loss

V.131 Ad Vitam

A monkey, given endlessness
A tamarin, say, freed from death
has a long continuity
but soon elements in it shift

It becomes more gentle, it lies
in branch-dark and smiles at eras
proportioned each to new problems
each dealt with in fertility

But day to day life continues –
a melon, a sweet mango,
oranges freed from clinging peel –
they swing, becoming-antic

Eyes that saw the sun hacking down
almost making the waxy leaves
shake, like chess figures with no shape
still see the same, the same frantic

world bearing on with curved spacetime –
our brains are lathed by the planet –
infinity cannot change us
as much as we would like it to

Hold the glowing orb and think it:
how loss will always assault us
every moment – it need not be
a death – only a forgetting

V.129

In a dream, riddle-full of dark
and industrial violence
It is night, like in Cloverfield –
I am observing guileless loss

Someone dies and someone screams – no
don’t look over there, it’s not worth it.
I close my eyes, twist my head round
and wake up with pain in my chest.

As I question it and question,
the dream does not become clearer
It is images seen through ice –
I need something to make me smile

The note was sent by me to me
unsigned and without an ending
The black morning drags, and I toss
thinking of the curls in your hair

Never leave me, goddamn it, swear
that your post-entropic body
can justify the invention
of the lost world-eternal space

Swear it. My thoughts grow so sluggish
crawling around your end// a void
so sharp I am cut in half, now
when time has yet spared me. Amen

V.108 Moth, after Rebecca Elson

Sometimes something someone says (light
of the morning through the canvas,
warmth of bed and skin) fails to hold
and the problem deepens, and fire

holding me, like a massive frog,
begins to crisp the edges of
my mind. Don’t worry, this one has
a good ending, a small firework

let off in a quiet district,
a single man, gathered to watch,
in the November fog. Happy,
watching the fire-flower unfurl –

a man who has been reborn, fire
leaping into the past, gently
to wrap its warm palm around him,
and give him life again, a chance

for a son, a friend, a wife
to ask, why. That happy. Silence
falls upon me apart from sobs
and whimpers which I cannot place

(they’re mine) (I make them whilst I think)
(think through this problem we have posed)
(you could say, like a moth with a flame,
your brightness has me befuzzled)

V.101

This author will still be read, when
the sun has enveloped the earth
in a stifling embrace, and rock
again attains its prevalence

It will go down in history
down into the land, under it
with the rust, into the magma
where the planet forgets itself

The nation’s glory shall ring out
through the debris field in deep space
as comets impact planets, dull
armadas in the dead empire

They will still talk about today
when mouths are a thing forgotten
and the only concept is cold
Cold that stills the slowing atoms

I will remember you until
I lie on the linoleum
watching the inlaid glitter blur
until a galaxy appears

I will remember you, my love
breaking the law of the poem
We will forever have been us
There is nothing that can change that.

A Pound of Flesh, by Paul Éluard (1948)

I am a man in the emptiness
Deaf Blind Mute
On an immense pedestal of black silence

Nothing This oblivion without end
This perfection, a repeated zero…
Solitude, finalised

The day is clean of work, and the night is pure

–

Sometimes, I wear your sandals,
and I step towards you

Sometimes I put on your dress
and then: I have your breasts, your stomach

So, okay, I see myself under your mask
And I know myself

*

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