Even Now

What to Speak About

What to speak about tonight? Speaking

in a country we recognise, tolerate,

seldom forget.

This country with its slapstick genesis,

its clammy climate, its filthy stories

about the old days,

its inhabitants, grasping until they finally collapse

between the cauliflowers.

They keep on multiplying

in a paradise of their own invention,

craving happiness, trembling, mush in their mouths.

Like in nature,

where our runts of hills are depilated,

our fields scorched, our air poisoned,

yet the unsuspecting cows keep grazing.

Speaking about this country’s writing,

publications full of question marks

on patient paper

continually shocked by its history

and fleeing into deceptive shorthand.

Speaking about the heavy drapes

people draw around themselves.

But we hear them still, the stinking

primates who corner each other in rooms.

Like in nature,

where the hibiscus gives off no scent,

leaving that to the innocent cows who sink

into the drenched earth.

Speaking in this country of gleaming grass,

in which man,

that immoderate worm, that dreaming carcass,

lingers among the cadavers which, dead as they may be,

remain obedient to our memories.

Like our nature which expects a single, solitary

miracle that will eventually, finally

illuminate what one was,

not just this shabby spectacle

thrown together by time.

Speaking about time, which, so they say,

will remain like a brand and a palimpsest?

We lived in an age of using

and being useful.

What defence can we offer for that?

Which festive feathers in our caps?

Which song in the cellar? Maybe.

Say it. Maybe.

A few scratches on slate

to mark the silhouette of your lover.

Fingerprints in clay for her hips.

Phonemes of delight that sometimes resounded

as she, when she, cried out for you like a cat.

Speaking about her presence

wakens the violet hour of twilight.

Like in nature,

the merciless, glassy azure

of our planet seen from Apollo.

And even if your party hat begins

to weigh heavily from speech alone

and the lifeline on your palm

begins to fester,

still, nonetheless, in spite of this

honour the flowering

of the shades that inhabit us,

the shades that beg for comfort.

And stroke her shoulder blade.

Like a hunchback’s hump.

Still craving a cruel kind of happiness.

Interview

There’s a knocking on my door

and, yes, it’s the young poet

— I recognise his teeth—

who once sang the glory of my alliteration

and — oh, familiarity! — has gnawed

at my ankles in the papers ever since.

I bid him enter.

He says he lives from readings

and interviews for magazines.

His wife has been depressive since her teens.

I help him out of his coat.

I pour him a shot of jenever.

His letting me have it in the paper, he says,

was hard, a bitter cup, and not his intent.

It was forced on him by the editor of the cultural supplement.

Our talk would be, broadly speaking,

not too long, about love without stains,

and politics, without naming any names.

I pour him another drink.

“Between you and me,” he says, “I find you at odds

with the new,

not recognising the spirit of the age and

venerating dead masters far too much.

Where in your work is the exhilaration of technology?

Because if technology is our divinity and our destiny

shouldn’t we join together to reflect

on the laws of the Internet?”

Another jenever. With a beer chaser.

“And excuse me for saying so but

you’re sometimes very hermetic.”

Hermetic? Me? In my old age,

with my laughter tamed,

and my thunder all in vain?

Who sits here quivering,

copying the existing

all the same.

“And your rhyming patterns are so obvious,

so childishly obvious.

Rhyme doesn’t do a thing for me.

And apropos of that, what’s actually

the underlying concept in your flossofy?

You don’t leave me any the wiser.”

I think of an earlier life.

The rams’ heads clashed.

The rabbits all had names.

The turkeys gobbled for grain.

I shouldered my air rifle to shoot

the guinea fowl in their granny’s aprons.

I think of faraway countries.

The spectral moon rat that stays alive

because of its stench.

The lamp-eyed lemurs.

The orang pendek that steals children

and loves human liver.

I think of the dead masters.

Byron who kept and numbered

locks of his own hair. His manuscripts.

Lots of crossing out. Lots of second thoughts

but he always left the rhymes intact.

Ezra Pound in the cinema screaming

with laughter at idiotic comedies.

His Ezivursity.

How he kept silent for years and years

then said, “I did it all wrong.”

Stevie Smith who thought that everything

could swim in a wonderful wisdom.

“Stepping stones,” I say.

“Pardon?” he says.

“Stepping stones the poem can follow.

Gezelle and Minne

have led the way.”

And I help him into his coat.

And I lead him to the door.

Outside I point up at the moon.

He keeps staring at my finger.