Even Now

Exercises

7

Tonight, the whatever of May, at nine p.m.,

On the dirt road past the young and rustling corn,

In the froth of the summer rain,

I was misfortunate enough to think of you.

I thought:

If you’re gone, if you desert,

If you want to be dead to me,

If you want to cower in the brothel of forgetfulness

With your arms over your head,

If you want to walk off unnoticed from one day into the next,

If you want to play with memory’s pearls,

Tying memory around your neck like a wreath.

I thought:

Where will be the grace in life’s bird cry,

Where will be the grace in day after day of

Swollen sickening time?

Gistel By Bruges

Village of cows and willows,

Church tower and rhododendrons in rows.

In a curtain of rain

In a fold of the sky and in the light,

The bronze mayor sits on a bronze box.

Moss from the palm of your hand,

Rain from the whites of your eyes,

Hedge tops from your lashes,

Hills of ochre from your breast,

And the folds of the whole country from your body.

And the ringed bulls bellow

Through the circle of hay to the open fields,

But the nearby cows don’t make a sound.

A Rendezvous

Again you say, Bye and Goodnight,

Words that come at me with the crooked gait

Of the tortoise in the kitchen.

The fourteen monkeys in the garden

Cower under the rhubarb leaves,

Huddling together to weep in the rain.

The wire that clangs against the smoke-stained walls

When the wind gets up.

The last cigarette. The smoke. The ash.

We have got 30 years left to live

And then centuries.

The lift starts up. The footsteps in the hall.

I tremble briefly. You’re caged in now

And won’t get past me again.

I Write You Down

My woman, my pagan altar,

Which I caress and play with fingers of light,

My young wood, my wintering place,

My tender, unchaste, neurasthenic sign,

I write your breath and body down

On lined music paper.

And in your ear I promise brand-new horoscopes,

Preparing you again for trips around the world

And a stay somewhere up on an alp.

But with gods and constellations,

Eternal happiness can grow deathly tired,

And I have no home, I have no bed,

Not even flowers for your birthday.

I write you down on paper

While you swell and bloom like an orchard in July.

Behind Bars

Saturday Sunday Monday sluggish week and weakened days

A still-life a landscape a portrait

A woman’s brows

Closing as I approach

The landscape with blond calves wading a river

Where the season of compassion is burnt

Into the Prussian blue of the fields

Then I painted another still-life

With unrecognisable brows and a mouth like a moon

With a spiral like a trumpet of redemption

In the Jerusalem of my room.

An Angry Man

No house too black

For me to live in

No morning too bright

For me to wake up in

As in a bed

That’s how I live and watch in this house

Between night and morning

Walking on fields of nerves

And digging my nails into every

Uncomplaining body that approaches

Saying chaste words like

Rain and wind apple and bread

Dark and viscous blood of women

Caligula

Where later radishes and mignonette will flower

In May that is

In a garden by the tracks of a country train

The wind

Is freezing now in December

And in that wind without light without shepherds without birds

Without any chance at all a foal has frozen to death

I’ve brought it here and put it under glass

I gaze away the days and hours

(That pass me by on the wide path

Of this existence which reasonably

We tread in sin with no great deeds)

And wait until thankful and thawed

The foal looks up and speaks its first word.