And won’t get past me again.
I Write You Down
My woman, my pagan altar,
Which I caress and play with fingers of light,
My young wood, my wintering place,
My tender, unchaste, neurasthenic sign,
I write your breath and body down
On lined music paper.
And in your ear I promise brand-new horoscopes,
Preparing you again for trips around the world
And a stay somewhere up on an alp.
But with gods and constellations,
Eternal happiness can grow deathly tired,
And I have no home, I have no bed,
Not even flowers for your birthday.
I write you down on paper
While you swell and bloom like an orchard in July.
Behind Bars
Saturday Sunday Monday sluggish week and weakened days
A still-life a landscape a portrait
A woman’s brows
Closing as I approach
The landscape with blond calves wading a river
Where the season of compassion is burnt
Into the Prussian blue of the fields
Then I painted another still-life
With unrecognisable brows and a mouth like a moon
With a spiral like a trumpet of redemption
In the Jerusalem of my room.
An Angry Man
No house too black
For me to live in
No morning too bright
For me to wake up in
As in a bed
That’s how I live and watch in this house
Between night and morning
Walking on fields of nerves
And digging my nails into every
Uncomplaining body that approaches
Saying chaste words like
Rain and wind apple and bread
Dark and viscous blood of women
Caligula
Where later radishes and mignonette will flower
In May that is
In a garden by the tracks of a country train
The wind
Is freezing now in December
And in that wind without light without shepherds without birds
Without any chance at all a foal has frozen to death
I’ve brought it here and put it under glass
I gaze away the days and hours
(That pass me by on the wide path
Of this existence which reasonably
We tread in sin with no great deeds)
And wait until thankful and thawed
The foal looks up and speaks its first word.
from Tancredo Infrasonic [1952]
Las Hurdes
We know neither bread nor meat
We sleep on leaves that turn to compost for our stony land
Our houses have no windows
And in our village there are 14 dwarves and 30 idiots
It rains and our levees leak
It doesn’t rain We pray and our earth stays dry
Like our skin
Like our throats that swell and crack
He who is our father is our lover
And our mothers die young
Shame is our portion
Disgrace our daily meal
Our faces are rank with weeds
We look into your camera We are real
And you are right to say, “They are Las Hurdes.”
West Flanders
A gaunt song a dark thread
Land like a sheet
That sinks
Springtime land of milk and farms
Willow-wood children
Feverish summer land when the sun
Spawns its young in the corn
Golden enclosure
With the deaf-and-dumb farmers at their dead hearths
Praying to God to “forgive us
His trespasses against us”
With the fisherman burning in their boats
With the mottled animals the frothing women
Who sink
Land I dawn in you My eyes are shards
I am in Ithaca with holes in my skin
I borrow your air when I speak
Your bushes and lindens concealed in my words
My letters are West Flanders: dune and polder
I drown in you
Land you are a gong in my skull and at times
Later in ports
A conch: May and beetle Dark bright
Earth.
Bye
A morning like always your house is empty
We count and one by one the days
Step into the cage
One sees I see you see
The hidden animals in the cool mirror see
This keeps it buried
The knife that rusts the blood that clots
The bricks porous the milk sour
One says you say
With a blinded voice a frozen gesture
Bye
Bye dear children bye.
from The Oostakker Poems [1955]
Bitter tastes
Bitter tastes the herb of memory.
Artillery, chunks of phosphorus,
Chalky stubble turnips surround the house and who
Is not watching there, unchaste sentinels waiting for the sign
Of the burning bush, of the horn,
Of the helmeted weathercock of hate?
One step and monkeys start swinging, slithering,
Sliding in on fingers,
Forcing entry into my resting blood. Living there swiftly,
Living there slowly. Until it burns in the hay of all words,
Until it burns in the bygone field, the drowned days and
Their fermenting corn.
The Singer
The singer is not free
But fast and scornful and skimming the peaks like a pond.
He is not free because his transfixed cascade
And worm-eaten wood resound in his throat, tongue and mouth.
Let loose in his skin, this house,
The singer greets neither cuckoo nor bird catcher
Nor the furtive watchers in the low country.
The singer is his song.
The Mother
There is no me, no me but in your earth.
When you cried out your skin shivered
And my bones caught fire.
(My mother, imprisoned in her skin,
Changes by the measure of the years.
Her eyes are pale, escaped from the urging
Of the years by looking at me and calling me
Her joyful son.
She was no bed of stone, no feverish beast,
Her joints were a litter of kittens,
But my skin stays unforgivable to her,
The crickets in my voice unmoving.