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DARKLING, I LISTEN
Fag ai lo vers, no say de cuy
e trametrai lo a selhuy
que lo'm trametra per autruy...
Farai un vers, pos mi somelh...
GUILLAUME IX OF AQUITAINE
This is to be written in the windowless bathroom
of a Dollar Motel somewhere south of Indianapolis,
it is to be written in darkness on a blank page torn
from the back of the Gideons' Bible, it is to be written
in expressively indecipherable palimpsest, and
it is to be given this provisional title: Synergetics.
Three strangers sit at a dining table set for four.
To discover their disposition, before joining them,
I peer under the tablecloth; their shoes are impressive:
the women's, stilt heeled arching the insteps, deep blue,
mahogany red, expensive; the man's, black basalt,
pharaonically planted. I record no conversation.
Now all three must climb—or try to—into separate
shelves of the Louis Quinze provincial armoire,
itself a statement of unimpugnable arrivisme . What
shouldering, what writhing, what impossible stowing
of knees and straining of cuffs, hems, zippers, garters!
I do not catch their eyes. I will start no small talk.
Such stories are always to be scribbled blindly:
a woman I once adored crouches at the foot of a rock
where spectators are perched, fifty bucks a shot.
From a sandbox beside her she spoons the nasty
fragments of a grand piano shattered by mallets.
All this she vows to swallow before her curtain call.
Or again: the crossbow sweats in my palm, the rim
of my leather helmet grips my head like a thorn-crown.
The supplicants talk in low voices, their hands a-dither.
I recognize neither their language nor the smell
of their oiled bodies. His feet hesitant on the abrupt
circumference of the world disk, the high-priest
in his woman's dress is lifting the infant king
high by his chubby thighs, offering him to the people.
As I turn away, the quiver-strap rasps my back,
the arrow-feathers sharp against my shoulder blades.
Such tales must be written, I say, only on the immaculate
skin of bible-paper. And in a room with no light.
   
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