Even Now

I

Even now, gagged and bound on the gallows today,

she, who will awaken soon with swollen lips, eyes closed,

was something I knew, and then lost sight of, and how,

but how did I lose her, how does a dog bark when it’s drunk?

Sanskrit horniness in syllabic lines?

Bring it on,

for me, it’s as clear as a monad:

all seduction comes from seeing,

from the action of seeing or from the idea,

or rather the sensation that we’ve missed something.

II

Even now, her face like the moon and her body like the moon,

young, bitter young, with those breasts and buttocks and ribs.

Love had arrows once, a quiver full, you felt how sharp they were,

a torment, you were sure, for that full white moon of hers.

To put it another way,

seduction creates a necessity

that had not existed previously

or was drowsing, asleep.

III

Even now, her chewed-down nails, her chafed nipples,

the creamy thighs and, in between, her vertical smile,

and she who despised metaphysics said, “Ah, honey,

every cell of your come contains both God and his mum.”

“So she exists in a world

of autumn crocuses.”

“No, she is an autumn crocus, really and completely.”

“Sir, science requires categories.”

“Her red pussy, the arch of her back,

are they categories?”

“Um, yes, but almost abstract,

like an autumn crocus by Van Doesburg.”

IV

Even now, the welts and bruises, swellings and tattoos,

love’s injuries hidden underneath her flimsy frock,

and I fear this will just go on and on, this bitter furtive

scratching and clawing at her miniature no-man’s-land.

We’re forgetting two things, by God,

the different ways of being

and the different ways of not being.

I fear that you’re trapped between no longer being

and not yet having been. What do you say to that?

V

Even now, completely still, she lay excessively alone,

abandoned left and right, a numbness in the roof of her mouth,

and I, as motionless as her in my own cell, heard

the clink and rattle of the chain around her ankle.

“When will you be together?” my mother asked.

I said, “In the realm of King Baudouin,

when the world will be truthful,

when the Yellow River is clear,

in a month of Sundays,

at the noon of midnight?”

VI

Even now, I remember how, in the morning, tired and slow

after making languid love, she hung her head almost shyly,

a duck that slid over the lake and nipped at the water,

before diving down and biting me and then never again.

You could also say, “The roots seek what’s clammy,

the blades find the sun

and the plant forms itself

between two equilibriums,

between one longing and the other.”

VII

Even now, I tie her pitch-black hair up in cocky

combs, plumes and quills and worship her as a totem

and a cross in my house that quickly, awkwardly

transforms into a temple to Love, the furtive goddess.

Soldiers painted a cross

on their shields and won the battle.

But you’re in thrall to a game

where only losing counts.

VIII

Even now, all those rooms and nights and creamy nakedness

and all that sleeping after and before and the smell of heather.

How she snored when I asked if she was happy now and how

she stroked the bolster that had ended up between us.

Until the eighth century

one kissed the Pope’s hand.

But then there was a woman who kissed his hand

and wouldn’t let go.

That very night the Pope chopped that hand off.

That’s why one now kisses his feet.

IX

Even now, her limbs, all four of them at work, exhausted,

and her freshly-washed hair hanging down over her warm cheeks

as she grabbed my neck with her ankles, a giggling executioner,

beheaded, presenting me with the cool and glistening wound.

Just as the cell shapes itself to its minuscule prey,

obeying that which it will consume

and warming itself on its pseudopods,

uniting with it.

Admit it, admiration is called for.

X

Even now, I raise a flag and put my arms up in the air,

crying, “Comrade!” But she was the one who surrendered.

Because on the battlefield I heard her splutter and rage

in her mother’s accent, uttering filthy syllables.

Love, cinders and scrap metal,

bread and water

love, wake up

and approach from the void

that freezes me.

XI

Even now, when I am on the verge of crossing over

to that other life, she leads me as through black water,

ogling me and leering at me through her dangerous lashes,

laughing at me as I, drenched through, ascend her golden bank.

Above all else, without exception,

the forest path we follow is a labyrinth.

XII

Even now, her body is carmine and gleaming with sweat,

her openings all smooth and slippery with baby oil.

Yet what I know of her remains a strange gesture,

a thing with no echo, full of bitterness, chance and remorse.

Professor Policard said, “It’s so hot!

I have the impression a certain heaviness

has entered our synapses,

that in weather like this our neurons swell.”

XIII

Even now, I forget about the gods and their ministers,

she is the one who shatters, condemns and forgets me,

she, who is of all seasons but especially the winter,

growing colder and more beautiful the more I die.

Why don’t you say anything about the coldness of silence?

The self-satisfied destructive silence of Ajax,

Iole, Niobe, Achilles, you name it,

all prayers I wrote in my dotage

despite knowing better.

XIV

Even now, among all women there is not one like her,

not one whose furious mouth surprised me so much.

My foolish soul would tell of her if it were able,

but my soul has been plundered and razed to the ground.

And with the self-assurance of sleepwalkers

we keep skirting the issue.

XV

Even now, how she quivered with exhaustion and whispered,

“Why are you doing this? I will never let you go, my king.”

There was no colder monarch than me and recklessly

I showed her how the King’s one eye was watering.

Antony van Leeuwenhoek to the President of the Royal

Society in November 1677:

“What I investigate is only what,

without sinfully defiling myself,

remains as a residue after conjugal coitus.”

XVI

Even now, when I dare to think of my lost bride,

my legs tremble beneath me imagining who plucks her now,

my wandering oleander of a bride who won’t stop tearing

the weed that I am out of her garden of delight.

If you dare to think? Although while

constructing a consistent image

of your lady,

you forget time, mass and velocity!

Strange. Eros: a blind photographer.

XVII

Even now, with the bees of death swarming around me

I taste the honey of her belly and hear the buzz

of her orgasm and stare at the moist rose

petals of her pulsing carnivorous flower.

These symbols are multiplying

at an alarming rate. They’re a threat to existence itself.

Can’t the babbling in our tower of Babel

be a little clearer?

Maybe you should limit your writing,

do it on the wall.

XVIII

Even now, our wide bed that reeks of her and her armpits,

our pale bed shat upon by the birds of the world.

At the bird market she said, “I want that one, the wild one,

the one that can’t stop tapping its beak on that tit of hers.”

It is dangerous to believe

that you understand the least bit of it.

Much more than the unknown,

you should fear the known.

XIX

Even now, the way she resisted and refused my mouth,

lying limply only after I had floored her with my nails

in her breast, and then, while I slept, drunk on her abundance,

stoking me up again like a fire that had long seemed dead.

You can see it like this:

the physical corset in which a beetle grows

is responsible for the mental straitjacket

that regulates its patterns of behaviour.

XX

Even now, her supple breasts lying in my hands

and her lips thick from my nipping, biting teeth

and her chewed-down nails and her chafed nipples,

and how she squinted in the cruel light of morning.

“Now, now,” said Monsieur Paul

“Speculative thought never imagined

what the microscope has seen.

Come now, le vent se lève. Il faut tenter de vivre.”

XXI

Even now, I tell myself that in the straitened time

between me and the Arctic night, she was the stars,

the grass, the cockroaches, the fruit and the maggots,

and how I accepted this and how it delights me yet.

The beauty

who gives you the greatest pleasure,

what is her purpose?

At most she’ll scare the fish

when she jumps in the water.

XXII

Even now, how to describe her, what to compare her to?

Until I’m in my grave I will arrange her and paint her

and spoil her and, head spinning, blow her back to life

with my irritating complaints, my nerve-wracking moaning.

“You can say that again!

But I sympathise. After all natives

paint their faces

to protect themselves from the sun.”

XXIII

Even now, with her mascaraed lashes and her eye shadow

and her painted lips and her scarlet earlobes pierced.

“I’m burning up,” she said, “I can’t go on, I’ll murder you,

those fingers of yours, nobody else ever, nowhere, never.”

Not seeing something for what it is

is more treacherous

than faulty reasoning.

XXIV

Even now, she’s still nineteen despite how much she drinks,

and though the tracks of far too many tears have worn wrinkles

in her cheeks, carving through her camouflage and war paint,

the mould and freezing cold of her life without me.

We should examine

her biorhythm, her hormonal ebb and flood,

the behaviour of her enzymes, blood sugar and amino acids

when you’re not around.

XXV

Even now, if I could find her again as a fairytale

from the moon after a cloudburst and lick her toes again,

back on the road with my heart of stone I fear it would lead

to another horribly soppy song à la Cole Porter.

I’ve seen many a heart,

being a coroner, and I’ve yet to see one

that’s worn out nicely at the same rate

as the other organs.

XXVI

Even now, her more than the water in her miraculous body,

a salt lake on which a duck would float and stay

and that duck with a dick was me hear me quack! — and she

being a lake rocked me on her surging waves or pretended.

This is completely at odds with physics.

Although physics itself can also be seen as a protest

against the cult of common sense.

XXVII

Even now, if I could see her again with that short-sighted look

of hers, heavier around the hips and with a bigger bum,

I would, I believe, embrace her again and drink from her again,

a bee could not be happier, busier, lither and more limber.

Seduction changes us, obviously,

because we are

titillated, incited, spurred on

by one of our possibilities with that one possibility,

that spitfire,

determining the whole

and completely sweeping it, her, us, along.

XXVIII

Even now, with me entangled and knotted together with her,

the Destroyer is at work and scorching mankind.

People of standing are lost and cannot find their way

as after a battle without weapons or winners.

Even now, wearing her shackles and with the bloody nose

of a lover, I say, filled with her blossoming spring,

“Death, stop torturing the earth. Don’t wait, dear death,

for me to come, but follow her lead and strike hard!”

Envoi

My poems stand around yawning.

I’ll never get used to it. They’ve lived here

long enough.

Enough. I’m kicking them out, I don’t want to wait

until their toes get cold.

I want to hear the throb of the sun

or my heart, that treacherous hardening sponge,

unhindered by their clamour and confusion.

My poems aren’t a classic fuck,

they’re vulgar babble or all too noble bluster.

In winter their lips crack,

in spring they go flat on their back on the first hot day,

they ruin my summer

and in autumn they smell of women.

Enough. For twelve more lines on this page,

I’ll keep them under my wing

then give them a kick up the arse.

Go somewhere else to beat your drum and rhyme on the cheap,

somewhere else to tremble in fear of twelve readers

and a critic who’s asleep.

Go now, poems, on your light feet,

you haven’t stamped hard on the old earth,

where the graves grin at the sight of their guests,

one body piled on the other.

Go now and stagger off to her

who I don’t know.