The Blue Tower (3 page)

Where did all those fishponds go, they were flooded
for power plants and wigwams and ducks that swam around
the People's Park, all those clerics dining at

 

liberal tables (they got everything back,
doppio
),
and I've gone nowhere, slid no place, just that
lime that brought it up. Gundula stayed on the

 

surface, scarves flapped while we, whoosh, whoosh,
played on the frozen Rinza. That pheasant on Sovre's
table wasn't shot in winter. Never.

Plunge into the Drava, braggart. Your dainty gooselike fingers
will describe the arcs of living bodies falling from the bridge.
He crunches on the gravel. He swims and swims, can't swim across.
His shorts were torn off by a branch, he's bashful and won't get out here,
drowns. He swims and swims, can't swim across. Three paces
south with a pistol to his head. There is no decent water.
Heat eats his fiancée's breastbone. Greasy paper is left,
sausages, train cars. What sort of veil has been drawn across
you? What did Irina's two hundred dogs do in
Odessa? Where do you have your little fingers, on the buds or on the
canon? All it takes is for the strut to get worn and the
sail will burst. Death seems. It sags, hides
its spraying equipment, and beckons. Here I am,
great golden hen. I'm yours, great golden hen.

Janjica, Janjica, how do I get close to you?
How do I hear your bent paw? Tomatito plays
Spain. Pupae crawl onto people.
The angle is photographed from branches. Anne is coming
by train. Shall we go? Shall we go? Are the roads
crossed out? From the brooder to quiet workshops
where the clocks creak. Will the cypress fade? The coupon is
servus.
Will the stone drink strychnine for people?
Why aren't you shaken? I lie in the bathtub
until after sunset one hundred stars
light up in the sky. Droplets of sweat that
drip down my arms in the sauna. Nothing. Slowly.
With a drawing. As many droplets as I
can endure, that's how many mankind will endure.

I palaksh around like a little Gypsy. I scrub three ribs
and get stuck. You'll scrub quite a few ribs
yet, just relax, with switches. With your eyes, with a fly, with leaves.
My complexion hums. A linden leaps into a new moon. It lifts up pamphlets.
The hollow ball of the earth falls to pieces. Whatever you water isn't drunk.
A panel board dewy head, leather head. Billions of pieces of
birds cast a spell. Will the shah absorb grain? Will
Robert Minhinnick ever publish Poetry of Wales?
Chamois will overgrow the transversal and freeze like a statue.
No one will be able to get past its fur.
Eyes come falling from the joints like some tiny
grape turds. Will lime ever comfort the
bristling wood? Brown, yellow, shoes with rubber. And at
the end, a haystack, a waterstack, Pont Mirabeau.

In San Pietro di Cascia.
To look at Masaccio.

 

In the butter of a huge linen hall
a hen kindles
Andersen's red shoe.

 

It thinks of brooding.
Be on my commanding hill and shut down my knitteries.
Let them keep watch. Let the tulip give meat.

 

Where did that sultan live, who lived near
the upper part of the red tulip's frayed
flag?

 

Bless you, cube.
If a unicorn stopped to the right,
the car couldn't get around it.

Il gnoco.
The upper dishwashing shift. Laure is sad
from the fluff. Juan moves around like a shadow.
Rocks dust Lipica. We fall with Ludwig's head.
Dry land. Sarah. I wake up in my T-shirt. They lifted
me up on a pulley, in silk. Do you sway when you slam
into the cliff walls? What does that do to your
bone prints? They put ointment on the little skins. Stored,
bound, cropped them.
Chiama mi.
I'll ride forth at
the fox hunt, from under the hide. Here's the spot where
Browning signed. I'm fond of Procacci. Pathway, pathway,
Bello
Sguardo. Ho mangiato il farro. Mi ha piaciuto
molto.
You, made of fresh moving body parts, the sun's
shining again. We folded up the buttonhole.
We gave, and gave, and gave, and gave, not there, and gave.

When I jumped on the sieve, the sieve
got sick. The word departed from the flesh and
became the fruit of Nicodemus. No one is free
of gentle bonds, buttons and ribbons
excepted. We dug them in pearlike flutters.
From there a short jump to a branch. Johnny Weissmuller,
such a well-stitched tarp, where do you see these now? We turned
gristle into myriads. Into mush. Into pharaohs.
Into Isfahan, where the square had no water. Into: let the
moon bang its knees or bang the stairs.
Do you hear how it's emptied enormous fields with chisels
and introduced acqua alta? Beatrice, Pascali,
Nono, speakers, wrapped in green and yellow, the
throat of the ship owner, where have I been that we've never met?

Leopard, droplet, leopard, why do you roll around
a lathe? Shiraz was the name of Pepi's cat. A violet
hoop, jostling in the whiteness if the sun drips,

 

thank you, if the rain drips, if it shines. Are killed
animals softer than unkilled ones? Covered with dirt,
what can you see? Lockets and octaves. An evergreen

 

spruce. A deep well and a shallow one, see how they
kiss. In-lining fox furs. Birds and flesh,
pierced with a wooden tip. You lick your lips

 

and ride on a lateral lift called an
iron horse. You put his hand in front of the lamp
to make figures. Bodies have feelers.

 

The roads are laid on a ventricle: mulatiera,
in the mountains, with windows, with steamships, Lilliput
is on water, tickles the earth's crust, protects it from

 

earthquakes. The steamships can vanish and continue
their way through the brambles. The fur
is bemittened. In oatmeal today, tomorrow in

 

an abyss. Now the squirrel already has teeth and a
compote of roof, bottom and sky. Horizontal
is for running and gathering. Horizontal

 

is for hoarding together food like
blankets heaped one on the other, to capture the
warmth. Camões sailed away by boat.

What sort of icons? What sort of Rigas? What sort
of stelae? What sort of sheaf of trees? When does the oral cavity
consider where north is? When does it return
mittens? What comes between evaporation and
overheating? And what can we divide with a
tractor? The shooting of an arrow to its target? Can we
restore the gentleman who's sixty
feet tall, displaying his bones at
O'Hare? We travelers provided the slabs of flesh.
Memory is made of reeds. Handbags never
rot. Lakes leaning on your chest. Otters
like statues stowed before birth. Fine. Heels
in the sand, but I see. It started with Popeye and a
furious Olive Oyl. Persepolis was already washed by Disney.

How the birdsong volleys!
I walk on a stroller.

 

“Selfish little beast, writing your own
stuff, who do you think you are?”

 

Calma, calma,
non sono un cinghiale,
don't shoot me.

The rudder is hungry.
A showcase fills up clocks.
A boy limps.
He's going home.

 

The wave waits.
Skin dresses
Billions of cross-joints, jackets,
ink pencils strewn like Russian fairy tales.

 

Brebis. My baby breviary.
Atalante's stroller of tinsel.
What are you up to like a wreck? The point is in the mineral.
This ant had a wrinkle on its wing.
I shut off the gas. The tree is in Brazil.

 

On a handsome yellow board that strokes the wing of a bird
up on a branch from below.
It makes an ellipse and bends left and right.
It forms a triangle.

 

Cut the boletus right under the hood.
Stay faithful to mites.
Mangle your hands.
Die them in a stork, so that
the golden gray gushes.

A ball a seascape, no man's Bogliasco,
il gruppetto.
Lika cooks. Diran eats chickens on his own. Ahhh, floating
again, and I could care less whether there's algae below,

 

I spit in
l'abîme,
I spit in
the abyss.
I've gnawed through
the Question of Technology. It could have helped dead brother, since
they were friends, I dropped him at that point, stopped using

 

him at all, the one who threatened all Kakania from his Nazi
lectern, except you couldn't say that then,
I barely escaped from that snare, but

 

I do admire my dead brother, what would have saved him from
the Seine? Meat? Diran doesn't join in any meatless
meals, he can't stand salads. He touches himself. Not like in

 

Fellini, where the fat priest asks from the
confessional,
ti tocchi? ti tocchi ragazzo? ti
tocchi?
Diran circles around the table, scratching

 

his balls, but that entertains us, Alice is spoiled.
Tulips flutter in Dorset and in Turkey.
Anna is drawn to the plant. The botanical gardens have

 

all been closed in Italy, because art has devoured
nature. Taken all its money and not left a cent for
heating. It's been two months since Lika was last paid

 

and I've knocked over my modem. We're all paralyzed.
For three days Stefano has been calling for help, which
never comes. Albertina's in Milan. She's so pretty, and that's why

 

I jumped to kiss her as she left and got
tangled in the cords. Marco says he's calling us from
Riyadh, that he can't stand those Arabs. We know he's calling

 

from Milan and that he'd like to buy Beatrice's house
on Rhodes. Terry discovered black and white and red bugs
in the bathtub. Diran is afraid of snakes. His father beat him to a pulp

 

if he discovered him in London when he should have been in school
at Oxford. Diran is the biggest star on my horizon,
since Péru left and didn't ask me out to watch the stars.

I flower into shoulders.
Toss the snowball of a horse into the windberries.
Mildew. Chrysalis. A leg mouse scratches the slats.
Disappears and steps onto the deck of a typical boat.
Undoes the slats. Undoes the straps. Sunbathes its leg.
Watches the water splash and sunbathes.

 

Like a worm that gives its body away before it arrives—
where will he give it, at what points slice it up—
like a worm that gnaws, soaks up and hears cymbals.
Is that what a tail's for?
Do dolphins come and lead?
Do they bring wetness?
Which finally, flatly, bent over at ninety degrees,
waves in the snow before it departs.

Soup, Rabelais.
Soup in your mouth.
A turtle in the soup in your mouth, Rabelais.

 

Come running, thief, come running, thief.
Dismantle the wall of sulfur barrels.
Dove in the vapor of my lungs,

 

lie down, close your eyes.
Get up.
Lie down and close your eyes.

When the candelabrum started to lose its light,
they seized the chickens, everyone shook at the
thought of the coming winter. This winter is a snare.

 

This winter is a farcical knot. This winter sees a
threat in a wise guy. The next one will be
Galician. The bugs of next winter are already

 

staring, and if the curls get spoiled, then
Ropret will be out of his meals. It's a danger.
Honey is a joint over Jacob. He limps.

 

Professional soldiers get attacked by vermin
regardless of how many crumbs. To asphyxion.
To asphyxiation. Even she cheated her,

 

Anne-Marie Albiach. What is a pure
source and how does it smell. What did the flag say
when the head looked through it. Selim unrolls

 

a carpet for us to see. A mink. You walk on
black diamonds that attach
onto sleeves, that attach onto cuff links.

 

Fog is the hands of trees. It bends down and
opens the water. The thick hoarfrost hurts. A train
dunks it when it goes beneath the water.

 

An ibis extends its legs into a bonfire.
Do the kernels between the rings, in the places where
flesh is, flutter, hide, set up a

 

tent above them? I am conducted into an
arch. All of me is conducted. This is Uccello,
these are horses, these are horses' asses, banging