This nutmeg stick of a boy in loose trousers!
Little coffee pots in the coals, a mint on the tongue.
The camels stand in all their vague beauty—
at night they fold up like pale accordions.
All the hedges are singing with yellow birds!
A boy runs by with lemons in his hands.
Food’s perfume, breath is nourishment.
The stars crumble, salt above eucalyptus fields.
I. Departure
Roofless houses, cartons of chalk,
catch the sky in their mirrors of air.
Intake of breath. Crisp
trees hung with sour oranges.
Hunched in the unnatural light, you wait
for the driver to start this bus forward.
Dust scatters in the pus-filled eyes
of children running after us, waving.
How small they are! They are getting smaller.
II. The Discovery of Oranges
At night they quiver imperceptibly until
the leaves rustle; their perforated skins
give off a faint heat.
Only the Arab knows the heart of the orange:
she tears herself apart to give us relief.
We spend 200 milliemes for a bag of oranges
so sweet our tongues lie dreaming in the juice.
III. The Salt Sea
If, at the end of the Atlantic,
Columbus had found only an absence of water,
this English tourist would have been there
to capture that void with a wide-angle lens.
Here, the wind blows from nowhere to nowhere
across a plain transformed by salt
into a vision of light. One bug,
black and white, dusted with salt, crawls
among orange peels that flare up like
brittle flowers. You could not live here,
he says. It is not so astonishing,
close your mouths.
IV. The Discovery of Sandroses
Each inconsolable thought sprouts
a tear of salt which blossoms,
sharpens into a razored petal.
Now we have a bouquet of stone roses.
The bedouins are hawking the new miracle,
600 milliemes, a few francs!
You buy me a large one.
By the roadside, the boys pose with foxes—
those diseased bastard eyes, those crumbling smiles.
V. Hotel Nefta
We disembark, the bus wheezing
like a punctured furnace.
The Englishman has set his tripod up
and is shooting the green interference of palms.
It is tricky light. Tomorrow the trip back,
our fingers exhaling small, tangy breaths.
What a light-hearted whistle you have!
It reminds me of water—so far-away,
so clear, it must come from the sky.
The bolero, silk-tassled, the fuchsia
scarf come off: all that black hair
for the asking! You are unbraiding
small braids, your face full
behind a curtain of dark breath. Why
am I surprised when your lids emerge
from the fragrant paint? Now the couch
is baring its red throat, and now
you must understand me: your breasts,
so tiny, wound—or more precisely, echo
all the breasts which cannot swell, which
we prefer. I would like to lose myself
in those hushing thighs; but
sadness is not enough. A phallus
walks your dreams, Kazuko, lovely and
unidentified. Here is an anthology of wishes:
if fucking were graceful, desire an alibi.
Darling, the plates have been cleared away,
the servants are in their quarters.
What lies will we lie down with tonight?
The rabbit pounding in your heart, my
child legs, pale from a life of petticoats?
My father would not have had it otherwise
when he trudged the road home with our souvenirs.
You are so handsome it eats my heart away . . .
Beast, when you lay stupid with grief
at my feet, I was too young to see anything
die. Outside, the roses are folding
lip upon red lip. I miss my sisters—
they are standing before their clouded mirrors.
Gray animals are circling under the windows.
Sisters, don’t you see what will snatch you up—
the expected, the handsome, the one who needs us?
does not show his
true colors. Ice-
blue and of stuff
so common
anyone
could have bought it,
his shirt
is known only
to me, and only
at certain times
of the day.
At dawn
it is a flag
in the middle
of a square
waiting to catch
chill light.
Unbuttoned, it’s
a sail surprised
by boundless joy.
In candlelight at turns
a penitent’s
scarf or beggar’s
fleece, his shirt is
inapproachable.
It is the very shape
and tint
of desire
and could be mistaken
for something quite
fragile and
ordinary.
It was not as if he didn’t try
to tell us: first he claimed
the velvet armchair, then the sun
on the carpet before it. Silence,
too, he claimed, although
we tried to spoil it with humming
and children’s games. There was
that much charm left in the world.
It was not as if he didn’t want
to believe us: he kept himself
neat. Behind his head, the anti-
macassar darkened, surrendered
the fragrance of bergamot.
Things creaked when he touched
them, so he stopped that, too.
He called us “dear little bugs,”
and it was not as if he
acted strange, though our mother
told her mother once
at least his heart was bigger
than any other man’s.
That’s when we called him
Great Uncle Beefheart; and it was not
as if he listened: he just
walked outdoors. Sunflowers,
wildly prosperous, took
the daylight and shook it
until our vision ran.
We found him in his shirtsleeves
in the onion patch, shivering
as he cried I can’t go back in
there, I ain’t wearing no clothes.
All the toothy Fräuleins are left behind:
blood machinery pumps the distance between you.
At the moment the landing gear
groans into the belly,
Mama’s outside the window
in her shawl and her seed pearls.
She comes for help—your brother’s
knocked down while restraining an inmate
and the family’s counting on you . . .
A year ago Wagner sang you down the Rhine.
You stood in the failing light, certain
the Lorelei would toss you her comb.
Life could not bank and drop
you on the coal shores of Pittsburgh,
the house by factory light opening
its reluctant arms to boarders.
We strike camp on that portion of road completed
during the day. The strip of sky above me
darkens: this afternoon when it lurched into view
I felt air swoop down, and breathed it in.
Instruction:
Avoiding bogs and unduly rough terrain
Clear a track two rods wide
From Prairie du Chien to Fort Howard at Green Bay.
Today Carlton devised an interesting pastime.
From each trunk the axe has razed
a startled, upturned face awaits
refinement by the penknife:
The Jester. The Statesman. The Sot. The Maiden.
The symbol of motion is static, finite,
And kills by the coachload. Chances of perishing
On the road are ten to one, calculated
According to the following table of casualties:
1. By horses running away.
2. By overturning.
3. By drowning.
4. By murder.
5. By explosion.
Whenever a tree is felled, I think of a thousand blankets
ripped into sparks, or that the stillness itself
has been found and torn open with bare hands.
What prevails a man to hazard his person in the Wisconsin Forests
is closer to contrition than anything: the wild honey
blazing from outstretched palms, a skunk bagged and eaten in tears.
Shape the lips to an o, say a.
That’s island.
One word of Swedish has changed the whole neighborhood.
When I look up, the yellow house on the corner
is a galleon stranded in flowers. Around it
the wind. Even the high roar of a leaf-mulcher
could be the horn-blast from a ship
as it skirts the misted shoals.
We don’t need much more to keep things going.
Families complete themselves
and refuse to budge from the present,
the present extends its glass forehead to sea
(backyard breezes, scattered cardinals)
and if, one evening, the house on the corner
took off over the marshland,
neither I nor my neighbor
would be amazed. Sometimes
a word is found so right it trembles
at the slightest explanation.
You start out with one thing, end
up with another, and nothing’s
like it used to be, not even the future.