poetry

Whose translucence do you seek?

Another’s silhouette you’d shape

into a star blossom you’d mimic

if only you could imagine yourself

differently. Not some lowly Sol

on the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram,

but a full-blown yellow Hyper-Giant

like Rho Cassiopeiae or its blue cousin

Zeta Scorpii, which is so luminous

you’d fry in a second if you’d even

speak its secret name. Your own name

is encrypted, given that your birth

was sacrosanct and cradled into

swaddling. Your mother lifted you up

to see the lights in the sky, fluttered

you down to see the dirt of our ground.

You saw the grounding, and arose from

the blisters and pustules to invigorate

the fully-boned anatomic form you heft

now and walk with through the passages.

This cannot go on long, and so you shelter

in the mountains, imagining creations

of ice and rock you’ll form into hard art,

and periodically pelletize into some

little glint of insight from oppressive

boulders lying on your shoulders.

You’d willingly miss all the sightings,

mistake the music, if only your own light

didn’t break your back or shatter others.

Occasionally I speak of the forgotten self
of dreams, whose selves are darker and lighter,
a fighter who secretly breaks miniature machines,
cast at times as a man observing in a mirror
the contours of a different hair style,
one that curls and flops in the wind,
impossibly black, blacker than it’s ever been,
who when he speaks, speaks seriously of non-consequence,
the considered joy of flapping hair
as he prepares to walk from dream to world,
fumbling at the intricate puzzles his fingers have built
prior to awakening, their breaking.

Once upon a green planet, full of hope and roses red rising up the sides of houses freshly painted white, the sky overhead pure childhood blue, I awoke to reason and have been since alternately gray and black, a mottled man given up to extravagant swings between  the tepid tinges measuring only an inch or two in wavelength, the land of stultified colores, an essentially boolean boy reminiscing on the analog, the good old statistical continuousness painted in pointillistic dabs of bright infinitesimal, yearning for great swaths of infantile passion and truth, but substituting instead blue dreams of hot sex (unaxiomatizable but here and now, from time to time and space to space). 

A boily boy.  Mr. Pimply Little.  An acned iridescent redly boy.  A nib upon yr nose  will do ye boy.  A dilly lad of a willy boy.  Lead me into the gorse boy. A little dab will do ye, boy of a goily boy will dib him boy.  Goy boy.  Boy boy.

Hot gobbed and gargling with a full tongue, years past mama-gobbling but drowning yet in the spit of child speech, I ape well the best adult imitation, nibbling just a little at the nipples, producing drivel or dribble as I see fit: a spurting creamy white blank verse.  All nomenclature and conjugal forms: names of men and women, surnames, ma’am names, outlandish by-names, performing, dropping from exhaustion, firming up again, slavishly manipulating, triggering nuptial or coital feats one upon the others, these are depicted here and now, in living skinly manly colors, nude pink, red like the head of the dick of a dog, blue, bright blue, brown blue, blown blue, titillating incantations of the act in modern rendered Latin, however idiotic, otiose or odious, ballooning out good reader sensibilities beyond already swollen ballocks or ovaries, hard seed-producing factories hidden beneath the flesh in guts.  Jack Sprat will eat no lack, and Jill will still fill her mouth full of expectations, rotating orbs or globes, I forget which, hopeful for another revolution, this time one to end all, be all, whole planets full of creatures thinking that they are no doubt the chosen ones.  God save us masticated morsels who have been chewed to death by them.  

Boily boys will gleam and beam occasionally with full toothsome grins; other times, they surge up through serge into dark shadows of tornadoes, whirling around them a world of straw and houses and ripped red animal parts (with the bleating moo still in them).   No forecaster knows which weather rules in the long run, becoming climate.  No friend or brother, sister, mother, father, son, daughter, lover knows.  No child, man, or woman.  No beast knows the weather.

Before my sight: bloodened, blood red labiae of torsos posed in sitting chairs, wide-open orchids inviting within them the cool air of the stirring breeze and the flies which tumble through the window.  Broken-necked demoiselles or madeleines set to represent the fate of womankind, mannequins with distorted parts, bright contortions, forced irruptions into birth or abortion of many-folded babies or green fetuses, the gangly limbs akimbo with either lifelessness or the living force of zero as in turgidly heliotropic chlorophyll, the pink/blue skyward thrust up of green oblivion, the dark down-falling of the rain of gray incidental murder.  Magdalenes and maidenhoods, and not a man among them: misery, mystery, hysterectomy, history and her story, everywhere a nursery, and nowhere near a nunnery, to someone or another she, she says, why can’t they just let us be a she?  I mean, a me?

Give me a tongue that I may speak in a language of my own devise, thick with coronals if I so choose and none of that suppurating, piddly lip service, full of spit and little else, protestations plentifully sprayed but lacking sense and passion, no bright thick red semantics but instead delayed onsets and rhymes, the stuff of shallow men, the fluff of puffed up buffoons going on and on about the inherent science of the situation when a green and purple sunset rages in the sky above them and golden yellow corn with fluttering brown tassels sway about their shoulders, tiny red windborne mites pricking dots upon their skins: not knowing what to say, confusing words for wisdom, choosing skeletons for scarecrows, rotting fronds for ebullient or bursting trees, and death to life, hidden maudlin masturbation to a fleshy lingering full-fingered well-greased but somehow still bloody fuck.

But at core, no doubt (you see through me) I too am hollow.  I am colorless. Washed out into a background blur of clouds or mountains.  Cézanne put me into a watercolor of a waterfall where no one can tell where the water is. Gauguin gauged that passionfruit set against the rouge implicit in a Frenchman’s eye would blind the ages, the old sexually fantasizing with the young, snow on moss, bathing all in a warm Laurentian light, denying me my intrinsic camouflage, irreducible angstroms of flittering frequency, white like the unprismaticized rainbow, the undispersed, the fist of God held tightly to Himself and unreleased to fling Thor’s lightening bolts to earth.

One thinks of Wagner.  Or rather, the flaccid players who back up the choir with willowy pipes and taut string instruments, anguishing over increments and driving massive sopranos up and down and up and up and up, driving up:

Coloratura.  And finally, the bright setting sail into the dying crimson sun, dedicated jibmen hoisting not a few grogs sunward and then moonwards, kicking up a fuss, back-hammering each other about such good luck, not at all averse to skimming the tepid tea like flotsam on the water to remove the mealworms that dropped from beards still encrusted with the pre-celebratory, nightly bread and gruel, a sole loud outlandish fool yammering somewhere about the breakwater in the distance, the ripping lagoon, the shallow weedy sheath like a shroud of flat paddies lying in the light of the dying sun to take them down and then cover them up.

Those who survive live forever on an island until they die.  Inventing things to while away the nondying time, committing to memory words such as these:

This sentence is all that I have learned:
take the damn planet and see that it’s burned.
If I should die before I wake, pray make sure I’m baked.

Inventing classics, posturing for a future full of babbling nabobs and mages who not only have power but power’s power, the best meta-level equivalent of opportunity and place of dissertation that money or time can buy (off chance with an on-campus honcho theorist belt-buckling the women one two three).  Gulliver martini-ed on Fridays is brought to mind.

Lies, as always.  And so the ocean hurls another charge of waves at me on shore, here lounging in my shredded underwear, seeking to generate blind belief from out of twirling simple alcohol molecules I have coaxed from trees and I in turn damn the universe for an equally simple lack of dark brown smoke which even now I can feel my lungs pull down through dry brown lips.

Now bleak black of starlitless night crowds an empty horizon.  Nearly silent monsters rattle dead leaves in a cold wind and one knows tiny insect teeth wait underfoot for a misstep, a false start, an inadvertent ligament to sink themselves into, thorax-deep, or having caught upon some reaching root, you go down nosefirst and break through deepsoil into the universe of gnawers just the other side of God’s lawn.  Hence many of us choose the darkness we see displayed invisibly about or hear its susurrating shadow insinuate snake meaning on the window shade, and purchase exorbitant red robes edged in gold with dayglo yellow crescents and purple twirling Saturns on a pulsating background of white stars, and profess to serve the devil.  Seeking sex and power.  Limitless days and lives.  Step into pentagrams where a third universe of significance takes on new light.  Assume new names and visages.  Speak in tongues Baal and the Holy Ghost know nothing of.  Shine like nothing living has ever shone before, obliterating rainbows with white white white.  Die in splendid fire, a selflit mass transubstantiating on a dark All Hallow’s Eve, only forlorn November awaiting those who awake the next morning, pale and trembling, fingers, worms, hands held out to embrace the wan cold sun as it inches up over the far wavering horizon, lost souls all.

Quantum chromodynamics qua Joyce gives us a name we can hang all this energy on, a rational fractalizing spectrum spanning white to black, filled with a bazillion spinning buzzing things, enjoyed by good thick blooded Americans and bad thin neurasthenic pasty dudes alike: red, white, and blue quarks, tri-colored fermions caught in the Copenhagen interpretation up to Bohm (belittled beyond the grave for his unfinished last book, which fizzled at death and would no doubt produce only reduced ha-ha-s now, among the tittering physicists who lack his vision but are all we got left, vacationing this year far south of CERN, in a muddle of a hut on the Mediterranean, trisecting neutrinos for lunch in an olive branching thicket).  All art nouveau arabesque, isn’t it? Scientists putting a spin on particles virtually half the time not even there, or here, flipping in and out of this well-ordered universe like clowns tumbling before an audience who already know about the well-trumpeted up-and-coming African elephant show.  Just where the hell is Hannibal?

And so, agricola, a field theory.  Line them up, I’ll drink them down, but not before toasting to the older ones who farmed this kind of line out for what it formerly was worth: one sole pent-up Vincenté or Arturó who played Italian or Spanish vistas out in fresco via camera obscura for a multi-colored pizza or its equivalent, downing rosé, on the piazza or plaza surrounded by friends in the fading light, remembering what wasn’t learned last night at midnight and what remains daily invisible in the shimmering heat, a solaris reductive, reduced to the knowledge that there is never enough light to see by.

Obrst, Leo. 1997. De Colores. Nimrod, From Time to Time: V. 40, No. 2, pp. 113-116. Finalist for the 1996 Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry.

The Empty Room at Hilbert’s Hotel

Leo Obrst

July 8, 2022

 

I’d like to book a room there on Juneteenth, late.
I know it’s only January, but I believe I’ll be there.
Why do I believe I’ll be there? Do you seek proof?
I’ll put dollars up as collateral. Charge these now.
If you fear you won’t have room, dispel the error.
You’ll find you will have rooms enough for all me
Who set up reservations between now and then,
No matter how many our me will fit into a room.
I might have identical twins, cousins showing up.
Charge an infinite sum, if in doubt. Credit’s good.
If all me can’t fit into a room, book each a room.
There should be rooms to spare, dollars aplenty.
If I lack trust, accept this affidavit from G. Cantor.
If any room is empty at the end, accept this $null.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_paradox_of_the_Grand_Hotel

Sing and you will be sung to. A song will ring for you.
The answering choir will disentangle your having sung.

My song has been wrong all along, so if you sing
your song, expect to be eventually contested.

The sensical tune in the wind is a panoply of ruins
sped from disparate voices of funneling river, bricks.

If the song is not a gentle lapping along of the river,
but the Nile, a turgid expletive of water, thick cursing,

then we are dead, drowned in the turmoil of voice,
random, noise abrading away any of our harmonies.

Can we issue a low last lilt, a remembrance of word,
then wail, a rose suddenly shivering in a floating basket?

 

.

Clown Noon

I will be dead soon,
perhaps by noon,
another harlequin
to dance black
this afternoon.

Note my angles,
like bird wings
embroidered
mischievously,
a rack on ruin.

Recall my spread
wide of wings,
when I led
you to the center
of things.

You were so de-
mented by vis-
ions, you needed
guidance I couldn’t
provide by noon.

It’s no matter
now, when the clown
who came to town
this tattered
so soon shatters.

I always had
extra room
in the afternoon.

 

August 28 2019

Gray sky lies low on my new flat land.
Dark birds jostle others in the scratch
arbor out the window I view the scarp from.
It rises to surround the horizon of the world.
Some toil, a little pain, pangs of anguish
as new weather washes my tongue.

My friend’s memory is better than mine.
He remembers the time now long gone.
He remembers the perforation, paper,
chads that littered the floor, the lasered
pages I printed past years of the tales I wrote.
He remembers stories not true we told

each other, back when we were younger,
when we intended to be much more
than we ended up being: clear knights
who went into battle with avarice,
lust, engaged with blood, sorrow,
lived to renounce yesterday, tomorrow.