Here is the season gathered in the grain

the sway of millet pools where meals are moored

the godsoaked cantor tugging on the rain

the goatmilk sour in the herdsman’s gourd

the bed of sweet maturanguru leaf

the sacred sliver of a rusted plane

to map your unlocateable belief—

and here my paper airstrip in your plain

and here my fortune-cookie palanquin

and here the kleenex lyric of my trade

the concert-hall confessions of my kin:

a poachress cuts your lonely sturgeon bead

and all my cartoon-poet twists of shade

are useless as your elders make you read

the fingerprints of god upon the blade.

(janvier 2004)

C’est vrai… je ne séduis pas plus vite que mon ombre, moi. Je crois même que j’assomme, au début. Moi, mon truc, c’est le Transsibérien, l’aller-r’tour Terre-Pluton, ticket dernière classe, près des gogues où qu’ça a pas vu l’ombre d’une serpillère depuis 1917. Je suis au bout d’une attente, fiché comme un noyau de pêche dans le sleeping rectal de mon Transsibérien. Y’a pas à dire… c’en est une grosse ! Des parsecs ! Ceux qui m’aiment m’ont attendu longtemps, m’ont espéré à la toute fin de moi-même. Même qu’ils m’ont pétri toute la tendresse de me bisser ! Après deux rogatons de quand j’ai plus de voix dans la gamelle, nous nous reconnaissons enfin dans une gare d’outre-attente, sur un perron d’outre-patience, dans un regard d’outre-écoute. Patiemment, ils m’ont permis de les mériter. Les voilà, quai d’arrivée, qui m’offrent de porter ma valise, pesante de mon spectacle, pleine de fatigue et d’applaudissements, pleine de mon coeur pour eux, pleine de mon coeur donné. Ils ne disent rien, ils ont ôté leurs mots, se sont déshabillés de tous leurs bruits et gestes. L’espace d’un spectacle, ils sont la mêmeté de n’être plus en désaccord. Je ne me reste plus : ils sont partis avec moi. Je peux crever heureux.

(le samedi 5 février 2005)

I cast my lines of duty
I angle where you cry
I’m in the line of beauty
I wish to catch your eye

I wait for you to wire
I’m washing at the why
You cast a line of fire
and hang me out to dry

I’ve read my lines of duty
I angle where you cry
I cast a line of beauty
but fail to catch your eye

and as you seep away
I shall be lost in while
until you find a way
to cast us in a child.

(2004)

Le petit te charpente
comme un buffet chinois
dont on abuse un samedi soir
entre deux pans de la 5 nord
mais tu es belle de ce détour
de cet amendement à ta constitution
qui te calligramme
comme un souffleur de verre
t’es belle tu t’encorbelles
t’encore plus belles
tu te précèdes
et nous boutures
ronde et belle de l’enfant d’avalanche
belle de ta peau blanche
tombée sur lui comme un janvier
tu nous précèdes
un pied déjà dans l’infirmière
l’hôpital est plus loin qu’un souvenir d’enfance
mais j’avale des quartiers comme une grève syndicale
il souffle un vent d’anniversaire
sur les bougies de la Buick
j’ai mis la clé dans le contact
comme une pièce ancienne
dans un juke-box d’antiquaire
et tout déjà n’est que musique
et tout déjà n’est que lumière

(2001)

Svelte Potapovski, ruelle du Proëkt
O.G.I., où j'ai tant de fois tiré mon 20,
il ne me reste plus, de tes filles de vin,
qu'une Balkan Star filtre et ces quelques insectes.

(Moscou, juin 2003, Потаповский пер., д. 8/12, стр. 2)

Don Quijote

s-a dus

să moară

de vînt.

A sudden rise provided contour in the east. Smears of freshly squeezed light tickled at his nostrils like admissions of fragrance ghosting out of a kitchen. He surfaced. Federations of bats heavy with insect filled the cliffside hollows to sleep the change away, oozing into the rock like mammal polyfilla. Mister Pumblenoose opened his eyes unhurriedly, closed them anew to sand them in a circular motion with the back of his fists, yawned fatly and stepped out of the wreckage, casually extracting a dark-tobaccoed cancer stick from an uncomplaining pack of Delicados. He contemplated the possibilities of the vast Chihuahuan desert, elected the broadest nopal the landscape could afford without assistance from the Arts Council, positioned himself behind it so as to spare any delicate readers, unzipped, mystiquelessly proceeded to quench the urchin’s thirst, and pricked his wrinkled appendage in the process, as though expending curse on the wrong voodoo doll. He raved and yawped as he pulled out the foreign feature, and resorted to his dentures to extirpate the sharp pinpoint his seismograph fingers were unable to stranglehold. The puncture, the engrossing procedure, the painful gymnastics of abstraction, the recess in the tissue – the entire tête-à-tête hoovered up his energy and left him helplessly elegiac. He hobbled back to the wreckage, an empirical Volks looking more a cockroach than a Beetle, investigated the glove compartment for reading opportunities, weighed a Polynesian take-out menu against a 1982 Buick Century owner’s manual, and returned them both to the cache as he was neither hungry nor the proprietor of an automobile anihilated by an apocalyptic crash only three weeks after he had inherited it from his disabled aunt Furanda. He settled for an old comic. Captain Writor, bifocal superhero in colour-coordinated blazer and tights, resolved chaos, protected the pure, and pinned villains with the simple armament of pen and paper. Mister Pumblenoose marveled at passages of rawness and extreme, yard upon yard of comic-strip drama in which the Captain, ablaze with inspiration, flung his massive, trademark, Writor’s blocks at formidable opponents before netting them nimbly in white pages and first drafts. Overwhelmed, Mister Pumblenoose reclined, unfastened his shirt buttons, and slept.

He awoke a short dream later, almost renewed, the confluence of his pant legs bewildered by a swollen distinction which a prudent hand, incredulous at first, confirmed was no postiche. He closed his eyes, for beauty. For a moment, she was restored, complete, with sectors of May, with places of peach, carried by her waterfall legs, treading towards him in the midday arson, her tonguetwister teats, her jawbreaker breasts cleaving through the street as she smiled for him under the cocoa mole bejeweling the western inception of her mouth, and the tar behind her boiled over onto the sidewalks to gnaw through landmark foundations. He would have torn his torso to make her many times, to see her manufactured in as many styles as he had ribs. But she left, the atheist of their love, and having purchased a winning lottery ticket on a toothrending January night, she resolved to wrench herself free and fly to Maputo, where she would teach anatomy to fascinating types, labor in the pleasuremines, and bear some clones. Pumblenoose hounded a nascent tear with a segment of his sleeve, alighted from the wreckage, and walked across the sand towards the setting sun, a Delicado coffin nail drooping from his lower lip. He shook his shoes and shed the shirt, and slowly made for a large pit at the bottom of which a pair of tight, forbidding shrubs concealed a square-based bottle in an argument of thorns. A broken smile of solace and defeat fractured his face as he reached for the Grail: the half-cooked mortar shell, though antiquated by the elements, appeared to shelter some leftover potential. What was no longer a clean, hard, yellow label still mustered up sufficient style to belie the contents – an unworkable mescal, untutored and violent, bottled on account of a regrettable lack of deliberation. As he twisted the rusted cap, the frankness of turpentine rose invisibly from the receptacle. Unencumbered by principles of hygiene, Pumblenoose mouthed the piece of artillery and took a swig of the bramble. It entered him like cattle. The Midas needlework began at the sides of his tongue, spread like an oil stain, picked everything up in a net of stitches. Like a child’s penis in gelid lakewater, his tissues tightened and shrank in the unwholesome wash, yearning for a shoreward shift. – He loved it. But the second gulp of this succès de scandale aged him irreparably. As he swallowed, the huge piece of liquid furniture dangled painfully like a hanged man in his oesophagus, then began to sink. Deep and slow and heavy, the struggling oil tanker toiled upwards but foundered begrudgingly into the gut. He staggered out of the pit, loosened the clasp of his pigskin belt, and stepped out of his garment. Pantless, naked, free, Pumblenoose issued a high-pitched fart imperceptibly shy of a G sharp, which he stooped to sequel with a cotidal output of dregs and liquid gold. He bent forwards to introduce a hand in his inanimate trousers, relieved the right pocket of its sole occupant, a blue tortilla purchased earlier south in San Luis Potosi, and applied it repeatedly to his crease as a means of restoring a semblance of cleanliness to the heart and outskirts of the flaccid region. A melancholy Pumblenoose beheld the disc of corn – soiled, malodorous, demoted – and discarded it at the base of an agave. He managed a final step, and crumbled. Toad-eyed and weak, he used a trembling digit to delve the two halves of an asymmetrical heart in the sand, and filled it very slowly with the letter Z. His body diseased with orchard hues and hungry mutation, a neckvein hardened down to cherry, a leg bloated with eggplant ambition, his temples eaten with parsley and cress, a spinach complexion amending the suburb of an eye, his member souled out into mushroom decay, Mister Pumblenoose entered gently the sweet Chihuahuan sands.

And simple, and silent, he chose between breath. And smile.

(février 2004)