busier, lither and more limber.
Seduction changes us, obviously,
because we are
titillated, incited, spurred on
by one of our possibilities with that one possibility,
that spitfire,
determining the whole
and completely sweeping it, her, us, along.
XXVIII
Even now, with me entangled and knotted together with her,