Isn’t it better to be made of stone?
Or am I glad it was you?
It’s better to be grass
People mow it, weed it and
it grows wild again, never the same.
4 Him
People say that a man
who has been bitten by a mad dog
sees the image of the beast
in water everywhere
Have the teeth of rabid love sunk into me,
that in the vastness of the sea, the river’s
whirlpools and the glass from which I drink,
I cannot escape your image
smiling up at me?
5 Her
Marsha said, He’s too old for you. Imagine!
Knock it off, I said. Next thing you’ll say
I can’t forget my dad. Come on!
But I still think Marsha’s great. Lovely, really
’Cept when she gets like that …
You’re old, my beetle, yes, but you find your way in me.
No one finds their way as easily as you.
Wait, I have to do my nails. Now? Yes, right this moment.
Wait, I said.
(“I’ve got him where I want him,
like a beetle on a pin.”)
9 Her
Dear bumpkin, I won’t be beautiful when I’m old
Hurry,
caress the eyes of my breasts
22 Him
Yes, your eyes sparkle star-like everywhere!
And you make me your captive
when you dance with another!
It’s true, it’s true, your secret hair
burns on the lips of your lovers!
But soon (so very soon, my bunny rabbit)
you’ll see them land on the moon on TV.
And what will still be shining then,
there in your room?
The diamond in your ear and nothing else.
from The Sign of the Hamster [1963]
Een razernij, een kuil, een pijnbank om te pijnen
Haar zotter lievers die nog in haar kercker zijn.
Bredero
(A pit, a frenzy, a rack on which to torture
the foolish lovers imprisoned in its dungeons.)
~ ~ ~
This is what I will write:
a trip from Ghent to Bruges and back.
Because I am being written.
It doesn’t rain, it drizzles
in this country in the grip of the past.
Should I emigrate?
No rock or wilderness anywhere unless this history-crazed nation
excavates it and cultivates officers there to keep the peace
and nowhere is the thought’s main seam laid bare.
This is what I was going to write:
a tater for later, a third for a verse,
allegro con fuoco.
But peevishly grieving, the hooked spire rises,
surrounded by clawing clouds and trees like antlers,
under the aluminium sky with, in it, a falcon
or a sparrow hawk.
Tower, gallows, cross.
Now that — from the days of Ursula, her virgins and her executioner—
the plague has been reintroduced
to the cocked and loaded continent
I will be intelligibly resistible.
Left Ghent
— though I, thank God, do hate this town,
there’s not a turd that doesn’t have a fly to buzz around it in the sun
and Ghent has gates that never close
although the Lys reeks of folklore (foreign currency)—
for the town where I was born among cars,
scalpels and Memlincs.
Left not unwillingly,
but with women-trouble i.e. moody
and otherwise not contemplating heavenly bodies
but more the skin you pull over your own eyes
and the disease in which you find a home — satisfied.
Now the rabbits have died in the west
the foxes (giant hamsters) feed on the sheep,
biting their udders and bellies at night.
The sun wants its shadow.
Nocturnal birds of prey (so much softer than falcons or sparrow hawks)
wear lined gloves that cover
their fingers to the beds of their nails.
Like the cross spider’s
simple rhymes.
Left Ghent among loaded smiling postmen,
following the tram tracks
“between channels, many”
and waving to relatives or residents.
Lots of streets offered diversions under skirts.
Low entertainment throbbed in wandering eyes.
Slow down, you, who used to
venerate the moment
and now return to perhaps, therefore and but
and will soon believe in Nature like a newspaper.
Cat people sleep away their days and hunt at night,
the birdman wakes before dawn,
I am the toad and nowhere to be found
unless you drag the pond
or beat the grass.
The houses here are grey and crenelated,
their skin recalls a woman with
the pox. Renovation only speeds
the rot. The houses here are dead and
tortured The residents shack up in them
quite happily.
Like using a scalpel
to search a vagina
for a foetus.
Stefan George in Heidelberg: You can ask me
to eat bread that has been adulterated
with a large amount of bark.
That’s acceptable.
But there are situations in which one must say,
“No, not that. I would rather die.”
(Which? He doesn’t hesitate,
a mountain wind blows,
the poet shines on a boy like the sun.)
“For instance.
If one were obliged to eat rats or mice.”
At that time (in the Bagne of Toulon)
they dyed the Zouaves’ trousers
crimson.
Near South Station, in the Telstar, the card-players sit,
silhouetted sharply against the day.
Present are: Horsedick and Hadji Baba (because of his slanty eyes)
Gaspipe (for bashing passers-by) Snowwhite (four years suspended
sentence) and Bugs (who scratches)
cadaverous, sordid,
the weavers’ shady descendants, joking
and hoping for a guardian angel to bring
them stunning luck and Sundays
(when they give the cards a rest)
udders.
In the Advanced Book Shop,
as academic as the lost Hebrew word in
Isaiah Two Six, as dark as Yahweh,
the toads are mating.
Her underneath, dropsical, with eyes of mud and chlorine,
and on her shoulders,
struggling yet motionless,
the father (like a suckling).
Blocked yet balanced.
No peat smoke can bother them. Gender is absent,
inflection and conjugation.