Читать книгу Taking on the Local Color - Cynthia Genser - Страница 7

Sodden.

What sodden day we didn’t

walk in the rain.

You parading

your glorious head,

the last book’s last

sentence, read

on the first train

to town.

Il pleure sans raison,

my heart! here—

you never, after the first year, cared.

*

Lust, my fixed

star.

Both, how blue,

azure-headed,

my revolution.

To arms! To arms!

Two arms

to be held in,

mother, brother,

I cannot call you,

what—fellow sufferer

or spouse or

fellow dream-snuffer

or parasite, partner,

traitor

fixed foot.

*

The last sentence

of that book read:

“évohé, évohé, leaping

like young horses

on the banks of the Eurotas.”

Meaning, you said,

they had freed their feet.

And you jumped up,

fell forward, head down,

skirt up, head over heels:

marvelous cartwheeler,

I remember

your legs flashed

scissorlike,

against the sky.

This is the fashion, you said,

to be free (adjusting your hat),

and you wet your mouth

and stared;

but you never really cared.

*

Music dreams:

Cars, battles,

axes.

If praxis be the gruel of love,

play on! Open

your starry door.

I throw myself

on all your shards

or lie

beneath your small, glass-slippered feet:

ecstatic.

*

What I want, you wrote,

is to get rid

of all this “inwardly revolving.”

One foot’s fixed:

you spin.

Or tacked up

to some lousy Cross, fall forward,

the hanged man

with a broken ankle—

it makes me spit.

“Chère petite,” I wrote back,

“it makes me spit, too.

Let us make love with whips.

The Diva Club, at two.”

*

Cars dream:

violins, thighs,

loss.

If gnosis be the fool of love,

drive on. Through desert

to the micturating sun

of wetlands,

the dreamy jungle.

How richly I deserve you,

little demon,

little love-thing, little

bloody foot.