19. Where Poetry Now Includes the Weather
We & I – let’s swim into this house
and have a bath, swiftly
everything spills, every one
embrace this feast
– we feed
each other’s faces
all summer long
delicious too
our ecosystem
Things get sooty & disordered
Who wouldn’t blame the
Old generation then?
– Richard: oh, what of succour?
Rita: adorable source of worthless order
Gilda: cannot calm the dawn
Glenn: doing his grunties, again
Adrian: tutor mainly to shingle is wasted blasphemy
Stella: helpful, salty & built of old bricks
La Vedette Atomique: oh my friend
the dark vapours break
whatever we improvise
dust & voices
speckled w/ grey drops
memory
Make a ritual of this now
The shock of utter events
Will break our silence
Hour by hour
– rearrange all this
thus:
18. How Beautiful the Swift Is Flying, How Ugly When Still & Dead
Here is where we are all right
in unbroken being, yes, constant improvisation
always swimming into this world; slavery?
yes – but I cannot say, maybe we hide
the blame, the bodies, our bodies then
the wonder of it all in summer sparkles
& we are stripped of circumstances and weeds
we shall be rejoicing & thrive – thrust
to accept the delicious ecosystems of each other
of a sudden sooty, then within reverie
a question: Richard & Rita, Gilda, Glenn
Adrian & Stella – half-derelict all yet immortal
trapped that is in suffering & incompleteness
no help; congeries of shingle infest the shrine
just a Kentish artefact, briefly roseate
nothing whole; futile to improvise calm this dawn
La Vedette Atomique, my friend within the ale-house
out here the apocalypse is breaking into vapour now
17. How Comes It Then
Out of need maybe in lack
of adequacy but no sudden entry
don’t we always just accept then
these circumstances for full slavery?
Each time, each time I tell you
we accept the natural right of rulers
we thrust ourselves into darkness
a world of no colour or light
As the sun sparkles we must
build up into some true many
rejoicing in diversity & need to
help eachother live into this light
And darkness – any intensity of purpose
purely against what the few lay claim to
that world of random murder, constant hate
in which we feed upon the bodies of the weak
The predators take off & thrive
on the tolls we pay for air & earth
these circumstances not of our own choosing but
each day of acceptance shall be our blame
OK, then, summer, & it’s delicious
but waiting on the beach for due attention
won’t get us anywhere – get a pen, all
the unbroken instruments of this world to write
Don’t care if it’s too personal, don’t
care if just impersonal, least said
but be the best & most perfected
open to all our pleasing games
Swimming, like that good god1, with-
in the world with which world we are all in
-volved, supported say by all its gaiety & mess
no fuss, no, but being here one evening
You can go on, to flourish
in this deep summer where the warmth
tends this world now – not distant
& not sad:
but here
Where the earth is filled with slaves, yes
& despots’ weeds crunch out the ecosystems
abased & prostrate, no, needn’t be
stripped to our rich bodies we shall live here
to swim
in summer light
& hide in
its darkness too
16. To Live for Obedience and Mean
No – processed giggling too much
I think I do, ya
With the ruling elite reimposing power
The new transnational feudal order
All the folkways full fucked
I tell you
The sun glitters above
the great shapes of the city
they have no colour or light
The sun glitters above this lake
glistens & scintillates
dancing in a crowd
beautiful as alive
Oh – luscious darkness too
intensity of purpose
pushing in
then out
I’ve never been first class
That’s not fair
– but absolutely
Right
“Artists, in old age, should not appear eagerly grateful for belated attention to their work. A decent courtesy is more than sufficient.”
Gilbert Sorrentino, Something Said (Dalkey Archive Press, 2001), p 434 – cited by Jenny Davies, “Well you Needn’t, Motherfucker: Sometimes Underground”, in Armand, p 105.
Dangerously personal
– may be less dangerous
than the dangerously
impersonal,
don’t y’think?
Ganz ohne groß Umtrieb, wie der liebe Gott tut
Wenn er am Abend noch in seinen Flüssen schwimmt.
Brecht, p 106 “Vom Schwimmen in Seen und Flüssen”
To flourish
in the deep summer
when the warmth tends
this good world real
How comes it then that earth is filled with slaves?
Millions on millions prostrate in the dust,
Rank are the despots’ weeds which now o’er-run
How comes it then that minds are thus abased?
from Edward Rushton, “Human Debasement: A Fragment” (1793), in ed. Roger Lonsdale, The Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (OUP, 1987), pp 792-3