Even Now

~ ~ ~

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.

Then like a moral lesson, a celebration,

he moves, almost falls, gives a bitter belch and shudders. A tic.

Respect makes women thin. He moves no more.

Like the lure of your hedgehog

among plaster prickles.

Left for Bruges. The year has taken off its coat.

Rode through the countryside under azure skies, paling.

As always, the bandy-legged farmers came

to stare at the rain-bringing train,

bowing chastened to the ground.

No more than a legend, they dig the earth

like harnessed ploughshares. And vote compliantly.

Cherishing their farms and children Senator and priest

so sacred groaning wins over legislators

and no-one ever hits his neighbour, in astonishment

and fury at the sameness of things.

No-one vomits, skin rules and smothers the broad suspicions.

I don’t want to go on, they are contagious, I want

to go back to being wrapped in the jabbering that dims as

Death defeats me.

Come here. Now? Come on. “Look into my eyes.”

Bruges. My mother holds her babe — her prey — tight.

They have to search inside her.

The doctors at her bed compare makes of cars

and my father beeps at the gate.

Boneblack and dead I am born between

the hospital Memlincs,

Ursula among the angels wrapped in membranes.

No vine leaves or deerskin,

but metal organ pipes.

The seraphic canon: my first breastplate.

Again the year takes off its coat

in the city of lacework, obsequies and star-shaped vaults.

Oh, the old-style zinc smirks

of paladins, prelates and pimps

crammed onto panels!

On brick walls: the Annunciation.

Naked with a dagger and a feather hat: Lucrezia.

How elegantly mocking

is the past.

The fools of Bruges stand at the back

of the preaching hurtful mob.

Like the moth-

eaten myth.

[…]