Sad Idyll
Angel,
angel of grip, angel of spines,
they're first a sigh and then a kiss,
they're first a murmur and then a cry,
but are first a sigh, and then a rattle-dry-angel:
at last a rattle, but now the cream,
angel, now the glisten and now their prime,
the centaurs galloping on their hooves of sperm
from left to right, through turquoise waters,
across spurting sand, to palms of celluloid across a shallow foam,
angel,
and naiads slowly form orgasmic pearl,
angel,
so gradually blow the bubble of their world
to ride upon slick backs like kissing snails.
Angel,
angel of severance, angel of times,
angel of clocks whirring and of clouds passing,
cast the net of your eyes into the space
which waits and yet withdraws, angel,
which opens ahead and must also slide, and tilt, titanic, slowly
away, angel:
then grab hold and haul slowly in
the meshed catches milling there, angel:
shade your eyes against the light and, squinting, see
fractional holes, pink with afterbirths, like vapour trails,
see cubes, and Blue, God, and trumpets, angel,
heads and tails, and wings,
bodies, and humped backs
bearing stumps of things, at odd angles
Angel—
imagine them (as you will never see them
whole, angel)
dragging their snapped-off fins of time
like kindling, like rumbling barrows, angel:
angel, like you.
The air is thick and liquid with a fever
as of gills, beating, gaping,
or bat-wings whirring in the heavy gloom,
of scraping scales, and motion perpetual, but slow,
with shadows hissing by,
a prowl,
Angel,
around, Angel,
a stultifying circle, worked, ground out,
like Kois,
angel,
patrol, or tombs
are stirred by the unsettled dead
being bruised into their resurrection.
And yet the light is brilliant, and the shadows neat
as alcohol; under closed lids,
creep of no one mind, no single voice, but like a sea
whispering,
the will seeps slowly from the textile brain
like unfast dyes, angel,
to leave behind
only the screaming, half-awake faces, day-dreaming, of those
caught in the geriatric claws and leap
of the senile lion,
Sleep.
Sleep.
Yes, sleep.
Let go, angel,
and go down.
Slip under
the sunlit surface where there is still air, and pull
deeper, through rumouring murk, and cords of bubbles, deeper
past the drifting hands of weed
at last to where, on the oozing bed,
the drowned and rusting limo rests in sand, and God
floats but yet is still
restrained by the tightened belt, but softly
stirs his head where
a fish picks at his torn and opened
cheek to feed: somewhere
on the road to heaven they were
lost, angel,
his seraphic chauffeur still at the wheel,
in spick and span
tan and mocha livery, only
his peaked cap bumps and hangs
askew under the crumpled roof,
and the pages of the paper spread themselves
against the windshield with the stocks and shares.
Sometimes hell is soft gold, limbo nickel.
Sometimes the fiction is supreme, Angel, sometimes
the rubber sheet, angel, or the clock with no hands,
(the sweating clock with the ancient, insect time
of Babylon, carbon, and Beelzebub)
Angel:
sometimes the curious, crowded gaze
of glass eyes from a case,
angel,
preoccupies, angel,
you:
sometimes Love, the moon, the Love, a moon,
love, the Moon, moon moon love moon, angel, Angel:
sometimes heaven is a swastika, hell silver.
Angel of centres, of crystal,
gazing through the misted lens
will you pity them their sticky, honeyed bodies, Angel,
with the runny cells,
their raging palms, their hearts on sugar, their buzz,
angel, their rush and their zip:
will you pity them their comradeship
with the bluebottle, the mosquito, and the flea,
Angel? Angel
of the cool brow,
have mercy on their delirium, their Greek,
on their gaping mouths from which are uttered
hands:
pity their babies piled like rotting strawberries,
their heads which are saws, or violets, or chains;
O, Angel of bachelors, of the sterile womb,
Angel of all origins and termini,
pity them their liquid names, their dreams of final stone,
pity them lost on their voices which are always roads.
On loosened strings of heat, they seem to
hang themselves, angel,
up: and—oh, but so
limply, so
lethargically—
try to take some doll-like
steps before they fall.
This heat is like a plain, angel, so huge
it dwarfs thought,
even, angel, thought of you,
and plays its dull guitar, gone out of tune,
to the endless fields
and the provincial sky
of numbskull azure
which yawns, and yawns, and yawns....
This heat is sweet, and rank, and waiting:
a junkyard of buds, angel, of leanings cropped,
truncated,
an overgrown siding, way off the main line,
heavy still with dreaming freight.
By means of intricate and spiralling ladders,
through thick spaces, through hairy apertures
and rough integuments,
and a sugared darkness, like a fruit's
blackening interior,
a belly over-ripe with spilling seeds, through leaves,
angel,
perplexed by dizzying perspectives
and the dazzling follies of the trompe l'œil,
rising by the sticky pods, the split
heads exuding oils,
in the swelter of late afternoon,
the light almost violet,
angel you find your way,
you push once more
into this sad idyll.
Is this, at last, the place?
A stupor hangs here like a heavy perfume.
Odysseus and his dreamy, washed-up crew
pad round, unshaven, in their canvas shoes,
always licking the snow-white, whipped and softening cones
of lotus gelati.
Superman stands by the edge of the pool
in his cape of muscles,
prescription bifocals, but with his hot, itching and painful piles.
Batman peeps shyly from his black silk cowl,
paunchy, knock-kneed, a little excited;
Robin lounges by the ocean side, false teeth in a beaker
like a strange marine flower.
You are not the One, angel.
You are not the cowboy with the hand-tinted eyes
and matching colts of supreme silver,
the dainty palomino, and the full canteen:
your pistols are jelly,
you've lost your horse
and must eat your own lips
just to stay alive.
Angel,
you are not of them,
no languid sylph or easy faun,
no satyr with the horns of speed, and blond goatee:
you are not there, angel,
in the bullworked foam
where the men and women come like trains,
or lay back on the burnished sand
and play their empty bodies
like drowsy flutes.
Eyes.
Eyes,
angel.
They slip and sidle. Drift.
Idle.
Like hungry engines, angel. Slitted and lowered
against the sun, langorously inspecting
bellies, fingernails, and
eyes,
angel. Wandering
across a desert of young skin, stretched
tight before them, angel, like a dry
tongue which will never
crush into speech or drink again—
a drum of want, angel,
sounding its pink, tan, cream beats,
sounding its white, bronze, brown beats, angel,
a heart like a hive
with all its honey dripped outside,
among the flickering hands,
and the pitched screams
of little angels on waterwings,
among dropped and lost dolls,
with their heads of glistening hair.
Angel,
angel of reaching,
angel of bad odour,
here in the lung of things,
on the moist floor which breathes,
livid fungi push up their rotten, orange minarets,
their soft, dun domes:
here on the underside of light, the sea,
here are speculative feelers, angel, hairs which wave and sway:
this grove is an oven where flesh
erects itself and softens,
angel,
where vaginal bread is slowly broken,
where stands are made:
Angel,
it is a tree hanging with sighs.
But, angel, what is that noise?
A hurricane of hands and mouths,
a loitering wind of fingers and teeth
picking at the pavements and the doors, passing
by, angel,
gossiping at café tables, grabbing and chattering,
bolting litter along the roads,
scraping the bones
clean, angel, oh,
angel:
and what is that silence?
It is the night, stars now unseen,
and under the great eyelids, the turd of sleep
withers to brown nothing.
If the horn would blow, the foam would rise,
the wave would fall,
loss would begin;
if the shell could sound, the air would move,
Love would step from the sea:
but the horn will not blow, and the foam will not rise,
angel,
angel, not in this
sad idyll,
not on this desolate shore
on which you have never arrived,
and which now you will never leave.
Page(s) 50-56
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