blossom into percentages,
Year of Voeren, which people want to rescue for a language they only read
in
advertisements,
Year of freeways for ever hastier sheep,
Year of rot in Belgian skulls,
Year that licked at the trough of folklore,
Year (fortunately far from our piggy banks and our folk dancing)
of the escalation there where children grey with fear
dig themselves deeper into mud
(Give them this day our daily napalm
and later our canned food and later our prayers)
Year that freezes smiles.
That was the year I went to live in a village
with books, a woman and a child
that grows
while I tell stories about tigers in the East.
Home
III
The singular sky
That brightens the earth.
The path that leads our steps
And in it our track: a dotted line to the end.
Nature: bordered.
The land: bound in.
In shades of salmon and metal.
The posts that sway when you move.
The reflection of the saffron field.
The pigeon behind wire.
The mouse-grey on the floor of the cage
Is the old seeds.
Speckled and striped.
The world seems trapped in a grid.
Your eyes pierce the pattern,
Mottled, almost hidden,
The hole is a mirror.
The simplicity of a bucket.
And finally, awake, present,
Never ready-varnished, only limited
By walls of gradual lines,
Turning on the spot,
The man bending down to his bucket.
Home. Almost a world of its own.
In Memory of Ferdi
In the Paris I now hate,
in ’55, in rooms that were scorching,
we were hungry,
you showed a lot of breast that summer—
Your lips: scornful of all others.
You’re in the night now and in water
and I — do you believe me? am senseless, sleepless.
You who made velvet ferns
in what I must call “back then”.
Even now you confuse my thoughts of you.
They flake and chip, chattering away
in this disenchanted canto for a slight, lost lady
Ah, the emptiness of my regret
and the wandering desperation
of my provisional present tense
with you in many coats, flowering flesh
in the bygone, bygone zone.
Female Friend
She said, “I would never kill.
Not even if a man a meter away from me
was strangling my little boy.
All life is sacred.”
And I saw her in sodium light,
the sibyl with her outrageous law,
in heat with suicide and prayer.
How the clay hungers for the skeleton
and the earth for the dung
and the mop for the blood!
And how I dance in my bestial sweat
and would kill and how!
Early December
(for the New Year’s guests)
Shall I ask them for New Year’s? To celebrate together here
With punch and feeble grins? To see the New Year in.
Who? Not those who are too wild, not those who are too mild,
Not those who count too much, but those who tell too much.
And most of all the ones like us.
I will soothe them with booze until they crack.
Should I make them pay? Would that enhance their thirst?
Quail? Waffles? Shall I also ask the self-generating
Toad full of poison gas who guesses at family secrets
In my transparent verse? And the greasy connoisseur
Who sits up and begs at the slightest crumb of protestation?
And that shrunken beetle who writes in his paper so brashly
To deny the migration of souls in my poetry? Ah,
Even his corpse will never crack a smile!
I will invite them. No, you ask them, madame, as
I, homunculus in my menthol cloud of dread,
Am like Mickey Spillane, weathered out of my own desires.
Ah, together we will all compulsively pig ourselves
To a full-blown rectal cancer,
We, miniatures more at home in heraldry
Than in nature. Ah, to greet the New Year with
All its whims and grudges, its freezing cold, we’ll scream
dozens of Quantanamèras and Yesterdays.
Yes, again, again. Shall I ask them?
Diary Pages
6 (
On Thomas’s Fourth Birthday
)
Later, my son, you’ll be a man,
later you will yearn to learn the how and why.
They’ll stamp you like luggage.
They’ll hurt you for your wishes and your dreams.
And you will try once and for all to photograph
the how and why of the woman
who turns between your sheets
who sings as you expand in her skin.
And later still, son, your life
will be a scrapbook.
But not for ages yet, no, not for ages yet.
17 (Translation)
Translated Borges’s Tango today.
(qua propter quod bene factum est in una lingua)
Jesus!
It creaks in every joint, it waddles,
this dirge of a dance.
In Spanish: a hard box with music inside,
a sparking flint, a coiled spring.
In Flemish: a band-aid. The metre slides under the table.
The link to the music is lost.
(non est possibile)
Faithfully ailing, how else could it be?
A Flemish tango on two-timing feet.
from Morning, You [1971]
Mad Dog Stanzas, traditionally reserved for poetry by drunkards and lunatics
~ ~ ~
I see her thinking: My kisses
are cold tonight. — How she then hurls
herself into that trusted void!
Mechanically prodding me from
her vacuum. — Towards her smell.
~ ~ ~
I count the steps on the stairs
and then subtract her age.
The number of times the clocks strike
are the thirteen letters of her name.
I tear her like a wet newspaper.
~ ~ ~
Will I ever grow used to time
that wears us down together?
Or will I, like her, become a coincidence,
an aperture in time? —