Thursday 31 March 2016

from Blackwater Quartet, selection 84



after Pablo Neruda
Furies and Sufferings
(Las furias y las penas, 1934)

We are made bone together, in comb
of ribs, in blood pooling, a country
to walk in, a tiger weather.
We skin the minutes, wrap ourselves
in stalking hide, this salt
ours, tasted, running with the vein’s jade
and the kisses melting and running.

You, this bully stance against me,
this insomnia, smoky tendril glass
breaking against sleep, rung, the bell’s note
wrapped sugared and such fragrance,
your swung hips, this pout of expectancy
liquid downy and met and met—
everything else, bone, its incisor edge,
floating jelly lenses
stare into our animal extinction, here,
the tongue’s requirements, its flame-jet thirst.
Make me anyone, make me burning
in this core, circlings of heat white sticky
bursting as a tropic, a voice,
the leaf’s mouth and your eyes’ swarming
insect light, make me anyone with you,
the skewered voice
and bondage silk, its water smoothness.

A painted scene, the smalltalk
boozy air hanging on your words,
quivers
and your eyes sought, seeking—
the light suspended, the polished grit of sun
and your teeth marks in blood,
your legs bruised with solar systems
and the petal footsteps opening
to the journey,
and yet, more, yet in you
the drunken streets, destinations
and shifts of calico adorning
cathedral ruins, huts at tide mark
and you waiting still
in driftwood and the mined vein,
the swollen cell, the sloughed life,
its skin of distance and the going you touch
and the timber’s grain and the iron touch
electrifies, rockets through this black.


Observe the moon, rusting in the dark,
the mist of jasmine, the silt of vanished seas,
the ivory yellowed and the image trailing breathless
in that knife-edge air, your sapphire navel
licked and the weight of roses,
and your breasts a roundness
and the moon a roundness that pulls the tongue.

Answer in the bareness of days, in blood
leeching from the sand, in red remembrance,
the dawn primed with corpses
and the slow rot of light begun here,
this month, its tortoise pace
and the ox-hide hour whipped on, death’s procession
and the woman called after flowers,
its bloom and the stem’s spur.
We have eaten our mouths, stuffed with hair
and the tongue’s gold, a pounding
of meal, a bread swallowed root and light.


A day remembered, it was forever
and nothing, a day predicted and still
the long knowing of it was enough,
a Thursday, I shall call it Thursday
the way all days would be so-called
from that day, meeting you there
naked in the dance,
or moving through deep water
or laid out in our deaths, entering you
and you above me and around me
and the sounding bell of your presence
the air swallows gulping
and the shell and the sound breaking.


I keep this harvest and the storm
over it, and the burst season
of cherry and the tasted
portions of your skin.
Tell me what month, what skin
shall we dress in, the burning soil
below the window, the waves.

Our lives turn through leaves.
The season’s grime
falls around you, clothes you
in the yellow shout of leaves
and autumn’s corrosion.
Your stocking foot blurs
and this motion is what we were,
fingers tobacco stained, shades
drawn blind, doors
bolted against leaving, this rubble
drawn tight into the planet
stabbing and thrown against
the mountain’s high snows,
dove senses, flying
one hour more, the blood turning
on it, this boil of collapsed
time we made in our mouths,
everything born in fear, waiting,
in our mouths the asking.

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