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Fountain
compressed like baker’s yeast
the brown serviettes
sheaved beneath the shortened
bench leg come loose
at my wrecked collapse –
and in that trot-like tremor
I see the stars of blood loss to my brain
and almond number six
jag like a stalagmite
from the squirrel’s whiskered jowls –
this is the pond in which the baby drowned
and parents, holding their Juliette
& Chocolat take-away cups
many in complete Hasidic garb
go warily to the shallow water’s edge
where a reactively laid fence of stones
insurmountable for those it was financed for
holds what turgid perils there are
back from the summer grass –
stars once seen
turned now to darting insects
I wonder what it is
clogging the apertures of the fountain –
cherub leaning back against a fish
festooned with marble seaweed
cherub’s head hung over the plinth edge
water dripping from his eyes and lips
as if in the imminence
or aftermath of throwing up –
that causes such a hierarchy of streams
and swarms of mist
and clenched-knuckled waterfall.
when the salvia smoke leaves her
it lets go all obstacles
to my awareness of the stomach muscles
formed upon a female body laid
on its back between fence and grass
and plaintive sun and centre of the earth
in exchange for bandits
shape-shifting in the giant cedars
rhythmic gymnasts ambling down the bike paths
laughter to wake the dead in the cemetery
just across the Boulevard Sainte-Anne.
then she’s amnesiac and I smell onions
burning, and only at the mirror-image
holes on the heels of my striped socks
do I feel my skin is naked – all the rest
arms, face, hands, legs – under some gnomic
coverage, spurning the breeze’s overtures
all radiance seems to be ebbing out of being
and, I’m later told, I cry
in so violent and yet unperturbed a way
that it appears the very opposite of hallucinatory
behaviour to her, as if I had merely reverted
for those ninety-odd seconds to my authentic state.
to feel the mist begin
to form in the unburnt crevasses
dividing one abdominal from another
and where the pressure of her bra stifles the skin
is to want so desperately to fuck
that I say I have to go and walk a while
allay her sublime confusion with some words
I quickly forget, and admit to myself, when I come
I’ll see the face of that other girl
not in hallucination, it might be argued
but in my authentic state
and it’ll set back my recovery to the start
it’ll leave me like a puff of magic smoke
as I resume my grudging metamorphosis.
*******************************************************
Music
hardly has more blood arrived
to fuel his fingers as they start to pluck
than they are there
one in a lilac dress with rhododendrons
whose hair is black, Japanese like her mother’s
one in an orange dress with another flower
perhaps a posy, in the midst of dark ringlets of
blonde
and he is playing softer
he is singing to his own daughters
and they are dancing
as they watch each other dance
they are dizzy
and one’s hair tie has come loose
and from across the park
four parents watch and think
they are learning what it is to be alive
by degrees, and that music is the highest
because it moves us everywhere
and I can see that all parties
find it beautiful beyond compare.
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