24.2.14

A Riot of Mud




Bruno Schulz preface:
                                    "The whole . . . was soaked in the gentle air and filled with blue breezes. When you lay in the grass you were under the azure map of clouds and sailing continents, you inhaled the whole geography of the sky. From that communion with the air, the leaves and blades became covered with delicate hair, with a soft layer of down, a rough bristle of books made, it seemed, to grasp and hold the waves of oxygen.
That delicate and whitish layer related the vegetation to the atmosphere, gave it a silvery grayish tint of the air, of shadowy silences between two glimpses of the sun. And one of the plants, yellow, infused with air, its pale stems filled with milky juice, brought forth from its empty shoots only pure air, pure down in the shapes of fluffy dandelions balls scattered by the wind to dissolve noiselessly into the blue silence.”


he smoked a La Gloria Cubana in a sun filtering through an easterly blanket of clouds 
bearing rain  warm and cold at turns
its wind in his ear
a lousy lover
                                                                i   
inarticulate  he contemplated a creative mind
                                                                a
                                                                g    
                                                                i    
                                                                n        shutdown by a foreseen
                                                                a        bullet to the brain
                                                                t
                                                                i
                                                               o
                                                               n
a specific brain
Brunos brain
from a gunshot he wouldnt hear
deaf
unlike all the other gunshots he heard
all the executions   purgings
he wondered if Bruno hadnt imagined the bullet smashed by his skull
altered mysteriously
into a fragrant mushroom tarnished
red by the sun and blood
sprung among the fern moss and roots mooring the forest or an anemone spawning in 
the underwater shoals of his brain
if
in that last mortal nanosecond -  yet contrived  - in that last moment before his death
if
Bruno didnt compose in elegiac prose  like Pan or Mr. Charles  a fantastic escape   
a picnic of the Senses
an escape into the afterlife before his life was shuttered and stopped
                                                                                                    and all the stupid 
Gestapo officer succeeded in killing was a dead body
the Sentience already awing and beyond approach or pain

all the jealous German did was shoot a riot of mud standing in the shape of a man




1527,  Twosday,  5  3. 13      

23.2.14



evening crawled over me

a feely breeze

a floe of honey    an amber embrace
                                                
                                                   every thing   tinged

distinct     and separate     

         warmly     and gloriously magnified



a stalwart black seawall stands sentry   vigilant   grown from the seas belly it

shatters tall waves or strokes its feal undulating surf

crabs scour its stones

and seaweed on its knees thread wreaths bejeweled by anemone fishbones and 

spiny urchins



I watched a thankless man    phosphorescent with sunset    gulp spirits from a 

narrow uptilted glass bottle    like a spike of lightning  
                                                                                    
                                                                              stumble on the slick embarcadero   

catch himself with his knee and hand   and then rise  fumble with his fly  and 

lavishly urinate into the saltwater
                            
                                   mocking gulls circled and cried overhead
                                                                                             
                                                                                     I had hoped one would swoop  

and emasculate him

(but that would have to be for some other poem)



he staggered backward   staggered   then fell hard on his ass 
                                                                                                
                                                                                                  the stones unforgiving  

and yet unfinished   his pantlegs blotted the remainder of his besotted stream

he laid on his back trying to curse 

but mewled

and then a huge wave shattered over him like a heap of broken glass 
                                                                                                 
                                                                                                the sea returning to him

what was his




the sky roiled black

the seawall merged

the man disappeared
                                           
                                           and in the hills from where I had descended to the harbor

small lights blinkered and

what I thought was a seduction of fireflies
                                                                        
                                                                      were families to their dinners or books or

conversations

I could scarcely wait to return to tell my story



the night took me by the hand and walked me through the stone paved streets to the

path that ascended into the farming hills and crisscrossed the dirt road
                                                                                                                     
                                                                                                                   I was happy 

one of us
                 
                  knew the way


0015,  Friday,  12  7. 13