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John Tranter site: DCA Thesis: Part 1: Poems
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Chapter 4: At the Movies |
Notes are given at the end of this file, with links that look like this: [27].
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Desmond’s Coupé
Desmond’s coupé is full of jam. He’s in a quandary:
a bean lance, or a dance of circumstances.
He’s eternally fond of his own naivety.
A swanky beam spells out a white
cranky tale.
Susan’s inclination was
plainly desperate.
An ailment common in Siena
makes him think he’s dead and buried
or makes him realise he’s a bad dresser
on a plane, or in jail, but you don’t dress for jail
and people don’t wear a jacket on a plane any more.
Raise the bonds.
His three résumes — swallowed — he’s just
a shadow of his former self — fooey! — a deep violet colour,
or an alternative he’ll just have to adapt to
by the verge of the road.
Deep beans: his aunt has a rooster.
She’s getting battier every year,
a fish in one hand, a peach in the other.
The Master of Surges,
or so we infer.
In the flames we see the communist menace —
uniquely, they’ve got the numbers, no?
But they hesitate when the corpse waves its arms.
Pluto (not Mickey) wants to play,
oh, what a nut! Chained
at the party, a name for the horse floats,
an old horse works it out,
tapping his hoof on the floor, good trick,
but then forgetting how old he is
behind the jade barrier.
These pedals take you to an agreeable horizon,
well prepared.
You old git, free meals,
a bad smell on the dratted train —
now he’s heading for the air vents
in another carriage —
that’s the spirit — actually, a jet plane
would be quite a temptation.
You could re-employ a division of passing firemen.
The secret item on the menu,
the chef’s envy, even now
is cooling on the barbecue, or so you surmise.
Look straight at the homosexual:
nerveless, not very important, yet vain,
an old Hoover in his hand.
Potato crisps
are found in the deli, useless for a téte-â-tète.
He takes a disprin and feels legless, then he
has another one, then he feels
ambiguous. His ulterior plans
and unforgettably demonic.
He feels nothing
for the empty countries, Alaska, let’s say,
home of the Inuit. This old idiot
had a chance to meet The Supremes, probably —
say, Louie, your son is some puerile hombre,
caressing a policeman and renting out a lavatory,
eating soup and getting vaguer —
a soup full of hard bones,
now he enters the aisle, bending his knee
like a bat flapping into the sea.
The old tenant reads Lowell [’s poem] against the sea,
a chance to ooze poetry —
financially speaking, that is — no, don’t —
a voile handkerchief is an illusion
as antsy as having a phantom for a guest
in the chancellery
but that won’t abolish folly
like this insinuating silence
or Dan’s squelchy high-voltage approach —
he’s simply rolling around and laughing ironically.
Ooo! — A mystery!
A precipice!
Frank Hurley!
A billion turbots! Laughter and horror
with the author Jimmy Guiffre (on guitar),
but no junkies, please,
no fur,
and that old berk verging on the index
like so, a lonely puff of smoke at Purdue —
so far, so good,
where recounting the effluent is the talk of the minute,
and it immobilises you.
A chiffon and velour coffee-coloured sombrero
for this stiff old white man
is derisory, an opposition horse seal,
rather tropical, the sombrero, quite unmarked,
exhumed, quite conkers,
the American prince who loves the cool,
he gives a little heroic cough.
Irresistible maize container!
Par for the course, but a pretty feeble reason to be acting virile
and like a foodie, maybe the ulcers explain his puberty
or mute his loose and bossy vinaigrette
(invisible from the front)
sparkling with umbrage,
with the stature of a shadowy filet mignon
and with the torsion of a siren
impatient at squeamish ultimatums.
A rare, yes, and vertiginous debut.
Time to snaffle
a bifurcated soufflé,
thinks the old bird.
His manner is rather false.
All up, with a toilet next to the bedroom,
evaporated brooms
impose an unborn infinite state
issuing from the stars — que sera, sera —
a pyre doesn’t disadvantage the minors,
they’re indifferent to the mutants,
that is, to the number of mutants that exist
apart from those agonising, sparse
hallucinations of mutants which start when they stop
and never seem to close, apparently, with an infant.
The park elk and his profusion of expandable rarities —
see, then the chief rat is ill —
evidence that the Battle of the Somme, for one of us at least
was a poor thing, though somehow illuminating
and written up in Hansard.
Choose a pen.
A left-hand drive car with a rhythmic suspension
that levels itself, an ox and some original scum,
no more wars, a delirious sound and just one crime
fleeing without identifying Jimmy Guiffre’s true neutrality.
Rein in a memorable crisis
as you see fit.
Your venomous accomplice can view the results: nothing!
Nothing human, that is.
In lieu of an aura of elevation,
the absence of ordinary verse.
In the loo, an inferior kind of clap
is likely to disperse and conquer
those who act in a poor video.
Abruptly key the synonym.
Parson, men’s songs are fond of perdition.
A dance, in the garage full of vague parables,
and which reality is dissolved?
Except where the altitude peters out
and an Aussie’s loins are right on.
A few swans, a vector dealer and
a horse of interest —
and a quantity of signals in general sell on,
tell obliquities, part Elle’s declivities —
the furs, poems, see what theatre
a septuagenarian from the far north of Australia
see in the stars — freezing, oblique and full of suet —
pass the aunt —
a killer from Noumea —
and this vacant surface is superior
to any successive hurt.
Side-rail was meant —
done, counted, totalled information
and a veiled ant, doubts, the rolls...
brilliantly meditating before the ratter
whose pointed bum is sacred —
and all the pensioners met Des and his coupé.
Five Quartets
1
All might have been speculation.
What might have been opened?
I do not inhabit the garden.
There they were dignified, invisible,
over the dead bird, in response to
the flowers that are our guests,
in the drained pool.
Dry water, bird children,
garlic and mud in the blood
dance along the sodden floor.
Below, the practical Erhebung without
elimination, its partial ecstasy,
its horror. Yet the body cannot
allow a little dim light: neither
rotation nor strained fancies
with no men. Bits of wind in unwholesome
eructation, the torpid gloomy hills of Putney,
twittering into inoperancy and the other.
Abstention from its metalled bell
carries the cling wing.
2
Words move the Chinese violin, while
the words between the foliage
waste a factory, or a by-pass.
There is a time for the wind to break
and to shake the field-mouse with a silent motto.
You lean against a van
and the deep village, the sultry dahlias,
wait for the early pipe.
3
And the little man and woman
round and round the fire
leaping through the laughter
lifting the milking and the coupling
of man and woman of dung and wrinkles.
I am here in heat, and writhing high
into grey roses filled with thunder.
The rolling cars weep and hunt the ice.
That was not very worn-out.
Poetical fashion, wrestle with poetry.
Calm and wisdom deceived us, the dead secrets
into which they turned their every moment
And shocking monsters, fancy old men,
can hope to acquire houses under the Stock Exchange.
4
The Directory of cold lost the funeral.
I said to the dark, the lights are hollow,
with a bold rolled train in the tube
and the conversation fades into the mental ether,
the mind is in the garden, pointing and repeating
‘There is no ecstasy!’ The wounded steel,
the fever chart, is the disease,
the dying nurse our hospital.
The millionaire ascends from feet to mental wires.
I must quake in our only drink, blood.
Trying to use a failure, because one has
shabby equipment in the mess of emotion,
and to conquer men, is no competition.
Home is older, stranger, intense.
But the old lamplight is nearly here,
with the explorers.
5
I think that the patient is forgotten.
Men choose the machine, but the nursery bedroom
in the winter gaslight is within us,
also, the algae and the dead men.
The sea has the water,
the groaner and the women.
Where is there an end of it?
Where is the end of the wastage?
We have to think of them,
while the money is ineffable:
we appreciate the agony of others,
covered by dead negroes.
Moretti’s Map of Paris
I’m thinking of a map I saw
projected on a wall in Cambridge UK:
nineteenth-century Paris
as seen in the literature of the time, a period
when high art met half a million readers
in a frenzy of spending before movies and video
could steal that lumpen audience.
The heroes of the novels of the age were men,
naturally — this is France — and all
lived on the Left Bank, which was then
a squalid dump, now heavy with real estate
that no French working family can afford.
Moretti’s map shows their filthy little flats
and rented rooms dotted exactly on a grid,
address by address, street by street —
‘He who does not know the left bank
of the Seine between the rue Saint-Jacques
and the rue des Saints-Pères doesn’t know life,’
says Balzac — for example the hot attic flat
of Banville’s house in the rue de Buci
where Verlaine installed his current
boy-friend, who stood in the window
and flung his lice-filled clothes into the street.
Now turn your ironic gaze across the river,
that fiscal pale, where the heroines live
scattered around the Right Bank in their
comfortable dwellings, each with a concierge
and one of these new hydraulic elevators —
drifting further from the water, further North, further Right,
into a golden frenzy of marriages and money.
Discovery Kids
When you look out the window and nine days later
grants flow back quickly, she seems fine, or maybe a little
new rocket CC and a happy meal.
She cares less than two important things:
“The song, Barnes, the engine wrapped in plastic!”
Custom tailors supporting a landscape that the planning
of the management side (goes away again)
out of the diary gets what he got: a new job.
She hated everything, by everything... to get a file
of us if you could be looked after
an election that could be fined or a holiday resort
sugar shack, if you wanted to quit, and she
looked away into the passenger compartment,
she is a full line reading the discovery kids of today.
Electrical Disturbance: A dramatic interlude
Two voices:
A: a literary scholar.
B: a company director taking on the guise of a naïve young man.
A: A poem, titled ‘Oxymorons’.
Outsourcing ruins the parties concerned with language.
They are employing level parking. You are one
who pretended to go at it this year.
You listen to other opponents, said the committee,
it wants to be yours and cannot be on the supporting level —
is there — are there other things for us?
To throw them into play, play — well actually, years —
but I considered playing hookey in Perot’s third innings
when he was trying to read a recent edition of Greek poems.
That is one of the stains — without parole, open-ended.
And before you know it, it has lots of the things that are typewriters.
And he played it once more, I think... but only for two years.
Going into a new level — a different attitude —
it means roughly — it guarantees that you are his — you ...
We feel as if we truly believe the required stuff,
suggesting that it will offer a train,
it comes during the reading of the jury list
with a box on its tracks, now they eliminate the table
and encourage the water pilot and his destiny,
supporting charities — such noise
that it was warm and fuzzy
(if you’re in your hair) and
they’re risking a relative amount.
Playing ring-a-rosy and once again
they have said their share, a lasting example
of the world history of humans.
They are not a singular authority,
and the worker lives in poverty and reflects.
Units are an old man in a blue shirt,
selling paint cans for a living. So
in the evening everything should show
that you can find a way to use it.
B: A poem, titled ‘What Works’.
One — I want to use what was wrong
and why I did the work of the house
where you first turned up for a day of work
on actual papers, was for reasons of summer.
Two — So far so good as New Delhi,
and we think there has been, in the lives of people
who are very common, a way or a growth of 21,
or maybe many more below the jury,
which will bring the way he rose from one end
of the worst case of each of the notes and stripes,
strange days indeed.
Three — he returns. Our lives seem more thorough
and lower, as a woman might seem.
Blazing blocks from the literature maven,
on his way into our Senior Center this evening,
and a list of rules for the future of the home
where his current visit is to our children:
what was wrong is in line with his words,
and he’s here. What is a story of a growing boy:
what are you guys? Do you know what has changed
his or her choice, and released documents?
And only the light of what works, works. It works.
A: A poem, titled ‘Some Trees’.
How to use these — are you
holding a joint letter?
As those things were still,
he performs, arranging a chance
to win his party’s
morning and world instantly.
I recently met with these guys to try to
close down what we had barely been doing...
something that can be hard for exploring.
We did not live in an instant, as we’re surrounded
by the silence, or a few hours silence a day,
and I was looking for his chorus of smiles.
Please have only one thing: parties, restaurants
and hotels of their own.
The Interview. Part One.
B: The Interview, part one. Can you
tell me about the ‘scrimmage’?
A: In reading that the publisher is 28, and
expects to be a woman, he got ready a new
line of scrimmage that had been used
for the annual series of younger poets.
The first ones were in hand with the new cars.
That’s all.
B: Now, to press the church of Saint Louis Blues:
one of the new rules for the event was
that one of the press would warn everybody
when he returned. Why?
A: The error rate was higher, and the defendants
were protesting that the U.S. is the worst of all.
The code breaker of the jury is this year’s fever.
B: But the East River — sorry, the year’s fever —
that has been over for a year.
A: The firm was very large, as well as
the shame when it had to lose. That was large too.
B: What a year.
A: Well, the Server is a painting where I live in the mirror.
They have been the source for the bears and the lender,
who owns the line from the original range.
B: He is one of the U.N. and NATO people. Right?
A: I don’t have any idea.
B: Okay. Would you like to meet some new friends?
A: Well, no. For those who are very easy,
who have a certain sense of publication,
I already have friends.
B: This is the feedback to the heart of everything.
Now, what about this ‘error’?
A: I’m looking for violence, that is the error.
And a lot of parents are large and very annoying.
B: What about those so-called ‘French Fires’?
A: After the old days of riots, all of the fires were over.
B: Not Fires, Fries. And who — where —
A: Four teenage girls. One of the stores was in Paris.
B: Paris?
A: His home in the water — we were stationed there.
B (looking behind him, voice muffled): The Seine?
The report... Maybe there is no such report.
A: You have a right to finish a long way off.
This is the year two women who are used
for the current issue, who are to review the data,
are eventually to write the report together.
B: I should have mentioned that there’s a curfew
on the free-threaded analytic use of terms
which only satisfy a few people.
A: Do you mean a kind of censorship?
But the anger over yours truly...
it says in the book, and CVS violence...
(looking around): Why am I here?
B: You are available, you are the only person
along the lines of the overview of the animal,
and more powerful than ever... Now,
who was uncertain about two counts of rape?
A: The French conversation last month
was given an aggressive expansion. When
the infected meet with a long-term convalescence...
B: Really, before anything else, you should
address yourself to that end —
A: Okay, okay. A poem, ‘Thoughts of a young girl’.
The second half of their hard work
came, live, to the shores of their violence;
that was the scope of the year, and
running back to the world in which you could hardly,
an hour ago, sign the bills. Are you
still waiting for the show’s conclusion?
Most of the early lead roles are taken.
A dollar buys (or reserves) your livelihood.
We wait for your presence to show the way.
B: A poem, titled ‘Last month’.
No change of support, only stasis.
Glad the great hero is alive and well.
Things have their own way in record time.
Black people used to resolve large receipts slowly,
and I am sure something is opening its doors
and willing to sell its earnings and dollars.
H. Lawrence Powell and I would open the doors
when we visited, he has one of the properties,
it has its own level. It is your own house in the year
of the solar wind, and this is the power of the book.
More of the Interview:
A: Preheat the oven, and the garden grove is ours.
B (mid-sentence): ... the interview, more of it.
If the market share falls away
from July onwards, at least
the paper has a review — The San Francisco —
A (butting in): There are some of my own flaws —
B: Claws? Flaws? The road runner?
A: Steady on. The higher the level of the opening,
the more you hurry, and the life of leisure users —
say about the past four years — it’s a long
line of human sexuality. One, the first error,
then a power failure for what’s left of the year.
B: Hmmm... Flaws become ‘errors’. Three years,
filling out the history of the human heart.
A: History?
B: The one you’re with has a history, you didn’t know that?
A (calmly): Yes. (confused): Uh, no. Most of the time
I want to encourage a million hits.
The error you would have is a file on the arts,
corrupt —
B: It is where you have the power.
You must serve part of the first year.
A: Corrupt data, I mean. The report. Fine.
The more heard, the less gathered.
B (looking for a piece of paper): There is one more line...
about a college graduate you are trying to teach —
William eventually took up a lot of time, right? —
... reading the letter of your life... uh... forget it.
(laughs) Boy, the way you guys
were able to use these discoveries!
A: Well, however long the road, anyone can walk it.
The Berkeley Renaissance was really very much
a large American way of anger.
B: Berkeley? Really?
A (annoyed): Mortgages were foreclosed on a million homes!
The heavy use of work in the nation, Bertha
had some ideas about that —
B: You and Bertha, are you starting —
A (interrupting): We’re not really starting anything.
The Federal forms of their injuries
have originally been worth 800 dollars per person.
B: There was no other way of reading it?
A: Whose side are you on? The proliferation
of the green arms of interaction
has various uses: the ones you used
for being a mother, and the one you used
to get your free meals.
B: A mother? Hmmm, I think you’re right —
A: Sure... about fifty per cent of the road.
Reading French
Hôtel de Ville
The kids should visit a history museum
in their senior year, to understand disgrace as
one form of Clinton’s victory. On the other hand
the European Community foreign debt gives
everybody bad dreams. So we do need to solve
the problem of students reading difficult things
that will lead them astray: why did Rimbaud
turn from socialism to capitalism? As if
it matters. We’d be delighted to have his uniform.
The name from the dish multiplies twenty black men.
We want to see all the modern art stuff, too.
Thank you. Press the button marked ‘monument’
and see what happens: a recorded voice says
‘I have wasted my life’, and we pay to listen.
Anguish
The May frostbite is still on the land,
a statement by analogy
down by John Quinn.
We should assess this.
Single men sit through the night.
Force a dual key to a bloody game
on the issue in this exhibit
to see more of the sea.
Flying, all share a common fear.
Get a file, he said, she’s
come here with this shot deal, no pay
and no exit. Kinda nice to know that,
thanks for joining in the song
at the close, four years.
Antics
And I see a feast
people on the phone
call that day
the key to the song
that blocks insomnia.
So you had taunted us
by going to where
that civil tongue is a lingua franca
on the one genuine document,
a plausible text, though how true
no one knows, exactly, and now
they want to solicit whatever it is
that has a significant increase,
its attention on a big coach.
Barbarians
To be an equity issue in this is all you can expect;
in the statehouse today old McAfee
told his story, and none too soon.
He is only local news in a local court, but
I was as worried as anyone. All the media
were there, barbaric on the video phones.
They’re seeing it like so: he has a free kick.
Did you say ‘What happened to the eighties?’
Are they the only ones saying this lady
made a few dents in the system,
took her doses — I see it as two doses —
and then a plea bargain for the shopping assault?
This edition paints it as a gamble on love, or
a kiss too soon, or Mondo music and a new full moon.
Bottom of the Harbour
Maria today got a heap of stuff,
all she can use for a month.
Taylor said she should make one
for the Indian, that is, the male person
originally from the subcontinent
and since she just wasn’t being the buyer
for two of them, she said no.
This had an effect on the warrior courtroom
until all of that month had gone by,
or do you mean that the U.S. should give up
the Cold War tactics shown on the
Canton blankets? We use them to keep warm,
for goodness’ sake, it’s a case of being up at dawn
bottom-feeding in and around the drowned cathedral.
Childhood
1
Call its stated goal an assault on the new window
looking at other fundamentally longer music and film
the norm for most women: like the market
the island is the editor of a different algorithm,
and clocked an experiment that feeds me
over the long tradition of discourse
which lasts longer than their own phone calls
and he on the web. The woman held to the belief
that it was his faithful mistake.
Are the blues just a warp in the DNA,
a genetic splice on the silver bullet of jazz?
At the beginning of the major slowdown
music is used to liven up the dismal matter
late at night when every gesture is cool.
2
See the net, the ten-year mission,
the dish, the town, the gong shimmering.
The city played the ‘call on the applet’ song
and claimed that a lot was going on.
You will hear from the U.S. government
and the E.E.C. boffins in due course.
they do what they do to guide the assault
on the date. Barry’s the one who knew
what he had seen between sound data
and the player, and had gone to get some help
because he is the only guy out on a limb in D.C.
with an inflammation of the chest. Dos Santos said
he announced that on CNN, some old male figure,
and that’s when they made the initial analysis.
3
What the day-to-day white cell function was
and its annual fatality rate, nobody knows.
You know any large kidney stone can do it,
before the end of the union,
the bits of rock inside the suffering flesh.
He was indicted for some minor crime,
and was allowed bail on condition that
he stayed away from the schoolyard.
That’s what the year brought us. Thanks.
(Delete the eighth.) Keep this Sunday free,
be on call, it would cost them one budget at least
(using Outlook) to keep all the doctors on call
ready for duty (command) to be finding out about
the swap deal relating to the evolution of a saint.
4
Call me. It has the fix-it.
In his three days using it
he just couldn’t get through
to the end of ‘log enable’.
He didn’t use a cool bar
when the investigating court
claimed that the CIA under any other name
would be the same.
All the defendants, the whole sack of them,
have long been made ineffective
by the relentlessness of the judicial assault.
On the phone, deletion is the aim.
This idea is not the only visionary
thing to happen in a small novel.
5
Combing your hair, you don’t follow suit,
you look all blotchy on the late show
and indeed the team in the studio
including John Updike and a close female friend
beat the previous month’s audience figures.
You’re seeing the virus and these guys
all dying in a firefight, but on a neighboring island
the locals benefit from new lease of life.
The goal of the pain can get busier than all the data
in the world, the flaw in the work that we do
for state PTA president is a lack of talent.
Update the loan. The MIT Board is on the Internet
and his roommate has enough votes to win one of the best
seats in the house, still layered and glowing.
Dawn
Jerry Matsuno will get a band together, don’t worry:
it’s just a local phone call away.
Today they can open the case.
There are more witnesses to be called, so
keep an eye on what Jerry Marshall wants.
Really, all these criminals and junkies are the envy
of a bevy of affected socialites. That is, their manners
are affected, not their health.
The studies say they’re also obliged to slow down
every Sunday. ‘At the top of their key’ means that
for ‘don’t feel safe’ area you should read
‘black and Latino vision’ area. Your call,
call the Davidians for your weekend closure,
and Monday a lesson on the civic union of Genesis.
Deluge
Upgrading the late edition for all U.S. units.
So why didn’t you move the stock?
That one guy got a new all-nuclear crisis
for the week of the invasion of twenty people —
Congress and the effect of the debates.
Find a buyer who is in the American party.
I mean you’ll visit downtown Los Angeles.
You do not get that on the Internet.
That busy team has no qualms about going on and on,
the later we delivered the women to encourage the men
to get that problem solved — it became a key
that unlocked the pain of the Soviet Union,
and today a new location for the quiz shoot,
a green meadow filled with buttercups.
Democracy
Well, so much for the idea of an open session:
the result won’t be known until tomorrow.
So much for the tools of democracy. Elections
are an assault on the rights of the people.
Talk to the PC makers. We need cheaper
entertainment, not cheaper political displays.
They use our money to promote themselves
so they can take our money again.
To see it all, but to miss that one second
when the gun is fired... there’s an old saying:
How much water is needed to run a horse?
I’d be interested in hearing your reply.
And we put in a call for the committee
to tell us everything they know.
Departure
As a view
of the busy sale
quantity sat on a DVD
and this one
is also your mistake
when you
listen to the ABC
on the pound and the dollar
or the euro
on a fix —
so much for
the public
who know it
in the wallet.
Eighteen Fairies
Eighteen sequential disasters this year,
that’s what happens when you plant the seed
and don’t plan how to reap the crop,
like “I had a coffee (plant growing ) in the shade”
and “I had a coffee ( ... ) in the shade (of the
trees that adorn the front at Nice)”.
He sold some advertising, but his wife sold more
through the gullible mall culture in the sixties.
I am up to date. Does that sound immodest?
We had the dead based eagle product
and a $4.00 increase on the freeway, and
he is on board and on the sea and
people were shown his dissent — its use
was as a false light to all the seeded day.
Flowers
Jim Gott and old money
don’t mix. He sent flowers to the old lady,
but nothing came of it. Then he fought
the Chinese laundry over the disputed crease
in his last clean shirt sent by UPS, the Chinaman
got a court order that he not be so called.
He makes peanuts: his thousand a year is viewed
as a decent living: you figure it out.
Old Gott was taken to court, a kind of
maze synod, that September, ornamental
cherry petals littering the streets.
Thirty-eight years later the change sheet tells us
that he was called The Fiendish. In the distant future,
I shall be as efficient as you.
Genius
Josh Elliott, be innovative, nouveau.
It is more music pass than a treatment,
an ad that makes only a tiny use
of its own matching channel as an altar,
and a decent cost analysis is still needed.
The BBC wanted to see if that moment still has
a null market, or can they kick in into life?
They only sell movies they don’t have the ending for.
For that large a show, get a couple
to fight a ban made up of forcible sodomy law.
‘Separated at birth’ is all the formatting you need.
You know where: what tools to use, you
know what to say: we diva the couple to do a little more
and as for shared data, forget it: see ‘soufflés, social’.
Horticulture
Thomas Cecil, what did you do?
A man can he get what he wants
on the inside — much good did that do me.
Thomas was sued by the city
because he gave a false statement
when he came to the desert resort
which was not open, to peel an idea.
That means they’ll not nominate — that is —
because of the delay they called to say
that the sea — no, the Warsaw pact countries
mainly lack seas, thus navies, whose diet can never
be shown because of the jelly bean component.
If Greece gives someone a permanent visa status
it means that the Jewish faith cannot do for old Thomas.
Lives
Put me on the list of local media maniacs.
I am an old man working on a dBase file,
and I know that all the men in the theater
are there for a reason. I knew a student
with a hearing aid, and then the insane visual
was invented, the Enola come-on. Come on,
I can’t hear you. Take the kids to see the conditions
caused by the Vietnam War, why don’t you?
They’re not humane in Dawson City.
It seems to me that your famous design champion
is up a tree, and what effect does that have
on the practical Mister? Mama must do
what she must, shut down by the videotape marshal
as a mandate for the people of Mormon.
Marinara
Michelle speaks especially to Cleveland:
‘the CIA did sit in, that is, sit
in their offices on this issue also —
they come on down the steps
outside the Capitol, chanting initials:
NATO the FBI most US troops — blah
blah — then it’s denial and denial.’
Marina, this should be a speech from a script
worked up in the story conference room
of your dreaming self: Don’t hide it,
your life will be on film: the entire avalanche, the whole
disaster, the cascades of shit and honey, someday
tilting in the sky over England like a Dornier —
a blast crucial one single family and now gone.
Martian Movie
What to do? Nothing; just wake up to see if the units
prod the day awake, to keep this idea like a jet in a hangar.
You might be the key that all three of us need —
(and Jimmy the Basin) — need to be on call to notify
Kitty and the target — oh the arduous trade —
do the scene — of what, may I ask? —
the scene where some guy keeps keying the Martian
into frame. How? I do not know. I’m a kid and all we know
is the creation of the creature, but you don’t fit the cells
where correlation is the issue, a serious issue.
I’m on proxy, that is, resting, now in the slough
where Marcelino and his pals make themselves scarce,
the navy is in town and that guy called Austin is a pretty
call on the infield. Yet the tomb riddle will be solved.
Metro
Two guys from Detroit pored over the suicide letter
as its auction price rose through the $8.00 range.
A male choir that this year sang in Vietnam
is now a medical team on a training course.
No one wants an incontinent hostage.
Femina’s call for us all to share the pretty things
fell on deaf ears; so much for the taste of justice.
They can’t be bought. An application in the name of Antonov
will not reveal me as a donor or a smaller companion.
We could use a dime when the music imitates a disaster area.
The idea is still to issue a new Long Beach five-point
major disaster this year. At the home they can vote
that the economy is in fact the city of events
and he says ‘no one is a real actor in the film.’
Movements
The Gulf of Aden did enough, but
you know I said to kill one of those bad
men on Friday, bring the body to me later.
To call the team ‘failures’ would make this
a political stumble. If someone on Dataquest is young
and wants to get a CD in a bid to secede why
in the affidavit of being — why did you —
like all the kids in the city why should they —
but I do not cause the economy.
Is that what the song says? If you go from the beach to
the hotel for the Young and the Stupid, you’ll get
the idea that we don’t need more trees, just more
people who sit on the dish, this sounds fine and energetic
so they should be going out on a shaman basic poster.
New Beauty
1
Being viewed as the usual combination
of coward and hero is a debilitating thing;
naturally you would try to deceive them
in the music store, and then you want to sound like
you’re playing with a famous band, playing a song
that is to be a record of the navy’s faults.
You can depend on the City Council to do what is wrong —
the city may be Chantilly, and then again it may not.
So you pour all your resources into the battle
to get to the top of the pops with your angry music,
and force the listeners around the Pacific rim
to vote your way: most are no friends of America.
The airplane to you is that person, a star,
rising high and then falling. That’s the Catch 22.
2
Being viewed as the combination of beauty and ugliness
is a debilitating affliction: with a false face
and a different coat you would try to deceive them
and the more interested they are your role
in the music store, the more they want to sound like
something that’s already popular and thus out of date.
Fashion has to change: that’s its essence. One day
enduring values reign, then around the Pacific rim,
an SQL battle — structured query language
pestering the database for more and better data.
Then again, you may get sacked; then where’s your
cocky prognostication? Knee-deep in bullshit, a failure
recorded over the navy’s default sonar ping on dolls
and the airplane to you is that person, not America.
Ornery
We did want to buy the Kennedy coach.
It was ten a.m. And what you’ll get is the KB,
if you do that: the Kent Brewery, a nice little drop.
The light that began on the other day shone on
the long war unit. That would give me what he feared:
the CIA. One is a dish of blood. The other:
stains on the carpet. Both say
they have won if you recall the palace of sound.
It is off the hook, the phone. Any home
is related to a city, and that city is bait. Now
the agents call — plus 217 men — that is safe to assume —
and claim that the downfall takes place on the phone:
that they didn’t do a song that the Nashville people like
in a field of political and human damage.
Parade
The dollar goes to a city that is his only speaking song
that took place in the open air
and we also collected data based on a list
of all the costs of Saint Keene,
it’s a CD of fall songs, maybe, only
the data is in a format that might give away
the occupation of the person, and
as we got onto the shuttle, a flashlight shone on the ticket.
So the district judge knows that I am still at large.
That was the goal of the donors the courts imprisoned.
They added a goal to motivate the contestants
and that’s among the ideas they need to speed up:
the one who negotiates with NATO will always be
sad: the ideas of all the songs have always been known.
Phrases
Condiments every two weeks and he was sued blind.
No routine completed, no, don’t know a thing:
for DOS, some awful fee data, not that good. At some point
Internet Explorer can ease the internecine issues.
So one night we’re watching the news: he says
the Soviet cages are what saved the civil service,
and ‘What is the issue? Money? The assault rifle?’
This is the basis for the 1982 phone conversation.
So most of Congress said Mandela’s ANC manual
was seditious, but their song was only a minute long.
You don’t need to decode the closure. They should
take down the field quantity of all those cases.
And even if many of them are cool,
their share went undefended to the finish.
Pronto
1
No joy in this one, Bob. Would you like to be
summoned for one little blot on the record,
by a marshal? And create the indictment
today, that will be used for a demo
tomorrow? If you do that, my old friend,
the problem seems to be saying, the data
will go on the skids — it could be a fun contest
held in a field in the Boston area.
Now I don’t want you to get the idea that
finding a guitar has anything to do with it.
Just dish it up like the boss wants: though
if you deal with the CIA — Hi — I’m Bob.
Can’t talk now. Down in the park,
listening to the guitars, lots of single mothers...
2
Do they need to show more, to agree to put
the data mining double digits to use?
They blame a hotel trustee ten to one.
A bang on the gong and he’s off to Brooklyn
with a call for a song set from Tony, sliding to CNN,
sun blinding him, trouble in the upper airway,
cost of sales data ballooning — he cannot operate.
It is the ‘FM in a Domain Name System’ hazard,
a haphazard collapse they can share with the boss
who already believes that we should solve it —
that must be what the publishers want —
two weeks’ extra pay, he would say that to keep me,
but I’m getting used to his lies. Sufficient unto the day
are its many small evils — Betty, comment on that, pronto.
Royalties
We’ll make common cause with the Right,
and take that message to the Ford Foundation
who helped the CIA guy in Paris win a medal
that let him sit in on the cultural deliberations
of all those old freaks. Also note
that the quote of the week missed me altogether,
that is, I missed it — I just stopped by
to look in on the literary debate, cast a vote...
Democracy is what we define it to be.
Sure the Iranians voted in a government,
but those socialist shits were going to nationalise —
their oil, British oil, our oil, what the hell —
so we put in that poet guy to agitate, Bunting.
Sure, people were killed: so what?
Scenes
The subcommittee poses a threat.
When they say ‘the DB city’ they don’t mean
the Deutsche Bahn AG or whatever... here
the board of trade shows what to import, the —
Ronald, get them! Don’t shout! or give orders.
We told the customer what the customer wants.
We’ve only potted palms, and one wolf a year.
Then all the comedians disembark in San Diego.
That’s a company with a real future, though
the double stop is daunting, I agreed with them,
and I should say that the fondled sale failed
on the killed day, a reminder about the order for Tivoli
this week, they even want to set up in the courtroom.
We’ll all need visas, and openness cannot be fear.
Shames
Don’t kid me, I’m not Noah.
The corps existed in the new data —
Esprit de Corps, I mean — I mean giveaway,
no way — people see the wheel
then get a phenomenal fright.
No one thought he did it — she and the Nazi salt,
baking bread in a cosy home in the Midwest.
That was a duplicate of a shopping mall.
Call me ‘wish of the mall’ and no,
I don’t want the Tutsi player.
Make a decision on the whole movie:
good or bad. Mary is no relation.
Kitty cat, you force the Nazi salute.
I need what? A system of stone?
Sorehead
I was arrested because of that internal memo,
and ended up in a cell, then I was told
to sit with the police and the main
state and local bigwigs.
If you need a portal, reduce the safety margin
on the airport risk factor, they said, and I got the blame.
An unaltered, PA six-pack call at 6 cents a day
minus expenses, and see who belongs.
The local cop would not open the tomb of the deported —
sorry, departed — as usual he wanted to tell me a story.
The goal is a pool of all new CC research, he said:
they need a set of three standard deviations.
A TV ad face makes comments, what would they know.
Open the tomb, and let me in.
Story
The Seagate exited at the same time, telling him
to make a profit, but he found only enough
to get by. They’re holding a playboy, he is still on the sofa,
unconscious. Fit the company’s last item
in a dizzying array, then consider the eulogy
you posted on the Internet, you with your bail mind-set,
no one was even in jail at that time, not holding
in the closet the nation, the nation a house.
Today a new philosophy: and they testified
to shut down certain data pathways, not wanting
the bullet, the use of an application, so-called.
The big guy looks just like you, the DNA test
gets the nod. In the scene that you may not know,
the surgeon is on CNN and then it goes dark.
Subcontinent Nocturne
Units of troops learn to fear what the body seeks.
People don’t care what the law allows you to display:
a city full of media, before we’re torn to pieces
in the Class A data stack. And who used to be
happy in a dungeon, pray tell, tied up with the
Swedish maid? Don’t believe all the FAA tells you.
The radio waves to the north of Bombay tell
the young programmers to want to win, to be on a cool team,
to demand a training that gets them into the call centres
full of money. Player after player falls,
a large old domain is sold to the man in a blue suit.
But the town seems a bit tedious on the trip back
from the airport — after California, it’s a dump —
I hear the city’s soulful call — don’t leave me again.
Tenure Track
I have been seeing all the wrong types.
Have cards, will follow suit. You could say.
As we discussed the tenure track topic,
people were listening in, like a radio audience.
Perhaps in the last of days of my life
I’ll get to see some easier money, easier
than this rigmarole, studying myths
in a manner similar to a dental student.
So this is how the department administrators
get to mess up the hiring policy, relying on
false information from the Internet
on a normal working day. They had power,
but it seems they just wanted to seem to be
a grunt soldier on a flight outta here.
Villas
1
In April, the sun was to be the display manager.
What I am will eat it, data about the team.
Maybe it’s just good enough to keep doing that
since the ideas expressed fake up the stock and bond count.
He can want to win a token of the Norwegian fake,
he wants to believe that this can be a diminished fifth
and so what’s the issue — Las Colinas:
is it that the girl’s address?
or should it be that the pocket books, on the night,
open to a page where the Sonics become better known
as teammates on a vital mission to the azure quandary.
I’ve been booked in the media mall citadel —
data flows and then the syndrome.
No, I do not want to address the Iraqis.
2
The video shows that they can all be
what they want to be, until the Cleveland full moon
strikes, and they get a quick one on the side, and
they both wanted an eighteen-city police commissioner
to call us on the new board. The quality is suitable
for that, though I should point out that
a check for Washington today doesn’t mean promotion,
so I don’t suppose the Vatican regards pride
as the product that would determine
the station’s campaign of violence — okay,
call me — it only costs a dime — in time to
shut down the TV show. Go on, say some more.
You post the key to a college guy here, I get off,
the companion you can’t see, who sees everything.
Winter Maps
The cascades cascaded; so far so good.
And certain areas of Europe reminded me
of specific parts of Asia; more or less.
I wrote down the names of these areas,
and the list seemed both necessary and sufficient.
The whole experience was a kind of education.
In the Northern hemisphere, the April dawn
heralded spring, but not where I come from.
Lots of ‘money’ was signed over to me
on the video shoot, just to bamboozle the
nationalized people. It wasn’t counterfeit, but
it had no exchange value, in the crucial new store.
To open an account you had to be up early, and
answer this question: Are you a man or a mug-shot?
At the Movies
Caliban
The hideous
id is
banished
to the caves
deep under the ground
where
the abandoned
machines
hum
all night long.
Jack
will ruin
his
master.
Dark Passage
Poor Vincent Parry: he rolls out of a garbage can
and stumbles through a valley of coincidences,
falling into the lap of a blonde.
Poor Vincent: we are locked inside his head,
seeing everything, feeling nothing but vertigo
as the screen swoops and wobbles with his weaving
and ducking to avoid his fate. He can’t
have a drink, we would get splashed,
he dare not look in a mirror, because
we would be there gawking, dismayed...
Poor Vincent: he gets disfigured by a man with a towel
and a razor, and wakes up tied to the bed.
Madge calls, and whispers, and goes away,
and calls back again, spying, sneaking a drink, and
every fragment of conversation ends with Madge
who, if she can’t have what she wants,
kills it. Vincent gets punched around
and a pal gets it, beaten to death with a trumpet.
Madge, fatal Madge, fallen Madge,
defenestrated Madge on the sidewalk.
Ah, Vincent: he used to look handsome
with a pencil-thin moustache, then he woke up
looking like some movie star. He wants to
call out in his bad dream: Untie me!
Set me free! But he will not be free
until he takes the bus to distant Peru
alongside a boring couple of jerks
who have just stumbled over each other
in a bus station of all places.
Vincent dreams that he sits in a white jacket
sipping a drink by the moonlit beach in Peru,
feeling anxious until the music changes
and a blonde appears: Well, tie me down,
and start me dancing.
North by Northwest
A hero breasts Manhattan traffic, always
ready to stop off at a tourist destination.
A blunder with a telegram and Mother —
a demon never seen, only hinted at
in her distant, comfortable castle —
will lose her little boy, who quickly
plunges into an irritating adventure
in the picaresque mode — leaping
to conclusions as the scenery reels past,
into bed and out again, dodging and weaving
across a landscape more deadly and bucolic
with each passing trick of the light.
Of course it’s post-postmodern to have the hero
an advertising man rather than a policeman-detective
tough-guy action type, and the crop-dusting plane scene
is funny and priceless. Perhaps the Master was trying to
lighten up after Vertigo. There’s no fun there, just
descending levels of madness and sadness.
The blonde, unlike his sainted Mother,
is very good and also devious and wicked,
and so roller coaster morals are the norm
and in fact this unravelling storm of incidents
and grief is the painful future due to us
when we stumble blinking into the light,
for this sequence of parables was built
by its huge crew of many talents to be seen
and heard in the crowded dark, the wicked
are found out and trampled on, another
train, another bed, good night.
Shadow of a Doubt
Handsome Uncle Charlie, burdened by crime.
He laughs and scatters gifts, but he looks
unwell — no, he’s fine — the man playing cards
looks sick — he has a full hand of spades,
but then, he gets to tell the story about
how the ace of spades leads the pack.
Suspicion follows you like a snake in the grass,
so the story is torn up. But destroying the evidence
points to the evidence. Sleeping dogs lie.
Now, should a girl tell on the bad man?
It would kill Mother. But Uncle Charlie
has been killing plenty of those, it seems,
the lazy, greedy widows eating cake
and wasting money — they deserve to die.
Now those two men are here to see you,
again — something about a survey,
counting all the happy American families
and listening closely to their apple-pie opinions
as they look down from a high window through
shade-dappled branches at a pair of neighbours
gossiping in the sun. On the busy street
the old traffic cop can’t help the girl, he’s
avuncular and normal, and he has a job to do.
Now everything falls to pieces
and a killer pleads for his life. Traffic
everywhere, an engine running and leaking gas,
then back on the train again, the train
that takes you out into the horrible world.
The man with all the cards is here, somewhere,
behind the viewfinder, watching everything,
a resident alien with a point of view.
Uncle Charlie has to die, we all knew that,
it just took a while to fall into place
in front of a speeding black locomotive
somewhere out of town, and far away.
Black and White
Everything loose, including the morals:
first one, then the other, a kind of sister:
a headache, a beating, and the bad one sneaks out
and chokes the child. Or is the better self
just a sober lady dying to have some fun?
And look, no coloured folk:
the streets are full of white Americans
strolling around a small town. Or dancing
which is also fun, or drinking alcohol,
that pool of mystery and regret.
She thinks: Put on the red dress.
Take it off. Say hello to the nice Doctor.
He frowns and looks concerned, and quickly
consults with an older, wiser man. Then he
writes it up, but we never see him
writing it up. He doodles with a pen at night.
Somewhere back in the fifties: the sound
of a typewriter clacking and a little bell
punctuating the script, I mean the story,
that is, the case notes. More fun in a truck,
then nostalgia. Soon there are three women
arguing and hating each other, then
one of them starts forgiving one of the others.
First her sorrow and concern
for that other woman, then mine.
Where does she get the energy?
It’s the headaches, stupid. Try divorce,
and become a better human being, as if
that would help. Nothing keeps death at bay.
Somewhere a nicer person is moving
slowly towards me. When it’s time to say goodbye
I’ll die, just like that, for her sake. For my sake.
Say goodbye. Never leave me.
Boy in Mirror
First words: Gimme your hand! Then a fall, a death.
I left town in 1957 and went away, boarding school
gymnasium whirring sixteen millimetre movies:
Escape From Colditz or Stalag Seventeen, blondes
with heaving breasts were verboten for good reason.
So what do boys like about vertigo? It was
a way of experiencing something alien and new:
we had a trick of breathing much too fast for too long
then another boy would squeeze your chest from behind
as you held you breath and almost burst
and a million years later you would come to,
on the floor of a room on another planet
surrounded by strangers while your memories
converged slowly like a crowd at an accident.
Picnic was strong enough, when I was thirteen;
Vertigo would have finished me off.
Now I can face Madeleine in the water in a suit
with stiff blonde hair and stilted accent and demeanour.
The wounded boy in the water quickly becomes a man
dragging her backwards behind him as he swims
to the shore at the foot of a huge bridge —
trying not to bruise Kim Novak’s
wonderful tits.
Wounded three times, each time deeper
but he doesn’t know yet what horrors...
what mistakes, misunderstandings... he’s
juggling with a walking stick, he’s toppling
off a chair.
But he must have seen her stark naked!
Not glimpsed yet: if only he knew: Judy
from Salinas in the mid-West, stormy gateway
to the land of Oz, hiding two secrets,
loose, human,
but also art, and also dragged into a willed shape
by a troubled man
— restored in 1996 —
A footloose male: another in North by Northwest,
a direction no compass has ever known,
despite Hamlet’s ham-fisted play-acting:
‘I am but mad north-north-west — ‘
cut off from their normal jobs and bonding rituals.
Both women are imprisoned by a monster, though
the heroes don’t realise that. First
we have to follow and then rescue the princess,
unmask or defeat the monster, awaken the sleeping beauty
to our desires and needs, but the women are awake
already to their own desires.
Cherchez la femme, then the action
moves to a strangely threatening rural arena
far from the city: dangerous heights and fatal falls;
the (blonde) is unfaithful to the hero, maybe because
captured possessed by another monster and quite soon
the hero is a cuckolder and the woman adulterous and thus
fallen, or falling, or dead and gone. We hear
some moody music — Bernard Herrmann’s
more insistent music: all right,
I’m afraid of the future.
The first incarnation of the goddess is Madeleine,
a name in search of lost time, and quickly dunked, and
hailing from the East she is naturally cold
and remote in a steel-grey suit: now
she drives an English car, a Jaguar with plates that say
MGK 159, obliquely hinting at a stray fact
just out side the camera’s field of view: the owner of the car
once owned an old MG type K sports car,
then got rich
and traded in the clunker for a Jaguar —
but kept the plates — they always want
some memento of their lost youth, and now
an actress plays with his new toy, pretends to drive it, but
we never see her driving, just getting in and out.
Later she can be
more authentic, working in a job,
where she absolutely must clock on until Mister Handsome
becomes pitiful and pleading. She might become
‘Judy’ from some dump in Kansas
and wear sloppy clothes. Anything’s possible.
Speak like a tart, Judy! Good girl! Now she
walks on foot.
Earlier, locked in her metallic suit —
the wounded hero at the start
quickly spiraling into madness —
the mirror shape of the plot and counter plot
in harmonic motion, the circular corsage,
the spirals in the trunk of a dumb tree, then
the camera notices her hair, and the clumsy portrait,
driving in diminishing circles around the sunlit town.
Spiral, circle, spiral, circle...
May I commend the awkward acting? you
were the copy, you were the counterfeit —
those beautiful phony trances — thus
more sincere, or just less competent —
rather that than be like the brittle professional woman
in North by Northwest, or is that just a personal reaction?
And the smooth villain in the suit is named Elster,
German for magpie, a collector of beautiful things, but:
Die Elster stiehlt, so gut sie schwatzt — the magpie
steals as well as it chatters. So the great painter Elstir
haunted Proust — so much success! Yet
troubled by thoughts of his future death —
‘ambitious melancholy clouded his brow’ —
a clever analysis of a fleeting expression, an expression
which may have been, in fact, the painter’s embarrassment
at hearing a gushy and pushy young suck-up artist
praise his ‘fame’.
So, Marjorie Wood says of her brassiere: principle
of the cantilever bridge, an aircraft engineer
down the peninsula designed it, in his spare time.
Between two deaths — Gimme your hand!
and a good policeman falls to his death
in the alley below, then the old college chum Gavin —
Mission number, skid row? No, ‘Color, excitement,
power, freedom’ — San Francisco eighteen forty-eight —
then Ernie’s Restaurant with its red velvet wallpaper
and her green English car — in the Spanish Mission
graveyard calla lilies — mist fogging the lens —
a suicide’s grave in consecrated ground? What
madness is that? Catholic continuity girl, please!
Then at the McKittrick Hotel, an old drudge: ‘I’ve been
right here all the time, putting olive oil on
my rubber plant leaves’, then
a detour to the Argosy Bookshop and
an avuncular European man — if he reads books,
he must have glasses and a funny accent, then
a strange darkness falling too swiftly, following
the script into a kind of nightfall, however wrongly.
The scene in the redwood forest.
Her big white coat, so vulnerable...
Scotty (drinks) Boy, I need this!
There’s a brandy bottle. Next scene:
Scotch and soda.
Fluffy white coat!
Pink soft body underneath!
Scotty: I always thought you were wasting your time
in the underwear department.
Good Barbara: Well, it’s a living.
Kim Novak, left-handed, writing a sad letter:
We had fun... and then you started in on the clothes...
Beside her crummy hotel, the Twelfth Knight bar.
She had to die...
I hear voices...
God have mercy!
Girl in Water
Waiting to meet a pretty girl — any pretty girl —
hot summer day in 1958, beach crowd, emotional algebra,
also list and remember: makeup, perfume, lipstick, talc,
telephone passion — no, a soda fountain, a pizza.
Do they dream of mystery and adventure, women?
or do girls want to drown in literature? No, stupid. I
bet she’d like a fragrant pizza topped with mozzarella,
or is that just me? A movie: Item: Kim Novak. A drive-in —
yes, more subtle and powerful appetites litter the sand.
So become that detective, wounded, pitiful; so
learn to love and learn to fail in love, in the back row at the Bijou,
in parked cars, or snug among sandhills... your spyglass a nib,
keyhole secrets memorised and filed away, until
eternity comes calling at the foot of a staircase.
After that ending, another climb, another cliff
beyond which something awful awaits: love
or falling in love, or into love, or falling into death, a
uniform and dizzying and swift descent
that leaves you breathless, leaves you
very unsteady like a cork in the water,
effervescent and febrile and emotionally labile,
ready for almost anything.
That conscious pilot spoke: quod scripsi
scripsi, I have written what? I have written for
girl in water ‘girl in water’, girl
or woman in waves of water. I,
keen to find behind mirrors, wavering echoes, burn
in plots and complex narratives to draw
many clues out, threads of meaning. A
new insight into the convoluted plot
of good and evil I can look for, where good men whine,
villains struggle to prevail and bluster
against ordinary background noise and hubbub:
kaleidoscopes of criminality and subtle fiscal judo
scam and prosper, and some ordinary guy
will win and lose everything. I
owe more than money. The key will turn:
nervous ex-detectives afraid of causing harm
drop into floods of anxiety, plunge into semi-
enervating doubt; whirlpools of suspicion, and later
refuse help from well-meaning friends or
from glum old girl-friends, dawdling, doodling, who
understand too well their weaknesses, their
lack of manly self-respect, who know how hypnotic
those doubled mysteries within a mystery are. You reach
into a maelstrom of neurosis. Beyond bodily desire,
these complex chess-like fantasies are the true romantic
scenes in your life: the most ludic acrostic paradises: click!
Paris Blues
It’s the early sixties: before heroin,
before herpes and AIDS ruined things,
before the women’s movement.
Jack Kerouac is still alive, though only just,
with eight years left to live. But
let’s leave America behind and take
a cultural detour down to the cellar
where a successful American export,
a jazz band, is winding up for the night.
The hero is a nice guy: short back and sides,
casually dressed in slacks and a neatly pressed
polo shirt. You’d like him. He plays a trombone.
A trombone? But first
we see a city at dawn: a man wearing a beret
idling along the cobbled street on a pushbike
then a girl wearing a scarf and carrying
one of those long loaves of bread
in her basket, bought at a local bakery!
It must be Hollywood: and it is! Though
with a French savoir-faire and a touch of
je ne sais quoi. As we get used to the silky
black and white, and the smooth lighting, we realise
we have been drawn into one of those indoor-
outdoor binary universes: when the action happens
indoors, the lighting is perfect, a studio in Burbank, say,
where even in the phoney park the light is just right.
But in the “real” outdoors it’s windy and overcast
and the lighting is kind of muddy and
the passers-by look suspicious and distracted,
so it must be Paris, or a version of it.
Yes, in a dive in Paris the hep cats are jumping,
jiving like it was the forties, when in fact
rock’n’roll has come and gone, JFK
is President, and the Ford Edsel is old hat.
Then we see the hero’s name: Ram Bowen.
Can they be serious? A name like that,
and Paul Newman with a trombone? Well, this is
a Paris of the mind, where ordinary suffering humanity
get to be pushed around by a bad script, so
anything can happen. The hero’s buddy is a black guy,
but he’s played by Sidney Poitier and wears
a suit and tie and a wristwatch and a short haircut,
so he’s all right — however deeply touched by
the madness of art — that is, jazz entertainment.
Then two women arrive on holiday:
one white, divorced, with two kids back home,
and the other black and single. So we have
four Americans in Paris but with angst
instead of fun: these jazz dudes may be polite
and press their shirts, but poor Ram:
his struggle with the demon of art and all those
late nights make him despondent.
So through the sets of matched doubles
day after day the Jane Austen problem
keeps rearing its ugly head: ladies,
how do you catch your man, when he’s
a wild free spirit who suffers for his art?
Of course there’s a resentful older woman
with a French accent: we see her checking the till
in the cellar at daybreak when the crowds have gone,
and cooking, but she keeps to the shadows,
nursing her hurt beauty behind a veil of makeup.
We get a clue as to why Ram is a musician,
not a writer: Paris is picaresque, he says.
His new girl friend Lillian misses this,
or maybe gets it and neglects to correct him,
shaking her blonde hair, straightening her gloves,
waving her handbag at the expensive scenery,
thinking — perhaps — that picaresque is French
for picturesque, and not wanting to
put the kibosh on a blossoming affair:
the guy’s Paul Newman in mufti, after all.
Meanwhile Sydney Poitier has a tormented talk
with his dusky lady friend Connie: color,
the question of color, that he can avoid in Paris.
Should he go back to New York and face it?
The color problem that brave Americans are
painfully working through, white and black alike,
maybe it’s his duty: she says it’s his duty
until his teeth ache, but then she says
she wants to have dozens of children.
What’s a guy supposed to think?
Ram wakes up late from the hangover of music.
He and Lillian have long talks about how
art eats you up, and we note that Ram
wears his wristwatch to bed, no doubt needing to time
what happens between those pressed white sheets.
As dawn breaks over tourist-flavoured Paris
he yawns and rises, his hair perfectly combed.
How can you tell if a man’s art is authentic?
Why, opines the lady, it’s the way he made me feel.
She speaks to him of Ram Bowen in the third person,
and addresses his dimple, which broods in silence.
Honey, he insists, I live music, morning
noon and night! Meanwhile her outfits
are astonishing: one beautiful coat after another,
scarves, gloves, hats: the product of resourceful
shopping as wide-ranging, committed and passionate
as Ram’s devotion to his trombone.
Yes, Ram is hitched to his mournful trombone
and we have the feeling that one day
he’ll find himself alone with the thing,
an old couple who don’t much like each other.
“We are the night people!” the nicely-dressed
black man exclaims on the tourist boat,
“and it’s a whole different world!” Sidney
is hinting at a kind of underground where
moral values are reversed, where being cool
is better than being prosperous and where art
has usurped Mammon’s place on the altar.
Then he checks his watch and adjusts his tie
and the illusion breaks up into ripples.
He’s a type, not a person, a vacant role
waiting to be imitated and filled in,
a cool black dude with the race problem
and a stern girl friend to worry about.
They play some music as an interlude
from the dialogue, though for Ram
we know that this view is back to front.
Now why is that saxophone playing second fiddle
to a trombone? Have you ever seen a band
with a dominant trombone? Is it because
Paul is more handsome than Sidney?
Taller? More white, let’s say? Then
we are asked to believe that Louis Armstrong,
America’s ambassador of cultural goodwill,
is some great giant of modern jazz, oh please,
gimme a break, he was briefly avant-garde
before the Great Depression, long ago,
and the furious God of Bop has long since
consigned him to the dustbin of history
and the lounge rooms of the middle class.
Now Ram’s pal the coke fiend is snorting heavily —
it’s his way, he says. Well, he’s a French Gypsy,
not a regular guy. Now Ram makes him
see his future in the figure of an old friend
ruined by drugs, busking on the street,
drooling and plunking on a tuneless guitar.
Gypsy, see a doctor, Ram says earnestly,
suddenly the concerned bourgeois. Then
more tourist epiphanies — shopping and kissing —
and as Ram hugs his blonde under an umbrella
an abashed camera coyly looks down
at his slacks and highly-polished casual shoes.
In this cloudy autumn weather they
cast no shadows, like devils, and chez nous
read the Herald Tribune just to keep in touch.
In the corner, a television set. This movie
might well appear there, titled The Tender Trap.
Sidney goes crazy with love and buys
more flowers than he can afford.
Then Ram meets a powerful agent
who knows everything — Ram is good,
but his music is not good enough,
says the wise man. That’s an opinion,
but not a life plan. What to do? Being moody,
that’s not suffering, you have to be a bastard
like Rimbaud. He used to keep lice in his hair
so he could flick them at passing priests, and
for a while there he was a sodomite —
no blondes for him — and when he got moody
he killed a man by throwing a rock at him.
And in the end he tore up his talent
and left all that art shit behind. So, Ram,
marry the blonde or the junk or the trombone,
just quit pissing around, will you?
At last Lillian comes to rest in her hotel room,
exhausted by her efforts to persuade a dumb guy
to marry her, in a wilderness of dishevelled suitcases
and loose shopping. Then he turns up, then
he has an attack of gloom and abandons her.
Oh, Ram! You and the script writer both
seem to have lost your grip at the climax:
a more authentic person has taken over
and inhabited this blonde like a virus and
as the train for Le Havre chugs out of the station
in a cloud of steam I realise that Lillian
is smarter and more fun than Ram, and maybe
she’s better off alone on the boat train heading
back to New York and her two kids, where some other
more interesting movie is about to begin.
Appendix 1:
John Forbes: ‘Serenade’
[»] Contents
From John Forbes: Collected Poems 1970–1998.
Rose Bay (Sydney): Brandl and Schlesinger, no date. Page 136.
Walking home down King St past
the Sunshine discount house
the sky to the west was glowing
like the windows full of Italian furniture
& thanks to its low rent coloratura
or a style suggesting its own collapse
for a moment I felt le sang des poètes
—Tonight Show version—
coursing through me, natively brilliant
& removed completely from that inertia
you cancel your career with
& make this gaudy stuff
revert to just the junk it is
as the negro beauty holding the globe
gets switched off
by Dis reclaiming her / & this evening
like the rest, becomes a blank myth
you ask a question of
& then stay up all night avoiding the answer
with your deft imitation of electricity
& speed, convincing you like a parade.
Endnotes
[Loxodrome] also called Rhumb Line, or Spherical Helix, curve cutting the meridians of a sphere at a constant nonright angle. Thus, it may be seen as the path of a ship sailing always oblique to the meridian and directed always to the same point of the compass. Pedro Nunes, who first conceived the curve (1550), mistakenly believed it to be the shortest path joining two points on a sphere. Any ship following such a course would, because of convergence of meridians on the poles, travel around the Earth on a spiral that approaches one of the poles as a limit. On a Mercator projection such a line (rhumb line) would be straight. Rhumb lines are used to simplify small-scale charting. Encyclopaedia Britannica 2004.
[1] ‘the sky to the west was glowing / like the windows full of Italian furniture / & thanks to its low rent coloratura / or a style suggesting its own collapse / for a moment I felt le sang des poètes ’, John Forbes, ‘Serenade’. See Appendix 1: Serenade
[2] Sir Francis Bacon: ‘...in March 1626, driving one day near Highgate (a district to the north of London) and deciding on impulse to discover whether snow would delay the process of putrefaction, he stopped his carriage, purchased a hen, and stuffed it with snow. He was seized with a sudden chill, which brought on bronchitis, and he died at the Earl of Arundel’s house nearby on April 9, 1626.’ ―Encyclopedia Britannica 2004 Deluxe Edition CD.
[3] Among various and sometimes dubious explanations of jazz musician Charlie Parker’s nickname ‘Yardbird’ is the following: ‘Parker’s famous nickname, “Yardbird”, came from an incident when the band’s bus ran over a chicken. The bus driver stopped and Parker retrieved the bird and later had it cooked by his landlady.’ <http://charlie-parker0.tripod.com/id12.html>. Another version from an interview with Charlie Parker’s widow reads: ‘Interviewer: How did he get his nickname? Chan Parker: Oh, that’s such a... you know, it’s such an old story about Bird’s nickname. Jay McShann said they ran over some chickens and they’re called yard-birds, and Bird said, “Stop the car. Pick it up and we’ll take it and have the woman cook it for us.” Bird told me, Bird told me, I got it from the mouth of the bird, that his cousin couldn’t say “Charlie,” so he used to call him “Yarley.” So it went from Yarley to Yard to Bird, who knows? I don’t know.’ Interview with Chan Parker, Charlie Parker’s widow, in France, May 1998. From the film Jazz, by Ken Burns. At: <http://www.pbs.org/jazz/about/pdfs/Parker.pdf>
Rimbaud looking into the future.
Graphic by John Tranter.
[The Anaglyph] An anaglyph is a red-green pattern providing a stereoscopic image. The graphic to the right shows a pair of glasses used to view anaglyphs. The first and the last word or two in each line of this poem are the same as the first and the last word or two from the corresponding line of John Ashbery’s poem “Clepsydra”. A general critical or creative piece of writing was commissioned by The Modern Review (USA) for a special feature on “Clepsydra” in 2007; the choice of this form was the author’s .
[Desmond’s Coupé] is a deliberate and partly homophonic mistranslation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem ‘Un coup de dés...’
[Five Quartets] is made up of T.S.Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ with most of the words removed.
[Moretti’s Map of Paris] is derived from a presentation I attended in Cambridge UK, in which Mr Franco Moretti displayed maps he had constructed of the literary environs of Paris in the nineteenth century. They are published in his book Atlas of the European novel 1800–1900, by Franco Moretti, Verso, London & New York, 1998, pages 100-102, of which the author says: “Specific stories are the product of specific spaces, I have often repeated; and now, the corollary of that thesis: without a certain kind of space, a certain kind of story is simply impossible. Without the Latin Quarter, I mean, and its tension with the rest of Paris, we wouldn’t have the wonder of the French Bildungsroman, nor that image of youth – hungry, dreamy, ambitious – that has been its greatest invention. Think of the rival traditions, in Germany, Britain, Russia: all great literatures, without question; but they all lack a symbolic equivalent of the rive gauche – and so, they fall short of the intensity of Paris. Think of Pip’s London, or David Copperfield’s, or Pendennis’: all of them caught in the gray universe of Inns of Court, so that the city can never become an object of desire. He who does not know the left bank of the Seine between the rue Saint-Jacques and the rue des Saints-Pères doesn’t know life, says Balzac in Old Goriot, and he is right. How much did British culture lose, by not having a Latin Quarter?” — from http://www.xs4all.nl/~ariealt/moretti_gb.html
[Discovery Kids] This poem is derived from John Tranter’s poem ‘3-D’, published in Selected Poems, 1982.
[Electrical Disturbance: A dramatic interlude] is based on parts of a radio program in which John Ashbery read some of his poems and spoke with John Tranter. The program was produced by John Tranter and broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Radio Helicon’ program in 1988. Nearly two decades later, an audio recording of the radio program was audited and translated by Microsoft Word’s speech-to-text function (as best it could, given that it had been trained to recognise an Australian, not an American, accent) and extensively rewritten by John Tranter in 2005 and 2006. The speaking parts ‘A’ and ‘B’ do not have a one-to-one connection with the original vocal texts; the speech divisions occur more or less at random. More or less. The title comes from an early line of Mr Ashbery’s: ‘My child, I love any vast electrical disturbance.’ (from ‘A Boy’, Some Trees, 1956)
[Hôtel de Ville] Derived from Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘Ville’ (Oliver Bernard, Arthur Rimbaud: Collected Poems. London: Penguin Books, 1997. 256). The phrase ‘I have wasted my life’ is Rimbaud’s, from his poem ‘Chanson de la plus haute tour’ (Bernard, 215), which begins: ‘Oisive jeunesse / A tout asservie, / Par délicatesse / J’ai perdu ma vie.’ (Idle youth, enslaved to everything, by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.)
[Anguish] Derivation unknown.
[Antics] Derivation unknown.
[Barbarians] Derivation unknown.
[Bottom of the Harbour] Derivation unknown.
[Childhood] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Enfance’ (Bernard, 235).
[Dawn] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Aube’ (Bernard, 268).
[Deluge] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Après le Déluge’ (Bernard, 233). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Democracy] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Démocratie’, (Bernard, 287).
[Departure] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Départ’ (Bernard, 247). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Eighteen Fairies] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Fairy’ (Bernard, 288).
[Flowers] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Fleurs’ (Bernard, 269).
[Genius] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Génie’ (Bernard, 289).
[Horticulture] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘H’ (Bernard, 284). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Lives] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Vies’ (Bernard, 245). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Marinara] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Marine’ (Bernard, 271). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Martian Movie] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Chanson de la plus haute tour’ (Bernard, 215).
[Metro] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Métropolitain’ (Bernard, 274). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Movements] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Mouvement’ (Bernard, 281). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[New Beauty] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Being Beautous’ (Bernard, 244).
[Ornery] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Ornières’ (Bernard, 258).
[Parade] Derivation unknown, possibly ‘Parade’ (Bernard, 242). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Phrases] Derivation unknown, possibly ‘Parade’ (Bernard, 242). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Pronto] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Promontoire’ (Bernard, 277). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Royalties] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Royauté’ (Bernard, 248). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Scenes] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Scènes’ (Bernard, 278). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Shames] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Honte’ (Bernard, 229). ‘Honte’ is the last poem of the series ‘Fêtes de la Patience’ (‘Festivals of Endurance’) and does not belong to the ‘Illuminations’. Published in Urban Myths, 2006
[Sorehead] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Matinée d’ivresse’ (Bernard, 249). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Story] Derivation unknown, possibly ‘Conte’ (Bernard, 240). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Subcontinent Nocturne] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Nocturne vulgaire’ (Bernard, 270). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Tenure Track] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Guerre’ (Bernard, 289).
[Villas] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Villes’ (Bernard, 259). Published in Urban Myths, 2006.
[Winter Maps] Derived from Rimbaud’s ‘Fête d’Hiver’ (Bernard, 272).
[Caliban] Forbidden Planet, color, science fiction, 1956. This note also appears in the Exegesis: A rocket ship arrives at the planet Altair 4 to find out what happened to the Bellerophon Expedition, sent out some twenty years earlier. They contact a survivor, Doctor Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), who warns them to leave, but will not say why. Morbius explains that not long after the Bellerophon Expedition’s arrival, some unknown force wiped out nearly everyone in his party. Only he, his wife (who later died of natural causes), and his infant daughter (now a beautiful young woman) survived. Morbius explains: ‘In times long past, this planet was the home of a mighty, noble race of beings who called themselves the Krell. Ethically and technologically they were a million years ahead of humankind, for in unlocking the meaning of nature they had conquered even their baser selves, and when in the course of eons they had abolished sickness and insanity, crime and all injustice, they turned, still in high benevolence, upwards towards space. Then, having reached the heights, this all-but-divine race disappeared in a single night, and nothing was preserved above ground.’ We find out eventually that Morbius’s unconscious mind, fuelled by the gigantic energy sources of the Krell, has destroyed the Bellerephon’s crew and is trying to destroy the recent visitors as well: its incarnation, a powerful invisible monster, roams the planet by night. At the climax Morbius realises what he has done: ‘My evil self is at the door, and I have no power to stop it.’ The theme and setting of the movie is loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the dramatic structure is loosely Freudian, echoing the interest in psychoanalysis in the US in the decade of the 1950s. The ship’s doctor says ‘Monsters. Monsters from the id,’ and he’s not far wrong. On the literary front, the identification of Morbeius with Prospero, his lovely daughter with Miranda, and his monster with Caliban is an obvious link.
[Dark Passage], 1947. This note also appears in the Exegesis: Based on Delmer Daves’s 1947 b&w movie Dark Passage. Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) was wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and sent to San Quentin prison for life. He escapes by hiding in a garbage can which is taken out of the prison on the back of a truck. But he has little chance of getting away until a stranger named Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall) helps him evade the police. Irene is a wealthy San Francisco painter who hides Vincent in her home. While he is alone in the house, a woman whose voice Vincent recognizes comes to the door looking for Irene — Madge (Agnes Moorehead), a spiteful woman who gave false testimony at Vincent’s trial. Vincent realizes he is too recognisable, and a friendly cab-driver takes him to a plastic surgeon. In a technique reminscent of another 1947 b&w movie, the much less interesting Lady in the Lake, the first half of this movie is shot from the hero’s point of view; we first see his face after the surgery, when the bandages come off. Guess who he looks like? Dark Passage was based on the novel The Dark Road by David Goodis, and the narrative is marred by implausible coincidences.
[North by Northwest], 1959. This note also appears in the Exegesis: In Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) mild-mannered Madison Avenue advertising executive Roger Thornhill (played by Cary Grant) is mistaken for a government agent by a gang of spies led by the urbane James Mason. Thornhill becomes entangled in a series of dangerous adventures and is pursued in a north-westerly direction across the United States by both the spies and the government while becoming further entangled in the arms of a beautiful blonde (played by Eva Marie Saint) whose loyalties are ambiguous. Highlights are a crop-dusting plane that hunts down and tries to kill Grant in a mid-west cornfield, and the final chase across the gigantic faces carved into Mount Rushmore.
[Shadow of a Doubt], 1943. This note also appears in the Exegesis: Alfred Hitchcock often listed his b&w movie Shadow of a Doubt (made in 1943; the year in which ‘Ern Malley’ died and John Tranter was born) as his favorite among the 53 films he directed in his 50-year career. In the film, Uncle Charley (Joseph Cotten) comes to visit his sister’s family in the archetypical American small town of Santa Rosa, California. Uncle Charley is especially drawn to his niece Charlie (Teresa Wright), who is named after him and who idolizes him. The plot turns sinister as a pair of detectives show up tailing Uncle Charley, whom they suspect of being the ‘Merry Widow Murderer’. Charlie, just in her late teens, is faced with a terrible disillusionment and the threat of murder.
[Black and White] The Three Faces of Eve, 1957. This note also appears in the Exegesis: the poem is loosely based on the 1957 b&w US movie The Three Faces of Eve, about a young woman with multiple personality disorder. The script by Hervey M Cleckley is based on a book by Corbett Thigpen which is based on a doctor’s notes about an actual case, though the facts have been distorted to fit the story, according to the book I’m Eve, by the real person who is the subject of the film, Chris Costner Sizemore (co-written with Elen Sain Pitillo).
[Boy in Mirror] Vertigo, 1958. This note also appears in the Exegesis: ‘Boy in Mirror’ and ‘Girl in Water’ are two different takes on the 1958 Hitchcock color movie Vertigo, starring Kim Novak and James Stewart. Scottie (James Stewart) is a San Francisco detective who retires after a traumatic experience with heights that has caused him to suffer from acrophobia (fear of heights). (Agoraphobia is fear of crowded spaces away from the sufferer’s safety zone.) His college friend Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) persuades him to follow Elster’s suicidal wife, Madeline (Kim Novak). Gavin says that his wife is possessed by the spirit of his wife’s great grandmother. Scottie is taken by her beauty, and tails her around San Francisco. The two fall in love. But when Scottie is unable to save Madeline from killing herself — or so he believes — because of his fear of heights, he has a nervous breakdown. After he recovers he comes across a woman named Judy (Kim Novak), who bears a strong resemblance to Madeline. Obsessed by his love and loss, he begs Judy to change her looks and clothes to look like Madeline. He then discovers that Judy (from Kansas) in fact acted the part of Madeline as part of a plot by Gavin Elstir to kill his real wife. Judy accidentally falls to her death. Scottie is left alone again. The similarity of a mirror image to a portrait painting plays a vital role in the film, and betrays Judy’s secret double life; indeed the plot of the film is doubled.
[Girl in Water] Vertigo, 1958. See note above. Alert readers will note that the words made up by the first letter of each line of this poem spell out a message, as does (separately) the last letter of each line. The initial acrostic grew out of a conversation with Douglas Messerli about Hitchcock’s movies; Messerli said in an interview with Charles Bernstein: ‘Why, when I was 12 years old did I so thoroughly enjoy Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for example, and yet at 13, hate North by Northwest — a movie I now love?’ (‘Making Things Difficult’: Douglas Messerli in conversation with Charles Bernstein, September 7 to 12, 2004, in Jacket magazine 28 at <http://jacketmagazine.com/28/bern-iv-mess.html> To me it seemed obvious why a 12-year-old boy would surrender to the charms of Ms Novak in Vertigo, thus the acrostic; though as it happened my analysis was inaccurate in Douglas Messerli’s case. The telestich (the last letter of each line) implies a Lacanian reading of the many mirrors and portraits in the movie and how they reflect the boy-girl relationship.
[Paris Blues] Paris Blues, black and white, 1961, directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman as Ram Bowen and Sidney Poitier as Eddie Cook, with Newman’s wife Joanne Woodward as tourist Lillian Corning and Diahann Carroll as her friend Connie Lampson. Louis Armstrong’s ample ambassadorial grin has a small part.
http://johntranter.com/dca/dca-poems.html