People in the darkest of purlieus
with streetlamps and soot – boys who scrub chimneys by night with warm hands
and scrawl Paleolithic inscriptions on the blighted walls of the orphanage – a chamois, a serpent, the death of a mare –
and kiss and die under streetlamps at knifepoint with claqué
and the fog sops their top hats when it thickens – all oil and smoke in those homes in the port
where the white necklines rest, and the blood of the marquees, and the marriage beds,
the accordion of the bals-musette, its mistress a bit withered, blond dye-job very shoddy – but her blue eyes quite young – smoking Gauloises,
and now, with nightfall,
the flame from the becs de gaz,
like the lips of a woman
who kisses my eyelids,
because eyes only close for death or for love.
It’s cold in the darkest of purlieus, and still people think
of the felt hat and the Browning with rubber grips in the pocket,
because not on the first two corners, but on the third, a fist blow will shatter the glass
and the girls playing in the alley, as in an old Chaplin film
– blonde, drab jerseys, eyes the colour of sea pearl –
stifled by ribbon and lace and the murk of the metro,
when the Carrer d’Aribau was like a clip from a postwar newsreel
(the girls entombed in the Fossar de les Moreres, with the lonelyhearts column and the scent of starch in the kitchen – the after-dinner radio, like a voice from the land of the dead),
spirit, my spirit, who called you to a wisteria summer?
Like men made whole by action, or desire,
or a warm body in the depths of a narrow lane,
in the depths of a diorama like back in Colón,
showing the discovery of America, in period-piece style,
remindful of the century before –
the paper of the agaves still shifted a bit, brushed with a green dragon flashing fangs in extremis –
and all into the canoe – we furrowers of the black waters of Lethe.
So, for a time, the poem suffers the imperious necessity of designating the real
and cannot do so: is obliged to periphrasis
to allude to the transit of a summer cloud,
to the warm corolla fraying on the lips,
to the sense of nostalgia, to fear, to contact with the brume of memory,
the poem’s making and unmaking, the loss of contact with consciousness
that awaits us at a cocktail party – and already, that man in the tuxedo
is dead like an actor on the screen.
There, where word will become snare
but only so far as we wish: whether ashes or music,
it remains, perhaps, an effort of lucidity, and its simultaneity of planes
corresponds to the intricacy of experience: to wit,
there is no other way to explain that instant
between two stations, departing from Salzburg
with the lights and the tracks – a ground level shot of a child playing amid vapor – glum, glum,
and only a poem can explain the wherefores of those princely eyes on that lush with the five o’ clock shadow.
A world’s unmaking: that is grandeur,
fall who may, be it a vamp in mink furs or a classmate we remember nothing of save that his hands shook beneath his desk one summer afternoon.
I have never lived the distance between what we wish to say and say,
the futility of grasping the tension of language, of conceiving
a system of acts and words,
a body of relations between the poem as written and read.
It may be an Elotian discourse at times, I think
this poem puts in danger
one of the levels of my poetry: that is to say, this discourse shows here, all at once, the two faces of the mirror.
I close it and it spins:
at night, lit bright in the gilded gloom, on the streets or in death,
like the rustling of the forest and its trees that fall in silence
– where, if not in my heart?