"…and that, since he became corrupt, he unhappily carries in his breast a fount of concupiscence which infinitely augments that power."
I hear the word myself does not appear in the Gospels;
nevertheless do not feel imprisoned
by my own or the world's dismay.
This bad old habit of sadness at death
is a bad old habit is all
in this zone of impure righteousness
where miracles are violent
and parables an excuse for illegitimate means…
Que pasaria si diesemos rienda suelta a la malicia?
Perhaps I should be made free of suspicion - Let's see.
For I am myself; thoughtful damaged and confused
in the mire of human and inhuman history;
my enemy? at the universal port of refuge
I cannot choose
the world's unfaithful mystery.
As a gangster society of one
mainline institutions like not me,
and what seems worse - few words are best -
a dose of myself as I wanted myself: the price?
I am informed how I am!
My thermo-
fluorescent
fish-scale
soul
settles on
my skinless carcass
as if dope
on a glider's wings,
tracing a sensible history
the history I sense, product of Pandemonium and the noon-day devil,
his mortandad implacable in those campos chilenos
for that is what these gardens are…
go there if you can to see the land that once you thought you owned
(es veneno y florece en verano), where the trains ran like a dream
and the night was worth a million reinforcements.
To action alone hast thou a right
and never at all to its fruits.
For instance…
The Military Governor of Jerusalem once killed a man for a wounding
and a young man too; not, as I first thought, a weary partisan
neither a Chinese Minister of the Idols
nor a Byzantine Greek come to live in the Western Empire…,
the Schwartzkunstler, tal vez, no mere spitfrog whose bright talents descried
groups and lines and colours streaming in their passionless splendour,
God's body!
from Huingan in the foothills of the Chilean Andes; unfearing
toda operación diabólica,
todo demonio,
toda insidea del adversario;
toda herida
todo suplicio
via silver lambent Scandinavian liquescent watercolours; unfearing
todo dolor
todo trabajo o golpe
o corrupción o sombra mala
to the pathetic solitary uplands of the Scottish Borders.
Perhaps the curdled earth could not bear that rush,
that scrutiny: sin embargo as it is
when you speak to me in exciting Prussian tongues,
all I ever seem to see is
Orion the conveyer in the sky,
conveying the secret psychoanalytical lie ,
revealing the thought at the back of my head, the mark
on the cranium of this your witless slave baptism I did not order:
then came the Greeks! How could I refuse?
Balaam's eyes were opened and he was an empty vase for speech.
Orders: I am laughing and hold you morbidly at a distance
in that medical landscape: I frown and you light out
for the Peruvian-Bolivian border, and when your
back is turned, Master Chance,
seeking to master himself
by raising the stakes still higher
clicking his dice ( horn of elephant inlaid with
pathetic human bone), sighs and reclaims his
horizon. But I know what racket I'm in.
Clicking the dice, clicking the dice...
drawn to military scenery and drugs
from my ancestral plinth bronzes: Border Reiver and General Baquedano
in the Plaza Italia;
Asu and Ereb:
Levante, mediodía, poniente:
centaurs...
Orders: Midnight, and I'm studying by the light of glow-worms
(the memory of the winter solstice on the mountain snow
filling my scrip with combustible horror)...
O hag-winter! (Tell me about her when she is dead, not before):
accompanied by my eternal maid I am eternally mad and shy frightened of my
foraging -;
me-not-thoughts. I learned to think at my peril;
lazy, lethargic I swam into myself; maybe I'd turn into a hummingbird there, or, better, an illustrated metal mechanical toy in a cage chanting "Das Lebewohl"
striving for a micro-logic wholly beyond (my) reach.
I am an automatic weapon with one bullet
my soul is a slum,
an anaconda shedding my skin like scum endeavouring
to demonstrate all, hiding many sweet secret details
secretly held in thrall.
I am not a fixed cost to myself;
variable and various my soul
my skin acting
extinguishing a Bengalese moment of danger, ipsissima verba, with no mouth honour - Ha! In the maiden's chambers a tiger was scared by the newcomers – Tomoyaki
Yamashita, the tiger of Malaya, hanged by the neck until dead by a resentful American
General whilst I held onto my secret –
nuestros sendos secretos! the messenger, in fact the messengers: quick!
Hermes, Mallech: Programmes! Annunciations! The angel of the Lord
with his meg-atom light all at once appeared in the corner of my bedroom.
I am sly, I am the lynx-eyed capital detective fitting together bits and dovetails
on a cumulative case;
I am the crippled serfling with conscious rancour, mysterious to me
and perilous to you; igualdad de amor, igualdad de olvido,
general practioner of passion and dealer in pain;
the immortals of my hearth have never been strangers to me.
Like the harpooner my task is bi-polar; a new difficulty suggests a new crime.
I use the little energy I dispose in the service of neither belief nor fact;
that was a real world
not worthless I spied on. My chosen instruments
not perfect in love (for I feared the rhythm of terror) but obsessed with the obscure
bird who flies over the seething ground, surveying the royal map at twilight:
Bubo! I find I am a man playing to Powers, order of angels most specially concerned
with the restraint and coercion of demons:
yet the overthrowing of orders.....
during the moon's eclipse that night at Pirque
you went to bed avoiding the evil horse-power. I, myself,
watched it, smokey moon, smoking; an unlucky time for unlawful enterprise, but
no failure in nature, no fear that the darker un-natural upheavals
explain - I could only watch the explanandum Protean of which I was part,
Job justifying himself (not God)...
A few words and Elihu had it straight...
A few phrases: a form shed by the eclipsing moon on a few herbs
when strongly solicited by magic - virus lonare: the sputum of my body,
my beloved unconscious, my silent wasting organs waiting for wisdom.
The vital human freedom appears menu prix fixe, Sappho!
A little syntax cures us of this pain.
Senor, salvados de nosotros mismos, procul recedent somnia,
et noctium phantasmata;
la mirada circumspectiva,
miradas atrevidas,
actitudes incitantes.
Go on, pass out
before the wine's drunk;
a landscape after rain
reminds us of the painter's art
which is not to copy but to steal
and by subtracting adding part
assisted by the watermark.
By that path there's no need for love ergo no jealousy no odium
rapacious Santiago Nativity
a swift killing a reason for
a resurrection in Autumn.
I imagine the secret policemen
are still painstakingly active;
it seems a miracle to me I last
even a single day
whatever the season.
With a scalpel
the thief in me
cuts into me
irregular pearls
as the blue of evening
turns indigo.
Absurd act,
je suis encore vivant! Madame Edwarda!
Maria Stuarda, Teresa de Avila:
la existencia humana como un constante y paulatino morir.
And when you die whom I love, I
shall arise and anoint myself,
for tomorrow I shall be food for worms
having grown old writing letters on the night-watch
(not consoling cousins or amusing mothers and daughters)
rather, a blind ordering of phrases chosen for the Emperor of China
first sent to those well-born clerks in exile;
far from home, government officials in the west
on the border, wheedling pleading charming cajoling;
polite threats and reverence in due form
all in order to obtain an ex-gratia payment
from desolate cities with Victorian interiors besieged by legions (for I was many)
and not disordered.
What's more, unwilling to pay too much attention to the subject-matter
for I was ( like you) in the middle of a mystery.
The music's in the metrics: No! this is English, twit! Not Russian. The cryptic
was found to be work and survival; the tremolo, panic
and fear of the Prussian,
from the horror of the biological camps
the Lord of Death flies overhead revealing his smooth blue ribs.
However all reports should be brief and factual, yet
fulfil other basic requirements besides being clear and precise;
yet that dawning brightness hovering over the heart of light
and on to report to an Austrian
woman, yet.
The object of a secret shame last night
and every night to come: twice in the country of Worms
there was an earthquake ,
the first in the night following Palm Sunday, the second
in the holy night of Christ's resurrection:
A royal horror
Horror of cold, a royal blue horror.
Toward evening it lightened and there was thunder heard;
The heathen as is their custom inflicted injury on the Christians.
Horror of white: surgical intervention asleep
(a horror of virtue)
faint, if you can.
In that season in the Octave of the Lord
A mighty flash of lightning seen.
Awake! Local practices, local conditions…
An overflow afflicted the human race during this winter.
Local anaesthetic:
the horror of watching your thumb being cut.
Locomotive:
as if you were already dead.
In the following summer an all too great heat of the sun
burned the earth…
Relax, it's already taken place…
… as if you were a dead Chilean,
"Loco" they say (and so it doesn't matter whether you admit it or not)
"We were powerless so we authorised the power".
The steel of the heathens glistened: excessive heat.
A famine followed, there was not fodder enough for the animals…
In the cajon in the mountains like a New World centaur
"Vuela Poco" hunting in the dark wills himself to sleep, strange interlude,
as though he were hiding from me: something altogether different?
other habits of the heart? the damned hunter swathed in confusion in the Cordillera?
going glacially whilst time, our creature, whistles:
Quien va? A wicked intent on this excellent world,Sargento Perentorio, your world of objects,world of names: you dictate:-
"Dearer travelling today, slower and fewer trains..." Por sabido se calla,
the night was long and death was swift - why worry?
Never the total picture and no news; the tints I breathed were poison
but dogged by the ecstatic - this vatic rapture's not for me -,
nor was I undone entirely by the kill:
I reacted to the signal, subjected myself to account, controlled my fleshly
hysteria from the cockpit whilst I watched over winterland
in a monkish slough of despondency,
land-locked: deletatio morosa, one phenomenon
calling another to mind
peppermint and eau-de nil
give hints of pathological zeal
here in this spot where I arose
I'm just too lazy to write prose
Here my highly usable past may serve
for this biography of nerves.
I was what I say I was.
Listen, the moment of Thermidor approaches;
let us suppose the sinner could remain in heaven
unblasted:…hic et nunc.
Here are models to imitate
"Mozo, un coca de los Incas"; obedience,
not so much influences; more like permissions,
the toothache cure, rivals to equal:
obedience, puer!, and well known.
The rest -; leave well alone!
Se acata, pero no se cumple.
Imposters; here a bus comes, no, a bishop -
little bird with bloodstained breast.
Off with his head! Where's Colonel Chrome?
Why, here! A lightening conductor
in the city of the dead asking questions
as if he were a borderline candidate
going through the day-book,
and with the aid of an ultra-violet sun-ray lamp,
going through the night-book,
light-muted and bad chemical.
I assayed every detail, you see, with a jeweller's balance;
Valle de Elqui -ever been there? Elchies? - si!
Ringorm, Overtown, Blue Hill, Aultbeg,
Dava Moor, Maggieknockater and Thunderclap Hill. Look!
There goes an inquisitor with his complete lack of energy, similar to mine;
a gleam of sabre between the moonlike slits under his leopard's eyes,
excellent in the twilight.
Jack Stocking? is that your name, now?
with a ruler of glass, silver ruler and spirit level:
Juan de Palafox and Mr. Doon formerly of Galashiels
in the county of Selkirk condemned, bought, sold and registered;
- now of Santiago de Chile, drinking coffee in the Ahumada,
standing at the counter with petty empleados públicos talking the maquinaria esquizofrenica de la comunicación with small tradesmen, detallistas,intermediarios inutiles, porters, pedlars and other menials;- of gynaecologists, dentistry, aeronautics,
street hawkers, the clotting of blood, newscasting, hunters, cinematography, plastic surgery, minerals – Chile's really a mining country...
different low professions,
we and our words
run in both
directions
down the city's sewers,
my bright sublunary self
whoring after local anaesthetics:
filth in the whorl of my head. Yet that dawning brightness
hovering over the heart of light…
So, the true and lively word,
revenge and reward to thee -
convenient trinity that, for the spoilt selfish careless boy
of half a century or more:
the disorganised, forgetful, casual
boy of 50 years - not a formal man at all:
not to worry - my imagination,
my neurosis was caught on a cinta magnetofónica
Ah! but the rub: - "Il y a des ames qui lui sont donnees..."
With a one inch to one mile ordinance survey map, I prepare for
rápidez, sangre, corazón de ciervo at my desk:
to walk down quiet lanes at nightfall under the pencil circle of a Holbein moon.
hace muchos anos ya!
Tarry; O, my ghostly father, all my bones shall speak of thee.
Quite suddenly I was an outer barbarian without a name as such; even
a prince of the Orient, here and there.
In the east, for example,
like flies on the Caspian Sea
the morning is buzzing with history and oilmen,
diplomats and spies:
then I was riding westward where
hydrogen nights put stars in my cup, where
the dear one had gone and the chamber deserted...
Life's years, they say, do not fill one hundred but embrace a thousand year's regrets;
until I become a stranger in this strange land as active as heaven
or a looking glass or an empty room…
"For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past,
and as a watch in the night."
The crime? - my ignorance of my criminal self whispering: "Do you remember
the lagoon on Fever Island? the fortified monastery at Yelabuga east of Kazan?"
Not an inch of a shadow is visible, the royal heart shines in history - time moving like a leopard in the morning
through a crack in the book
whilst I ignore good husbandry,
and gaslight and moonlight;
yes! luz de gaz y luz lunar,
morfina fina: bienestar!
Where is the genius of this place?
Fighting for silence at last; and not without trials
yet not without refuge
I arrive at the sniper's black art – Yo the weak, pedantic, mad grammarian
hearing whispers of the peculiar institutions of this country,
capitanía dolorosa,
glimpse its gloomy wrongs - also mine - as if I, too, were far from here
on a cool North Carolina highway around dusk.
But I captured the hysterical over eagerness,
the impossibility of recruitment;
kindness, plus a kind of crazy criminal directness,
an addiction to near-death with no thought of dying;
and the fear of there being nobody in the next room, naturally.
Anxiety continued to stalk me;
guilt the hunter to fall across me
the shadow of the shotgun
in my tea-cup whilst taking valium at around a quarter to three: then working
from four... I fall -
I hear the noise, the news: "The man stood up and walked", they roar;
"he should have hit the bloody floor."
Tolstoy's last words
he wrote in English,
thus:"On my way to the place
where I wanted to be alone
I was taken ill". At Astapovo,
on the third of November,
nineteen-hundred and ten.
For my part I was minimal leant toward luxury saw only bones;
Mister Bones? He dead; not on that highway, in another manner.
I seem as unable to make out muscular structure
as the never-seen organs
but am mechanical and precise
and change into all you can see in the ice
illuminated lamented and consumed;
hermoso egipto te amo!
But why speak of opposites when we can speak of degrees?
nervous system and soul's lebensraum,
where is your history now, Republicans?
He reminded you of your poverty; the other side of his desires...
show a few rotten families and lives violently ended akin to the masculine zero word-O!
Why then speak of opposites
when we can speak of degrees?
Treasure known throughout the world
even sweeter than the tremolo
naught better than chaos
the cruel et cetera:
cum morte, familiaritatem, quam quaerimus.
Silence with teeth, war-prone Araucanian stars; fósforo, compadre?
and goats' cheese from Tamaya.
Different tribes for sure, little possibility of a night
without a light blaring from a psychiatric unit
on the calle Londres;
that's good husbandry!
mathematising surrealism,
diabolical teazing out of tremolo
and incest at the heart of this lurid,
saccharine austral world:
no es mi mar tu mar, tu mar :Pacífico; Portales, Balmaceda, Ibanez,
El Chicho, Pinocho... Phillipe le Bel
goes merry to Hell. But me, I find myself alone; pobreza, castidad, obediencia -
riqueza infinita: and then, at last, I start to make arrangements with the past.
Not to discover the secret but to conceal it:
Subject! Suspect! That is the Rule.
I closed my eyes, descried the school.
It was as if;
I'd made myself pretend to cool
the wooden towers at Troy, the owl,
staring at the Chilean ocean.
The rhythm of the waves has got me beat,
I feel I should feel cold but I feel heat.
The owl, ulula: bubo, bubonic - ,
An intelligence service and how they serve!
Not with an alias
but una identidad operativa mingling at the Mount.
He was a gonner when he talked about world & light,
salt on a worm turned as Troy
before – glaolopis -- with your owl's face, death's toy General Agamemnon's
tents pitched upon the beach looking inward to the Coronel poor as well
postponing payment on some service recorded as a debt: Ha! I'll not
altogether die: vivo soy, vivo muriendo
he justifies mysteriously, and sends his faithful servant before the gates of hell…
I'm thinking of her growing old.
Not the lines; that slight Christmas crackle
on the skin beneath the throat…
No, no! Go, evening glow; you make me feel too hellish.
"…Then all smiles stopped together."
Por los cuernos de Belzebú - No! I won't allow you to blurt out!
Here in Valparaiso there is:
Cranes ,containers ,tugs, customs' agents, offices, vessels;
probably drugs; laundered money, contraband, human trafficking, smuggled
artworks in the portworks: desires criminal.
Prospects.
The Masters, the lorry drivers, the sinister Baron Aduana
in the back of a tranvía the people's car, the oval crystal,
Dutch burgers (to all appearances) in a painting hanging
In the Cafe Riquet
& the old man's thin an' he's gone though
Johnson's the same , in his white waiter's jacket a relic of the Low Countries
or a sort of Chilean chapman billy;
the sublime insipidity
Selene: with all senses ideal quality of one sort or another.
All flux, all motivation; motes & motives swarming in the misty Luz Extensa
to spend one's day in food and drink,
slicing the wood into a statue of the jailer.
Continue now in the Bank Esplanade under the Minotaur
cerros of the port; under the marine skies where I found shelter from
God's gamma rays. But if you want to lie in hell,
off you go now, ding-dong bell.
In Santiago I met the devil in the metro, somnambulist, between Baquedano & Tobalaba. Our previous meeting had been 30 years ago in an Alpha Romeo
travelling somewhere between Genoa and La Spezia;
a karate blackbelt – the metro demon a
marathon runner – so he said: not a bad chap,
he works the divine doings only too well…
I still have the Roman's calling card: "Look" he said to me,
"God is the one; I am the many:
you might say I'm everything else." Most gorgeous of angels,
the liquid flash that streaks from A to B,
transformer of total knowledge into something secret that belittles everything.
The detection and suppression of heresy
is, I suppose, what he was referring to;
and ever since then I have not wanted an evening soul but many souls glowing
like a train of worms in the night, moving.
So afternoon, Schumann!
desperately invisible
under an overcast sky-
the pupil of the right eye
so very much enlarged:
nothing necessary;
everything not us whoever has
painted this must have been a man
accustomed to see fine women is nothing;
we are not necessary an interest only
to be indulged in secret
and out of the way of the police
en la calma de la ciudad
bajo el silencio de la ley marcial
& nearly nothing.
Thus he instructed me,
A depth charge you might say.
Listening to history in the Round Square class-room with membrane limit
and that extreme inattention that nets everything Robert Gordon the Wizard
turns jade soft and flowers droop to fall
against unreason & the wit of heaven.
His voice is what sounds before.
The underground launch is ready
to take us to see
the usual dangers of exile.
For all that:
I know midday is Satan's most potent hour in these poor fields.
Here, the pen fell from my fingers and…
"One night is sufficient to write a letter in, however long the letter be."
Facilius enim negligentia emendari potest, quam amor nasqui:
I'm not trying to keep the dying alive, for dying you should die.
The duration lies in fragility: however,
under this pewter bowl of thin rain in the courtyard,
I am investigating the taking of the enemies' lines. A bite,
then trying to hold it:
lightning like the filament of a light bulb;
attrition first; next, a take.
No culminating breakthrough,
for war is just such business,
mocking the vassal lords by lighting the beacons:
Enemy advances: we retreat
Enemy holds: we harass
Enemy tires: we attack
Enemy retreats: we pursue
A fair share of factionalism,
Show trials, petty rivalries,
Fantasies of every sort,
and death for the group's
less fortunate members:
there's no story-
line that makes human sense
apparently war
la luna se levanta,
los pájaros vuelven a sus nidos,
se acabo;
en el silencio sentado
never ends
so
el bosque vacío.
En este instante, el mundo de la conciencia es apacible
fix, not
se puede taner un laúd sin ornamento
mercy
Límpidez y frialdad vienen de la naturaleza de la madera
Calma y desapego se armonizan en el corazón del hombre
whisper to Céline and Sappho
Jerome and Pascal
to the thief-in-law;
"don't be greedy
show good- will
don't invite enquiries" like…
… the old Christian Andalusian peasant
with purer blood than many a don to
fight the sea-water that leaks into the mental.
And against the thought form like a troll
Yor v Zaknoye shall oppose: himself, the good-enough man.
What more should a man be?
King of a small country who knows order arises from disorder
and collapses into disorder;
who knows both dangers of lack and excess.
Truth emerges from deceit
And behind Barroco backs
falls into deceit again: Powers and Dominions.
Consciousness is not the problem
it's that silence with its interruptions and noise,
so unkind to enemies surrounded by beauty,
intrigue; tomorrow the insane child will pick rules of exclusion not
envisaged today and send them for your attention
through the usual channels.
The steam never stops flowing,
local flavour
and sounds of the native place fall sweetly on the ear;
but foolish and clumsy
not to say rustic
to be tormented by nostalgia.
But, if a jade travels a thousand li, it's only through perseverance.
Oh! What can you say? Vaporino ; the mad chauffer's passing
by fields, through railway arches; past a gas works…
Savile and Robespierre trying to remember
The Ballad of the Army Carts.
On the south side or the north side of the valley,
metaphysically flexible...
neither war nor peace.
David Colledge Santiago de Chile, 2001 - 2006
No comments:
Post a Comment