friend
for M
the blurs
Everything is descending,
even the scholarship of the
ancient adverbs 1
process of seeing
crease from
eyebrow
to temple
into hairline
crease from
too narrow
sense
O see (sings
eyes)
how
diminutive
Golondrina (a swallow)
dimming
dips
lands
alights
little feet
wires
talons
of tin
standard
paramount
in the jardin
blue walls the
infolded cloak
of the Virgin
A task for daylight -
separating mad boys from
shadows -
an un-ordinary one
shrugs its
shoulders like a girl.
An ordinary gesture
the mad boys may
be taken into arms
or dressed in strange
garb maybe all in the
gesture beyond
ordinary remains
remains
always becoming
image such as are
a gesture's embrace
bruised
dressings
undressings
ventures for affection.
But from whom?
*
The mad boy
writes feeble colors
for love for
the halt the lame
the mute which
within around
which intends
bends distorts
(in your glass
case) twists
takes traps light
to separate
the mad world
from shadow
*
Both
we are
contortionists
thus take our
place with clowns who
know tomatoes thrown
and juggler's (bare necked)
necessary concentration.
You are the maestro here
whom I trail behind at respectful
distance
murdered by the too ordinary
controllers
*
So long
So long
to image
to suffer on dear
bruised M the
void of course
o bring me
beauty no matter
how terrible
created by His
own opening
which makes
Him forever
a pomegranate
biggish
and green
a girl
You, dear, will read
of my heterosexual shadow
a great lover who serenades
her in the terrible contradiction
of the moon caught
in bare tree limbs/strophes
just outside Her window
the fool below in rouge
head hung, singing
O hurt
heart's tin can tied
to belt loop behind
of his ragged pants
pants
waits
to be filled with
whatever flows
in the dirty lane
he leans his
love against
*
Imagine
this asterisk
which contains an aster
is a rose transforming yet again
because it can
because
Lorca
has willed it obediently into being
letter by letter, petal by petal
bee kissed by brazen bees
a clutch of stamens
assassin's ink
out flowing
*
>>><<<
A note on the title and the phrase repeated in the poem: the line comes from a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca entitled, The Little Mad Boy, translated by W.S. Merwin in The Selected Poems of Garcia Lorca, New Directions Press, 1955 -
THE LITTLE MAD BOY
—Federico Garcia Lorca
I said, "Afternoon."
But it was not so.
The afternoon was something else
which had already gone away.
(And the light shrugged
its shoulders like a girl.)
"Afternoon." But it is useless!
This is false, this has
a half-moon made of lead.
The other will never come.
(And the light as everyone sees it
played at being a statue, with the mad boy.)
That other: she was little
and ate pomegranates.
This one is huge and green, I cannot
take her in my arms, nor dress her.
Won't she come? What was she like?
(And the light as it went, for a joke,
parted the mad boy from his shadow.)
(trans. by W.S. Merwin)
1 A line from Triptych for Believers by Richard Taggart from his book, Demodulating Angel (Ithuriel's Spear, 2011).
Here is Triptych 2 from which I borrow the line [my italics and underline highlight said line]:
II
Light solidifies in cells, the keeper of lost keys. They don’t belong to anyone, the keys. Playing the game backwards reveals nothing a blind child could not guess by the hairs on his arm. The lips on old men are lockboxes in the terminal of no-knowing without gratitude for the despair of angels. You have to suffer, you have to fill up in order to implode, to be recognized for the necessities of commerce. They unhinge, finally, the doors you walk through into phantom stairwells in telephonic hum smelling of wet coal and doll’s hair. Precipitous adjectives gush from a cracked faucet in the chancellery restroom. Someone is stifling laughter from underneath a card table where an electric utility had fallen from his sleeve. They say that trussed birds derive no pleasure from the music of mangled wagons and that gas seeps like a well-kept secret imperiling dust mites in the spleens of hooded maidens locked away from the light. Everything is descending, even the scholarship of the ancient adverbs. Mouths twist into almonds and you wonder how the noise can drown itself out with nothing but nouns and dinner plates and gallows, with history a hiccup waiting to happen.
A note on the Asterisk poem: It is a very loose reference to William Carlos Williams poem, Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower. Here are opening lines of this longish, now classic poem easily found online:
Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
like a buttercup
upon its branching stem-
save that it's green and wooden-
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you.
We lived long together
a life filled,
if you will,
with flowers. So that
I was cheered
when I came first to know
that there were flowers also
in hell.
Today
I'm filled with the fading memory of those flowers
that we both loved,
even to this poor
colorless thing-
I saw it
when I was a child-
little prized among the living