11:38 p.m. Forget preamble. I'll just begin
At my end, like Eliot, and wind
Up someplace hopefully consequential.
Perhaps in some diaryland sequel
I will expand a langour and tell you all
About the lost kittens, the heart's assassins,
The driver in the accident who resembled J.P. Sartre;
Tell you of poor Valerie who bewildered me a moment,
Tell you of poorer Stephanie, and of poorest me.
But that's another poem, to be writ villanelle
(For what other stricture so merrily carousels
In its structured deconstruction, so juxtaposes heaven
And hell?). This here is just Saturday's poem,
A knotting of words, a bricolage
Of, oh, this and this. And that. It's a song,
This poem. It's a map to the territory
Camouflaged. It's a hummingbird
Inside an aviary. This poem's not about me
But about a Saturday boy very much like me,
But unlike me more sensible. Moreover, he
Would never (my hero) hide himself in poetry.

A short dramatis personae? Oh, okay.
Lily is a dancer, aged twenty-three.
She reads too much into lyrics. She thinks poetry
Is, if perceived sidewise, through enough eyelid-squint,
An eruption of the divine into everyday sense.
An epiphany, in other words. I like Lily.
I met her at a wedding two or three weeks back
Since I, perhaps over-impressed by Harold and Maude,
Have taken to spending my holidays and free time
Haunting churchyards, funerals and weddings,
Not unlike god. This one wedding, I said
Extraordinarily charming things. The organist
Let me play Mendelssohn with a bossa nova beat,
The priest clapped along and the bride's mother blushed.
I kissed the trembling groom and wished him
and his wife an enthusiastic fertility.
I like you, said Lily. Because of you I want to get married.
Lily had brought wine. It was a Mormon ceremony,
So like high school Mormons we snuck out to the car
And guzzled down the wine while listening to
Coldplay's "Yellow." Drunk, "Yellow" seems
Sso meaningful, and I seemed
So interesting, so Lily adopted me. We spent the day
Annoying Mormons in increasingly baroque ways
Involving the angel Moroni, mind-altering underwear, and coffee.
So anyway that's Lily. Tuis pugus pignore.

So anyway. The night before,
Friday, I saw a movie based on Kieslowski's last script:
The first part of a trilogy (K. and
his trilogies) about heaven, purgatory, hell.
The movie made manifest the tragedy and wit
That conviction ordinarily leaves implicit.
The ending, oh. The ending takes one's breath
Away. It's a fuck-you to death,
Ridiculous, rhapsodic, in a word -- emotion.
It left me in a decidedly rapturous mood.
I left the theatre feeling, Oh, my life is going to change.
I shall devote myself to charitable works of good,
Remain chaste, pray endlessly like Frannie Glass,
Abjure the wicked, cast out demons, raise the dead,
Et cetera, all that jazz. But when I'd reached my car,
I'd already matter-of-factly broken two hearts.
I hadn't even noticed. A thoughtlessness,
A species of inattention like those of politicians.
This is when I decided that the cinema,
Seductive as it is, is no real verity,
No matter what Godard says. The flaw
In life is that there is no narrative consistency,
Thus no coherent poetics. Like Stephanie

discovered a couple weeks back,
at the heart of the heart of the heart
burns there a heart-shaped lack,
insidious like a sine wave, artless
like an earthworm. What she actually said
was "There is no free will," and I've
yet to decipher what's truly going on
in her head. but anyway

Fast-forward, if you will, to today.
There was Lily. There was me. There was you.
(I assume you were there, you must have been, somewhere,
Contributing to the mise-en-sc�ne through
Some arcane quantum effect,
Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky,
a Chinese butterfly's wing's wave upending
an Indiana trailer park, that sort of thing).
We were accompanying one another's Saturday
With carefully measured cups of coffee
And increasingly theatrical pronouncements upon love,
Delineating and eliminating whatever we say
When we say we're in love.
Love, Lily said. I think love's
A toxic by-product of the mutual massage
Of mucuous membranes. Love is
Upset biology, some virus, all we're meant
To do is fuck. Propagate the species
And die, that's my motto.
I should have it tattooed on my bicep,
I should wave it on a flag on Bastille Day.
Fuck, die, fuck, die. The rest
Is merely imbroglio. Common-sense. What was it
Ovid said, omnia vincit amor?
Everything conquers love.

You can guess Lily's leitmotif
In this scene-- she's the bitter one
In this triste tendresse.
Oh yes, the scene: this was at the cafe
Over at Little Italy, where during the day
A bearded man in his wheelchair plays bandoneon
And college girls slowly survey
Through various F-stops the sunlight as it turns
Yellow like warming mayonnaise.
You know what cafe I'm talking about.
We were at the cafe where the artists were
Regurgitating Vermeer, Modigliani, Giotto
And his nauseating putti in varicoloured chalk
in squared-off parts of the street,
And the passersby, those who were not
Drinking and hullaballooing the World Series,
Were walking like crabs between them.
Lily and I were on the orange bench in front,
Looking down the shirts of the pretty girl artists
And admiring the dusty chalk on the boy artists' arms.

Lily said, I don't know what it is Rob gets when I tell him
I love you. Why do those words act like a charm
To turn all our intellect into oatmeal? Yet I tell him,
I have to tell him, in order to propel
My heart to beat, my breath to turn. What is it, a spell
Or recipe or what is it, why is it that it seems
Those stupid words, I-love-you, sometimes gleams
Like sunlight does in those half-remembered dreams
You've had ever since you were a kid? How can those same words
Break suddenly in trajectory, zigzagging like mad birds
Avoiding being made targets of? What is it about love
That longs to dissipate, to shake off form, be obscure
And yet lusts like murderers to be discovered and named?
We're just fucked up, Jonathan. Ugh, I'm fucked up.
I don't know what I'm talking about. I should just shut up.

I looked at you. I longed for you
To tell Lily what love is, and tell her something true.
Lily said, Rob's mother's just died. I've known him six weeks.
I don't know how to reach him. I don't know what he wants.
I think he thinks, I really like this girl. I think she likes me.
But I wonder when he looks at me if Rob really sees me.
I'm not certain that I'm the right person for him now.
He needs someone less fucked-up. He needs someone wonderful,
As wonderful for him as he is for me.
If I really did love him, like I seem to always say,
I would let him find that other, and just turn away.

Tell me
what I should have told Lily.
Tell me that love cures nothing.
Tell me that like cinema, love's buggered by death.
Tell me what I should have said.
Look in your quantum physics and tell me
The equation that will make us all equivalent,
Tell me what I should say to Lily's Rob,
To his widowed father and his orphans.
Tell me something that endures
Our fickle lives that can stand as testament.
Tell me what I should've said this Saturday
Instead of writing this poem, and turning away.



Ralph Vaughan Williams: Serenade to Music

the Funny Show

agriculture poem

my life in the ghost of Bush

time-lapsed (part 1)

unreconciled

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Images are taken without permission from the fine and trusting folks at Folk Arts of Poland; please purchase something from them. Background music stolen without permission from Epitonic, Basta Music, and just about everywhere else my unscrupulous hands could grab something. No rights reserved.

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