Five Little Books
Renderings from Propertius
as spoken to Gaston Côté
I am not a Propertian scholar. Simplest put, I have read a number of translations of the Roman poet over the years, and a notion of the man and his verse lodged in my head and took root, like an accidental shrub. The latest translation with which I have had a go, some one hundred and seventy pages set in rhyming couplets, finally succeeded in driving me mad. I have nothing against rhyme. In my 20s a few lines of Ezra Pound's Propertian homage meant a great deal to me, but perhaps it has taken me a lifetime to understand why.
Otherwise I came across an article, this morning, on this our 'lost decade', and I have to say I agree with the premise; but that it has been lost for so many reasons other than that of the shift to right-of-centre, and egregious foreign policy, and a kind of crude class warfare by which money, like a lemming horde, headed for cliff-side condominums and leaped into the abyss of offshore accounts. Liberals imploded from their inherent contradictions.
Sometimes I wake in the morning and wonder if I am a communist.
Defend the high places and show no mercy.
Norm Sibum
Book 1
So long as my synapses fire, so long as you have an ear
For cause and effect and their love-child - farce,
Let it not pass unaddressed
How she hazed me there in the library,
Her walk a slow and meditative walk,
Such a thoughtful essay
On time and space and motion.
Her unconcern was cruel,— her sweet eyes were made
Sweeter by the lenses through which they saw
The world. No chin was more imperious, her flashing nails sirens
Calling out to love-sick sailors in the stacks,
Propertius just a name on a shelf,
Nixon not yet gone to China.
And the ring on her finger said weddedness
And for all I know it was fine by her
Who suffered no complications of guilt or remorse,
9 to 5 an ordeal
Punctuated by caresses.
Can't say who she most liked to read, if she read at all.
Why discuss Proust when her kisses took
Their prisoners, her clinch absolute
There against some wall by a fire alarm?
But all that was then and is maybe overblown
In my memory-bank, small balance that has since
Accumulated interest, ballooned
Into a fair-sized chunk of change, so much so I hear now
Her voice in my thoughts, the words of which
Traverse unimaginable distance:
'What are you on about, boy, those days gone,
You a pleasant way to solve my boredom,
Those moments mine, not your tall tales.'
Love? I don't think so. I was, in any case, too humble
For the grandeur in which her husband,
No doubt, kept her.
Can you hear this woman halloo
Across the decades, hear her hoot?
'Like I said, be you a poet or not, those days are gone
When you might have thrown a challenge at me
Or in me, in my body, heart and soul, and we honour
Poverty with love.
We were daft enough then. Are you daft now?'
Yes, Gaston, it's pathetic, as the cars of an evening slick
Over the rain-slicked street, as the leaves fall and life's a siren,—
As passersby, bending to the wind and rain, are the stuff
Of their routines, desire writ cold and large out there,—
As we sit here in a café that would be Greek and lets us
Hang about,—to know that what were shadows then are
shadows now
Even if she was a loon and I a clown, still.
_____
Though, Gaston, you sit across from me, Comptroller
of the Wine Purse,—
Though it's Quebec and winter's due, sanity and light at premium,
Consider what follows a bulletin
Catching you up to speed
From the moon's nether side.
How, just for you, I've tried to keep pace
With what passes for thought in the arenas of thought,—
How one needs life support, dogging the heels of the learned
Who dog academe's halls (health-plans a paean to polite virtues).
How, when it comes to the daily orders and getting it right
While clubbing one's opponents senseless with the magic
Of one's ties to lobbies and position papers,
One hears mutterings of plots and coups,—
One hears keening to do with rising oceans and other menaces,
Not to mention the fact that libraries go broke, and one suspects
Public intelligence is a ghost of itself.
How we are each of us so many clown spots
On the body-politic of a clown, hanging out starkers, twisting in a wind
At the behest of some ringmaster's whip hand.
As for bliss, it was always a mad hound, and we knew that, Gaston,
And it was knowledge gained at cost,
Just that now, subject to other cruelties, bliss is all curled lip
And bark. Enough. Poor form to harangue, and worse,
You'll only drink now so as to drown
The shrill tenor of my voice.
_____
Gaston, my man, the look on your face
Says you're upset. What gives?
Has some darling flummoxed you?
I know women for whom all their men
Are one endless man without reprieve,
But for us, and here's why women
Scorn us, there's always Eve Tremblay.
And then, while I defend the gods in whom I've not
A single iota of belief,
And there are no gods when there is no love,
Into the café walks a stunner, and there you are:
Some old cartoon zowwowing wolf,
Ga-ga eyes departing sockets.
Well, here's how it was, if you care to recall:
Say you've been out drinking,
Say you've come home, and your darling's asleep,
And she's beautiful there in her dreamy dreamland,
All cares disappeared from her visage,
And yet, though you would like to take license,
Even go so far as to steal a heart-felt smooch,
You can't, for five will get you ten she'll take
Umbrage, as she wakes and would smell on you
Some other, all the while you sniff her dreams
For your replacements or her hissy fits.
Ring any bells?
Is this what you sorely miss,
As you sit there divorced, monastic, scarred to the extent
You'll never take the leap of love again,
You a number that some demographic specialist
Crunches?
Gaston, drinking buddy, possessed of mind, steeped
In the ways of the world, eminently capable
Of charm and flair, so now you'll tell me
It was never thus for you, that charming picture
Of lust. And were you drunk or were you sober,
As guiltless as some new-born creature
When you'd let yourself in the house, the door familiar,
She was indifferent to this miracle of the faithful spouse,
And she simply rolled over, showing you her
Skeptical nature.
_____
Gaston, surely you recall the tensions, let alone who'd do the dishes
After the catastrophic dinner party?
Right, you'd just as soon forget all that
As the price to pay for the breakthroughs
In relations. How did it go again? 'Enough,' said the women
Who'd no longer play the games they used to play
So as to advance their interests,—
In refusing the games they'd call our bluff and force us
To trust them, as it was the way nature intended it,—
Which is what the Caesars said, nature indifferent.
And because no one trusts anyone, new checks and balances
Took centre-stage. And by now, the drama's been workshopped
And standardized. And whether new or old spite, new-formed or ancient
pettiness,
It's still spite and still pettiness on all sides, tart it up and trick it out
As much as you wish with theory, with the flavours of the hour.
And yet men are the problem and always have been, and I am
The least careful of men, trusting this or that darling
To do his or her best, to do his or her worst,— or to average it out -
As is usually the case. For all things being equal, and all things are
When voices pitch justice at high decibels,
The pain that cuts deepest in or out of bed,
The battleground most contested
Was that which fists itself in us:
Our cheating hearts.
_____
Roiling cloud, leaves whipped about,
That passing sky of crow and gull and our ephemeral
Clout, our little accomplishments so many vanities - I feel
The years, Gaston. Do you?
Or else, specialists that we are, wunderkind,
We had too much of love's body at the expense
Of its spirit, and we wallowed in cults.
For the most part, but not always, it began with the body,
Though I loved women by chance for nothing so much
As a look in the eye, a smile within, one as often as not
Overlooked as noted:
Some flower clinging to her stone desert,
Me clinging to mine, no words exchanged.
But will you guffaw and dismiss this outbreak
Of religiosity
That is nothing, really, but a commonplace
Of metro or bus or elevator?
So you will then, you protesting
It's not like me, poet of carnal love.
Come on, Gaston, über-materialist,
When men like ourselves, and you're a senior,
Put philosophy to pleasure, it's religious endeavour.
And I seem to recall how certain smiles and dares
Such as brightened our plumages or darkened them -
Fools that we were and still are and shall remain -
Got us to get down to cases,
Waking up those dozy gods.
§
Book 2
If effect, Gaston, will follow cause
Ninety-nine point ninety-nine times
Out of a hundred, the shortfall angel dust,
Then ask yourself why the rules of the house
Dishearten so, as if life itself and not politics
Validates hysterics and idiots, all of whom ride
The slipstream of vested interests, school wasted
On the young. And you will have noted how it is that wine
Leads to crushing certainties, the café
A kind of technical institute.
Perhaps it's the waning light, winter's long reach
Eating into the oracle of day, or that which is hand in glove
With the corruptions - landgrab here, arms deal there,
Scams without number, debt-mongering, endless wars.
Or say that a man would know another man's desire
For the love of that man's life,—say he'd covet a garden and get a desert
On the satin sheets of betrayal, and someone somewhere laughs,
Isn't it predictable, that laughter, as much so as the thieving,
Comedy and tragedy neck and neck at the wire
Unless melodrama triumphs at dark horse odds?
It's to say that pondered schemes set in motion
Observe each their logic, are sheer madness when lumped together
As a people's commerce,—logic the joker that gets us a mess.
But you say I'm off the mark.
Well then, I suppose that, in your books, if there be a god, He's logical,
And if there is no god then nature is logic, the how and why
Of all that transpires: from the seed comes the plant,
From the egg the animal, humankind, too, whose bent,
Whose manifest destiny is to survive, with or without
Hankypanky, influence peddling, furtive favours.
And how many darlings of our acquaintance know
The extent to which their humdrum labours
Are inseparable from sharp practice?
And all the Eve Tremblays will have their bliss, as will the Gastons -
Cheats who, nonetheless, and endearingly so, have scruples.
But as I, defying logic, have loved and hated for a thousand years
And more, seen much, done worse, why should I begrudge you
Your cherished priorities, your attempts to seal a porous pot
Through which reason flows,
You sweet on the sweetest of temptations -
An iron-clad case.
_____
Sure, Gaston, if you say so. Glad to hear it.
You love verse, love it to bits, love it as much as you love
Steaks and wine, comely women enticingly but safely
Just beyond your reach,—and well, forgive me, but as they say,
I smell a rat. Not even poets love the thing so ardently,
No, not as much as you claim you do,
You humanist with business credentials, secured
And divorced. I suspect a liberal's sense
Of obligation in your zeal, something like panic, too:
What if this crazed poet with whom you drink
And mark most evenings
With objections to his outlook,—what if he knows a thing or two,
Is right about what he says is coming?
Relax. I've no pressing need to carry the day.
Let me speak a while on Eve Tremblay
Whom I see just now, silver Christmas bells affixed
To her form-flattering sweater.
Well then, she signals and so,
In the poetry stacks we meet
Secure from prying eyes, and she picks my brain for ruses
As she's at her wit's end,
Husband wishing to whisk her to some vile place
For the holidays, and here we'd planned an afternoon's
Tryst,—and she'll not brook a change of plan.
I shrug. 'Lie,' I say. 'Plead allergies. Suffer him.' Oh, not to be borne -
Winter golfing in Florida. Right then and there we get down to cases
There in the broom closet, and it's as if she and I, in our kisses,
Each leave our mark on the body of love, the one hallooing to the other
Throughout the course of time. Weren't we silly?
But then, Gaston, isn't this
What you wish to hear, that body ineffably more real
Than any hegemonic spirit of science, religion, voting bloc?
Otherwise, what's to say? Nothing much makes any sense,
Especially when one gets it from the mouths of think-tank artists,
And in light of all that tweedledumdee
Winter golfing couldn't have been so bad.
_____
That Gaston is a classic, logic-bound chin-wag:
For every dilemma an answer, for every answer a new round
Of complicating data. That's him, the one leaned forward
At his streetside table, his glass raised. Shrewd eyes appraise the avenue,
Laughter at the ready. (I'll just enter the café and get myself
Greeted, refuted, twitted.
Now I parry his 'Good evening, sir'
With 'Cut to the chase and pour.'
'To temperance, then.'
'It's rumoured to exist.')
And like so many pigeons in a fuss
Exploding and resettling with thundery wings,
Various flockings of his brain flutter on about
Various scenarios, are engaging
Oil and gold in their new and amorous embrace, and why,
Here's Madame Dachshund-Walker (name unknown)
Picking through the trash again, the poor dear,
Wiener of a dog wearily supportive.
And we debate, he and I, and betray our ignorance,—
And we drink, he and I, and reveal our character,
Or that which film directors always enlist
And then slaughter in the trenches of art
And other considerations,—
And then, when I've had enough, I say:
'Look, Gaston, about Eve Tremblay, why,
You don't think we actually did it, rutting in
The poetry stacks, there with Propertius and Wallace Stevens,
Rewriting the gist of Dante, bringing blushes to the cheeks
Of Beatnik scribes? I can't believe you've believed me.'
'Oh no. Quite the contrary. I always allow, as business
taught me to allow,
For certain dissimulations, bendings, if you will, of fact,
Hidden agendas, unsavoury purposes, and in your case, well,
Poets lie, if only because who takes them seriously?
But I respect endeavour: even poets rate a hearing.
And as you're in the business of immortalizing me, I pay the tab,
The least I can do, so as to maintain a steady flow of wine.
And if, in your ears, you seek out the echoes
Of the kisses of all the Eves, so much the better for my cause,
As it keeps you interested.
But if you think that the hatreds and the circuses, the greed and stupidity
That are doing in America
Will grab my attention, think again. What did you expect?
Nothing's forever. Everything changes.
Chances are, it'll change back
To the old story line
Of your grade school history books.
And just to show you I'm a sport, don't need to carry
Every argument, it's yours, the last word.'
'Hell's bells, Gaston, how nice you are to me. The wine's mellowed you,
Or else you've had your fibrillator tuned.'
_____
Yes but, we kissed and they paraded -
Shameless Propertian concoctions,
Barely remembered deities
Of summer sun and winter hearth-fire,
Of unappeasable wants, so much so,
They vouchsafed
Continual research.
Or say it was autumn, the trees red, the pavements plastered
With leaves, the air almost tangy on account
Of the sweet-rot smell of fallen foliage,
And we, returned to ourselves, would go out,
Grappa and ice cream on the horizon,—
And Gibbon kicked in, or I F Stone
And what was playing at the odeon.
And it's only now, and I can't say why,
That I look to carve a valentine
On what time had been.
_____
It wasn't the dead so much who gave me pause,
Friends who bought it in the war,
But those, come back, who fell away,
And they may as well have been entombed.
Sure, they could tell you straight to your face -
Those young-old boys not liking manhood -
What they'd seen and what they'd done,
And speak of the enemy as a force of nature.
And yet, sometimes, a shift in tone said more
About what'd been service and what was reward,
And a terrible rage reduced to whispers was witness
To a kind of whipped dog bewilderment in the eye,
And you heard: it wasn't supposed to be this way.
As for me, you'd think that forty some years
Should've sufficed for the making of these lines of verse
That, as they stand, are far from adequate treatment
Of a debacle. For truth to tell, I often dismissed
The 'Pssst, hey bud, I've got a story for you,
But damn it all if I know what it is.'
And so, the Billys and Whitakers and other wretches
Who larked between my ears to no avail,
But who may now have gotten
Home-field advantage:
Civilian death and burial.
_____
You're a sly one, Gaston, to ply me with wine, to bide your time
With your guile, to wait until my bean goes foliate,
Is a full-blown corsage
Of opinion and learning, and then to trip the hammer,
Asking me in what I believe, if anything.
And I'm sly, too, stalling for time (I don't, at least, hem and haw),
And I weigh your treachery and I measure you for
What good faith your mocking gaze contains,
And I take an answer out for a test drive, saying,
'Not in God, not in humankind
But in love, perhaps, which some will argue
Is part God's and part humankind's.
As to the rest of the animals I can't say,
Nest-love something else again.
I endeavour, as should you, to keep this and other questions
Open: so much out there would draw the curtains
On sentience. And now, to clear up another matter:
Was she so very gorgeous, a time-stopper?
Of course, she was. Would a poet lie about such a thing?
But all that, to be sure, was years ago, memory such
A teller of tales, staring us in the face, the absolute.'
§
Book 3
You ask, 'From where does the poetry come?
Is there in your mind some kind of machine
That churns out creation?' I answer, 'No,
But listen, if she laughs, laughter's my muse.
She wears blue jeans, then my verse is denim.
Or say she shows up in a dress and heels,
And now she'll gladhand a toney crowd,
Well then, a poem that's known too many polite piss-ups
And pretends it hails from the provinces,
Agog with the turn of her ankle,
She rating ardor on a sliding scale,
Just might honour how she's nature's jewel.
How else would it be, my brain - raw sore -
No mind of Zeus spewing forth perfections.
The genius is not me - it's there, out there,
In the colour of the trees, be it fall.
Autumnish, yes, and I know I'm mortal.
What's more, there are lovers who never learn.
What's more, there are souls who have to make do
With a single instance of some embrace,
Love made again and again, always.'
_____
Gaston,
I was intimate with the jealousies,
So now you needn't sit there smug
Now you know that I, too, gagged on the fumes
And conspired against myself like this:
An hour with her and I knew that after
I'd burn in some arsonist's handiwork.
And there'd follow days of agonies until she thought me prime
For the next conflagration, the next round of a groaning prick,
And if she got bored, well then, I'd renew her interest
Which wasn't so difficult.
It was said that to look on a god
Invited a contract on one's existence.
Can't tell you how many times I beheld
Cupid's insipid, jeering mug
As I saw myself in her arms,
Hallucinating.
All the more galling for his being a punk
Who'd gall you even more, pouring gas on the fire, blowing his ta-ta's
At your wretched state.
Worse than dashed hopes
As when new blood fails in office, the country in vertigo
From the spiralling down to ruin,
And barring the ache for the loss of one dear,
Is to watch what was yours now claimed by another.
And then, and here you smack your silly head
(Is that sentience now creeping along your neck?), you inquire,
'Alright then, what did one have that was only a mirage
Of craven bliss, and we've yet to speak of love?'
So there it is. Clink my glass. Gloat, if you must.
But the longer you will continue to insist
All's well, and if not, it'll turn around,
Why then, I'll just have to genuflect
At your MBA, won't I, Gaston,
That ne plus ultra of the mind.
_____
I put one foot ahead of the other,
And in love with life, ambulated, the autumn air delicious
On my old face. Leaves fell to the street.
If a moral nature derives conscience
From indifferent nature, squirrels plumed, were cheeky buggers
On the young bark of the young maples
Shedding their red-gold attitudes.
Then pigeon-birds, filthy, obsessed, but friendly-like,
Like so many dolphins on the pavement, escorted my progress
Past the little park, that one shaped like an arrowhead,
And I looked and saw no slackers
Tethered to young boughs by their own intestines,
And it seemed good news.
And a woman with high cheekbones made
Bawdy eyes my way,
And in love with life, I was tempted.
No doubt, she thought me mature, broken in,
This Phaedra intolerant of moody, if prettier youth.
Let me say it again: either pitch your verse at the highest
Pitch, or, chaste as a child playing at jacks,
Get down and dirty, all else the burbs.
In any case, I breezed along.
To keep it brief, Gaston, and though Zeus philandered
And Apollo chased
Daphne to the ends of the earth, and Hippomenes outsmarted Atalanta
And got this athlete of a girl,
And all these were tales with versions,
Poetry in its infancy,
The Romans who salinized Carthiginian earth
Were as modern as Agent Orange.
Now have you heard the latest, how it is the generals
Have put their heads together,
Campaigning to put
One of their own in the White House
And there could be hell to pay?
No? Well, the wind blew. The leaves tumbled down.
My eyes clouded with slate-black cloud.
A dog yipped and worried the fact
Darling master might fail to emerge
From her tryst-time in the Four Aces Bar.
_____
Alright, I hear you:
Gaston wants that his wine be drink,
Not swill watered down with social commentary.
My muse is addled, he says: war, love, lust, Caesar,
The shenanigans of the financial sector -
Why, they're all over the place - these verses,
As if I were some shorebird, long-legged bundle of nerves
And aversions
Who finds the shore unstable, the tide treacherous, too many
Gawking tourists about
Looking for spirituality in the flaming sunset
And I can't settle anywhere on the beach.
Gaston has a point.
So why don't I snap my fingers and
Dancing girls appear,
And failing that, Sinatra,
And I keep Gaston happy
In his rotarian lusts?
But credit me this:
At least I don't game the system
With the obscenities of special appeals. I say a thing and it's said,
Seven Types of Ambiguity be damned.
No net made of language ever captured much,
Or else poets would be Stalins.
My love affairs? They were disasters, mostly, and for this, I blame
Myself, and though the ladies soldier on with perfect egos,
It does seem in accordance with nature's design.
My pessimism?
Now here's a product of experience.
My faith?
It's Homer the bard,
He who had his supper to sing for, his warlords to flatter, and oh,
He may've been full of himself, teller of tales about the gods
Who never existed, and yet, in regards to what mattered,
No sentimentalist, no spewer of platitudes, eschewing
Sanctimonius truth-telling,
He did not lie.
And in this there's a distinction to be made
Between then and now,
For if we assume that, on account of our greater knowledge, we've given
The old tragedies the slip, then what fools we are.
And now I've said my bit, you may proceed.
Yes, Gaston, pour, yes, if only for comedy's sake,
That divorcee three tables over making eyes.
Shall I make inquiries?
_____
So what is it, Gaston, you come in out of sorts
On a Sunday afternoon? Too much football? Too much golf?
Too many silver-tongued sportscasters, their throats sounding brass?
Yes, what spectacle most maintains the illusion
That all is ordered, peaceful, prosperous,
And justice, for the most part, carries the day
Than the perfect addressing of a dimpled white sphere,
No matter that, as it soars, it hooks wildly right
And then burrows into some hazard,
And dignity requires that a contender
Grin and bear it?
Or I hear tell, Gaston, of a senior citizen
Who's rediscovered ardor,—how he in his living room
Bumps and grinds to pop (his life-long passion has been Beethoven),
The two ladies with whom he frolics
No beach bunnies on spring break.
Is this what you miss, being crotch to crotch
Irrespective of the stress on your sacroiliac?
I was sitting here minding my own business,
And you enter the café in a bearish temper,
And you plunk down the wine as if this action
Were a call to battle. You say,
'Maybe, just maybe, you're right', and then
Your voice tails off. Unusual, seeing as
You always win your point.
Damn it all, what's got you by the short hairs?
Ah, you've read the latest poll. Now Gaston knows
Americans have no great regard
For their government.
Well, knock me over with a feather, why don't you:
There's revolution just around the corner.
So then, time for first things first - to cut a rug
With a grey-haired lovely or two,
Limbs creaky and arthritic. Seems ghastly.
Even so, what's stopping you? It's not for me to come between
A man and his bliss,—
Not for me to tut-tut the ladies when in their eyes
They get those imps.
It's symmetry of sorts, this Johnny Angel come-back as when
Girl loves boy but he's so thick he doesn't notice her
All the while those depressive Soviets brooded
And here and there Nazis were on the run.
What? You let me get away with philosophy?
The voice of wisdom says, 'What wisdom?' The well-ordered mind,
In dubious times, wears poncy clothes and strides manfully
From green to green with a bag of lightning-conductors,
Sizes up his lie and selects his weapon.
If the cities must burn, they'll burn.
But I, for one, lack
This harmonious blend
Of thought, purpose, execution, which is why I sit here
And imbibe
And review the histories
And hear out a professional like yourself.
For when you blink I figure
It's significant.
_____
Incoming - silks and spices. Outgoing - torrents of silver.
And that's how it was for cottagers
Whose villas were so many altars to Aphrodite
In the sun-splashed years of the empire.
But, Gaston, as you might wish to know,
What has the trade-imbalance of Rome
To do with Robert Zimmerman's
It's All Over Now, Baby Blue?
The cost-ratios of desire?
Mazel tov?
The death of sentience in
Those who might've valued it most?
Two months shy of the winter solstice and the shortest day,
One's serotonin reserves at peril (if one is conscientiously
upwardly mobile, not a working stiff),
It may be observed, nonetheless, that winter's struck
And this or that darling shall be drifting south
To splay toes in the tide-darkening sand,—
To count the suns and count one,—
To count the moons and count dream-love
Though one will have understood
That where there's love there's cost,—
To count the stars and endearingly assume
They are numberless, so many alternate scenarios up there
To the drama queen mind of humankind.
Naked and silhouetted by light,
Stepped out of the shower, her towel a headdress,
She did not stop my heart - she rendered it superfluous,
And I was spirit in the presence of a goddess,
Unaccountably inarticulate,
Love of man for woman and woman for man -
Love in general
Pegged to wherewithal.
I trust, Gaston, that you are acquainted
With the mysteries of love
As are pegged to ways and means,
You no stranger to boardrooms,
No stranger to bedrooms
And all the points in between?
That I amuse you tells me you are,
Even if, in the sounder regions of your mind, you sound off:
'These poets - they will fly in the face of the evidence,
But then I guess that's why they're poets.
There's no other explanation.'
§
Book 4
If I sing a darling through
All the hazards of eternity,
As no one else cares to perform that task,
I stop short, Gaston, of claiming
My death shall spike booksales - darling's mental make up normal,
My feckless verses all left field.
Moreover, if I puzzle you,
Confound, irk, dismay, perplex you,
It's only because - loyal to my low profile
And my designs on posterity - I am that which you can't slot.
Think of me as a sunken city
Between which columns the nibbling fishes
Pass, that the odd diver comes across,
His reports bringing knowing laughter
To some village's white-haired old-timers.
And who's to say that in a pale sea
A few graves aren't home to rhymesters?
She and other darlings I recall
When I look in the mirror and see a fool.
But that your grin is evil now, is the lowest of low blows, Gaston.
You can't tell me you weren't blindsided,
Flying kamikaze into a darling's eyes,
So mad as to think you had things under control,
So vain as to boast of your tender touch, Streisand flattering it
With songs? There was no getting out from under,
And it's late in the day. Being wise after the fact
Being the emptiest of illusions, just pour.
_____
That nipping wind from northern parts,
That pack of girls on the run in darkness,
Fleeing school, the job, or the horrors of home,
Announce the end of sweet summer light.
And you remove your coat, and shuddering,
You slide out a chair, are tactical,
And the wine will go down like gall
In this mausoleum of a café.
Well, best you take a deep breath, my man,
As worse than this is in the pipe:
My muse, lacking stellar options,
Even now mixes and matches, and farce
Speaks for doom and doom for the comedies
Of seduction, and a tease shall do the summing up -
If we get that far. What rough and uncouth terrain
For any nag named Pegasus, feet shod in tank treads.
But where were we?
So here you are dispirited, spooning broth.
Here you are to say you could care less
That the senate lacks moral courage:
And would that a poet put a sock on it.
But I must say it fascinates - how you, used to the fray
That was business, politics, marriage and divorce,
Deal with the fact you no longer count
In a world more corrupt than when you set out
To achieve, tomorrow's thin winter sun
Your pencilled in applause.
_____
The male of our species is the problem, Gaston,
And the least savoury among us were handed a gift
When women declared trust annulled -
Why then should a jerk learn to care?
And yet, break a man's spirit, and broken, he'll warp
A woman's joy in life, lies, pretensions, and shadows the roost.
I've known darlings who wished their husbands dead,
And men the same in respect to their wives.
Gaston, did she sleep around?
Otherwise, as an ancient poet had it,
Caesar bringing glory to the empire,
There's only hanging out on the boulevard,
Fresh from the exertions of the bed,
While wheeler-dealers, while soldiers are catching
Honour for their efforts
To render the world safe for yet more bonanzas.
In this way is lust the ironist, and in the sport
Men and women are one another's equals,
And equally cynics.
Yes, here's a conundrum no one seems able to solve:
What makes for free spirits, one day, enslaves the next.
I've stood on the Sacred Way, tipping my flat cap
At the ghosts of men, women and exotic animals,
Listening to touts carving business from business,
Hearing out the senators, their glory second-hand,
This or that sun at its zenith,
This or that moon a caution,
Ruin in the corner of my eye,
And then it's in your face.
_____
She took her lover of the hour to bed
And I brought mine to mine, and yet,
Come morning, we may as well have been
Marooned together on a desert island,
No one else about in that kitchen
Though the table was set for four.
Now if that, Gaston, overstates the case,
There was idle curiosity, at the least:
'Did he measure up to your ideal?
'Did she deliver you your thrill?'
Questions such as these, none grand,
Shot between our eyes like rumours of war.
And when we finally got around, she and I,
To the meaning of life, to its great purpose,
We were much too wary for any answer,
Peace our only desire, forget the mind.
And yes, and though I can't speak for her,
When peace, after all, seemed an empty ruse,
Her moans, her whimperings, her ferocious silences -
The music of pleasure was all I could ever trust.
_____
You've had the good sense, Gaston, to revere the wine god,
His jests half as good, at least, as those that love cracks,
Though they'll say the weak man takes a coward's refuge
In the stuff, as when love injures and the grape molests,
And one knows, without question, that one is a fool.
Moderation is good, to be sure, but I despise the thing,
Seeing how, once again, the conformities crush,
Excusing untruth,—how the righteous, secular or God-crazy,
Are hand in glove with the hypocrisies of the market,
And there's no room in this world for a skeptic
Of mild demeanor. So then, a toast while we can,
Before our brains rot, our amity viewed as treason.
§
Book 5
American rustic leaves me indifferent.
What simpler, nobler, more virtuous life?
What use have I for prairie sod? They are pretty pictures in my
schoolboy's
Mind - New England groves splendid and haunted
With Puritan sex and dead Indians.
For every good cowboy were there not
Ten pistol-packing psychopaths?
No, city-slicker, alleged poet to boot,
I'm chary of nature and human nature. The sacramental drink,
The harvest toast, the self-congratulatory nod
Was blood. So then, Gaston, pour the wine. Don't stint
As I'm only just getting started.
For who knows who squeezed the last Etruscan tear,
Rome making good on her take-over bid?
They are still crying
In the Seven Cities of Gold.
Humankind will wander and trespass,
And in this way generate conflict,
And each beseiged tribe will have its prophet,
And among prophets contention,
Arguments as to the best course of action
In a slew of troubles:
A return to the old ways? Making it new?
In these parts
Decimation is still an answer of sorts,
Fortress America an open air crypt
Of crumbling infrastructure
And advanced weapons systems.
'No comment,' you say. I don't see why,
The relations of your forebears to the Iroquois
Complicated,
Raid and counter-raid,
And the beaver almost disappeared.
Still, who needs obligatory outrage?
Who wants to be reminded of ancient history?
Just that I have superstitious respect
For ghosts and cycles of retribution.
_____
They were smug and corrupt, he said
And so, he'd tossed his hat in the ring,
And he'd boot the bums from their cozy offices,
And if I meant him no ill will, truth to tell, I was skeptical.
He answered:
'Yes, and that's what they figure you for:
You've had your brush with experience.
You'll stay at home on voting day
And they'll live to dance the beguine.'
Gaston, he shamed me.
And his sombre sidekick (her eyes sweet and alive, what with the way
She held her clipboard and seemed attentive)
Had the look of a woman for whom
Civilization had reached its eleventh hour,
And I was proof, if nothing else,
Of how bankrupt it had all become,—
And either she'd buzz a thousand more doors
Before the night was done, or she'd let down her hair
And cave to long-denied indulgences.
I'd never know, the man with conviction in his jaw,
Sensing perhaps that her unspoken questions
Spoke more to me than his reforms,
Broke off relations, and they moved on.
I returned to the ballgame on TV, old rite of passage,
To the pretense of America at its best, everything in a nutshell -
Truth, honour, justice -
Swings and misses, absolutely smoked, the intricate physics
Of what was a boy's paradise,
Big money boondoggle now.
Gaston, I shrugged as I lay on the couch, observed athletes,
heard out shills,
And I was a body within a body that, with aplomb,
Could still throw and catch and keep at bay
Lies, collusion, loveless nights,
Collective madness,
Marauding death.
_____
Stick me on some flood plain of the world
And set loose the waters of the record,—
And then, to further addle a metaphor,
Grant me the expertise of a connoisseur
Who, by taste alone, can trace a grape
To its locale,—and I might observe as I sample
This wave or that inundation:
'Clovis' or 'pre-Clovis' people,
This or that variation on a genetic theme,
But don't expect a grand summation of what
It all means. Shall we, Gaston, drink to that?
The thing is, I'm at an impasse - I just can't see a way
To end this writing on a decent note
Save for squawk, bleat or howl of protest
Deliverable, as ever, to the geist,
That one whose holistic spas
Sanction torture, excuse mediocrity, and in everything -
From making a buck to making art and love -
Reduce endeavour to paint-by-numbers,
And what happened to those Mayans, anyway?
So I'll step outside, if you don't mind - I'll light a cigarette
And sniff the wind for an ill wind,—and contemplate
Your suspect career and mine,
As well as those of the duped darlings of the day.
The clouds above - there's snow in them, and this time around I
resent
That skinflint sky stingy with light, and yet,
Were I to hop a southbound plane and find myself
In Quintana Roo,
Clambering over vine-clad temples,
I'd feel a fraud, one too clever by half,
Looking to apply the old mismanagements
To the narcissisms of shopping malls.
Besides, there's more honour getting drunk with you here
Yes, in this faux Greek café
Than there is in flashing a credit card
In a real Cozumel.
But enough of the interlude, my self-involved spell.
Gaston, I'm back at you, and I see you've poured,
You cupbearing straight man,
You tutoring Silenus.
And, guess what? Inspiration having hit me out there,
A wanton muse to an ancient poet
Gets the last word and gets me the note
I've been looking to strike, how she,
On dream-feet, flew from her grave to the poet's couch,
Let him know what a faithless s.o.b he always was,
Though she's thankful for the tenure he gives her
In his verses. Now would he see to it that her beloved slaves,
Companions, witnesses to her love-crimes, are cared for
In their retirement,—and then, and it's either a touching
Or a grisly coda, she reminds her old foe in the wars
That when he joins her in death, bone against bone,
They'll embrace, once again, and forever