Thursday, November 7, 2013

Tristesses de la lune (Sangaku—Gunma Prefecture)

                  
                                    The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
                                    The moon in lonely alleys make
                                    A grail of laughter of an empty ash can....

                                     (Hart Crane)



1.

Previous lives are a long unblushing of knives in ice.

Do you embrace the perfect moon and on the morrow
a moon more perfect than the one before?

What does it mean to say she is dark-eyed and moist with white?

That her dusks are divided and multiplied in honey, each a meadow,
each a broken comb?


2.

Fallen walls are secret in their snares, for her flesh is not endless
nor undressed witlessly and without prowess.

It is remembered that she wavered.

Remembered is impassable smile and flawless lips,

night bare and deep with her hips.

It is remembered that she resisted.

Remembered is another life round and imperious as her breasts.


3.

Every machine comes with directions
two-faced like fans.

Annals are a machine.

Menology is a machine.

Diary is a machine.

Her face is the space between.



4.

Unnamed is sudden dismantling come very late.

Is it thereby proved that no woman is a goddess unless craftily embarrassed?

There are few tears, just a half-mad joust that pleases broad day

and her exquisite mouth competing with the moon.




5.

Where in the rhythm of the night air is the almanac of her black hair
cascading down her back and at ease with waist?

She is impossible to clothe.
She is impossible to close.
She is impossible to begin afresh.



6.

Disliked are fictions that pose questions.

Flatter and tell them they matter.

Give them a formula or a mystery to crack.

Give them one raindrop falling

from frightened eye to the night flowers.



7.

Body records and remembers and there is no being born again
save in palsied repetition.

There is but one drama and no sequel.

Her suit to be disincarnated is summarily dismissed:

her fate is to be as real and living as the phases

of the moon.



8.

What is now is not what went before.

Is memory a function of the difference?

What follows both?

Imagine one category in intimate coitus with another

and complete complements,

the unequalled and cunning join of a Japanese beam.



9.

Body and antibody are strange and venomous flowers
pressed between the fallen lives of forest floor.

Worm is the interloper who builds ticket booths to a sideshow.

Be digestible and digested in the only carnival on earth.

Step right up--Be prolific. Be pacific. Be specific.

Be quick-footed and elegant in this thicket of copulating words.



10.

Pyramids are built on one foundation: that nothing is final.

Is there one more chance to dance on other mountains?

Wherever your moon is, caged or free,

wide upon the plain or webbed by sleeping trees,

yours is only half the time and space of that remembered

smile on unremembered face.

[E. A. Costa November 7, 2013 Granada]

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