Fourth Elegy
“The bony darkness presses on, sketches moral cheekbones,
the gas of the armored train, the gas of the last ankle”
—César Vallejo (trans. Clayton Eshleman)
I.
The fiction of going back.
Bone metal proxies, sites of instigation—
All thwarted. Mandrills & explosive poppies
With everything left to hide.
It siphons the rememberer & remembered
With only history’s proximities,
A tender interplay of violent silence
Numbering surrender with dead forms,
Stricken homilies, an end of the future
Death of vital knowing
Death of song
Death of the self (the more you cede
to tyrants, the less you are)
Death of latter days’ dignities
Death of childhood without labor
Death of labor without choice
Of human kindness, drowned eyes broken
II.
Because it is recursive
I’ll drown my book in a city of lost tongues
Rosy ideologies
Troubled newborns
The dead who speak to have their voices murdered
By sirens
Blades of song
Because it is swollen with the mouths of dead children
I’ll abide by awful places
In my song until the wind’s obscene
Regnant with unanswered lies
Until only the wind
Knows your name
Because it is not music
Do strangers forget to laugh at my shadow
Fulfilled of each others’
Aimless grins
Until night bursts
Rationing the laughter of the poor
Because I forgot what I almost read
Do I not so far see
That death is tangential
& Birth a rumor
Perhaps as silence, lucid
Almost thin
Because I remember Detroit
Do I now describe myself as thin
Glittering from pole to ivy
Devastating valves
Before I decide to become a pragmatic
Angel of discontent
Because I often am
At least
Do I now
Trembling
Know your
Name
& Speak it
Past forgetting
Missing; or, Fifth Elegy
“Black shirts— black shirts— some power
is so funereal”
—Louis Zukofsky
Without even alive filaments
Tendrils at the edge’s provenance
A bruit country tending toward evasion
Ever as in dour or some sort of remix
The crux of it remade
As all creation hovers dread
Emplacement sundry motions
Fields aflower & the dying letter
In fealty to a lecher care to sing
Along home in the remains is redness
Redeemable as counting beneficiaries?
Who benefits? do vowels burn echoes? who
The idler & who the wavered?
These the wayward means of drift a petty roar
Null diamonds in the attainment folly
Vast as others’ disappeared shadows
Before heat becomes thought thought becomes
& Night takes heed
52 Pick up
Does language decompose?
Is it biodegradable?
If you put a word
On your tongue, can you taste it?
Are we ever free?
Here, crisp October after-
noon light bathes us. A wrought mess
In a jiff. When you cut
Words, do you make a whole
New being? On the slant that the sun
Hangs on? Words are tethers, living beings
I told my class once. Are we woven in?
What a mess. Leaves tremble. But I am in-
side, against the cold, cluttered forms. Fruit
In varying states of ripeness or decay. I write to free
Myself of these conditions. A cold
Upheaval. Living’s littered with
Forms’ debris. Notes that flower
Or fade, into the dead heap of
Rote, de/voted means. The disaster is always new—
Revolutionary, in that sense. The hand
That isn’t always ours. Can you bear it, barring
Starlings? Maps? Estimates & negotiable instruments.
A table set for one, but the moon isn’t
Done yet. When does the laundry get done?
Are you living or leaving? In time now stored.
A life consists of days. When will the next one be
Happy? Organically scattered like everything
Else that’s ever mattered
In cold traffic’s passing.
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