The story begins like this. No. It does not. There is no story. Or, they shoveled a load of speed and shuddered toward the coast. Saltpans. Sparse groupings of pine. Dust. A bar at the side of the road. A woman beneath a tattered palm of tarpaulin, cigarette and sunburnt fingers. Vegetables, assorted fruit in plastic buckets. Flies.
He sat with the body for almost ten hours, watching the face almost imperceptibly flush back out. Day just breaking. Birds. The faint moan of trains. A small stain of wax on the wall.
So, this is death, he thought.
Late light in a just-turned summer streamed through the high canopy, just off the beach. The way the rocks went into the water. The way you could just fall off the side of the world.
You are not free.
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In the morning the gold crumpled mylar sea horizonless
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Digging in the red-dry dirt, fingers dry, air dry. Looking out at the other side
of waves. Ruins of indeterminate origin. A face there, one face of many, what of it and why. Cicadas at night, their whirl and wind. Smoke on the edge. Maybe brush fires.
A sudden light: a man, a pen-blue tattoo nailed to shoulder. He’d come up the beach alone, dangling low-volume static. Skin leathered from long exposure, a smell of sun, dried sweat, tobacco. They were back off the road, he said. But not in the pines.
Tuna straight from the tin, a bead of oil on a fingertip, almost cut on the lid, a roll of bread, Harissa. A can of beer. Two. No cars. No people. This is how the waiting begins, he thought.
No wind.
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Motes trapped like time trapped like motes in the late orange light the season swaying bending moving toward an end with the past’s pall and pull though night not yet and every mark its antecedent –
lower your voice for the dead
lower your voice by day
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And then one day awoke. The streets long. In that time when cities had already become like malls. Or simply were. The edge of fall. Below a building a small heap of clothes, wet with night. Beside them, brushed bronze and blaze, a square stone. They asked, So what did you do with your freedom? A kind of blackout, he said, I did what one does. I anesthetized it. That’s: me. Tubes along the roads like cannulae and a bridge named after a painter. Railways in morning’s ruddy light.
Where once coin-driven cabins more new hotels. Walls of liquid crystal now, the modern city’s symbol still a wall, rooms constellated like stars across time and space, caesarean-scarred, ageless, in the end the money’s still the same.
(And then one day awoke, looking toward the door.)
The cold silence of the stations like the ultimate one to come. Out at the city’s edges, night already close to frosting. The woods there, hiding, the rails, shivering. Granulated air. Brick. Cold water ripple, barbed-wire hand.
A wonder we’re even here at all.
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In certain parts of the city, when the sky begins to dusk, the crows turn the air
into a latticework of wings and call five years, he hears, five years . . .
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Here is a list of colors for no one in particular.
A list of days dissolving.
Skiagraphs.
Variations on a theme.
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What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?
Over one thousand views of the moon. Obsession. A wall-and-mirror silhouette.
A desk. A backpack. A rug.
As if you might sneak out the window of your life, was it? Or call back up?
And again under evening’s skinned-knee sky, flakes of light falling through all the in-betweens. The blue-hued whorls of the heart. Quiet again, the late day’s light mostly unseen from where he sits, brick once again halved into bright and dark, far sky paling out. Too many. And no talismans left. Auguries gone. But bells again. And blue. Another day fading. Where did they all go so soon? Inner courtyard blank. Windows blank. A light goes on in the stairwell but no one moves. A collection of postcards on a windowsill. Here is a border. Beyond this point. Countries disappearing. Exile’s bottle of despair. Blake’s death mask by Bacon. Dutch still-life. A room of wax. A river. Expulsion. A collection of snapshots to the side.
Coming back across a border the inner border what is an inner border he had no idea and from where it was he came little either now.
The jacket your father gave you no longer fits.
Around the corner there, the lights would of course be on, as would the gloom, the dark neon of neverending night.
A distant story, but recurrent. It would be one of escape.
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And names in dust on windowframes
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But I remember.
The scent of sun and ash, a taste of resin, blame. Summers across slanting floors and smiles like sickles for thoughts of flight. Abandoned streets and a feeling of sinking. Makeshift holes not far from the sea; closer in, the cicadas’ hum the whirl straight up to twilight’s hem, brittle wings which brought no breeze while all the rest were busy drinking, swallowing up the searing-eyed, searing-tongued prophets and seers and jaundicing into the years’ yellow silence. The tonal monotony of the land.
Days passing, just out of the reach of the sun. Days passing, in a basement room, watching the arc of the sun through a small square of sky. Tides of no turning. Blocks of light mosaic and slow days taste like mineral, copper, rust.
How much of the other side is one allowed to see? Shadow. Half shadow. Night barely impastoed before the distant blue of the country’s spine once again appeared. Mallow, poppy, thistle. Streets like veins tracing a story through the heart, the city a map of a narrative. What hands, what fingers worked the threads, and who gave voice to whom.
In the silence the quicksilvered side of a leaf though he, for his part, sent his head to hibernate in some distant port. With all his dreams how many dreams where do dreams go in the land of the dead.
Somewhere just behind the scorched thread of air, did he hear, what was it, the faint twinkling of shepherd’s bells? Not amnesia but a late-night aphasia and what ghost came to knock just around four. What lights were lit when the darkness came, there to lick at the panes. And must word from beyond always arrive in flame?
On pale wings they rise, but I remember, he began, I remember the way the streets they shone, I remember the way the afternoons would glow. The most beautiful place I’ve ever seen (but don’t remember because or despite the debris). Standing again, and all the rest, he said. If afraid.
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Remember: though splinter you can sing through cinder.
Sing sunlight. Sing sky. Remember:
the key will come from the mouth
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A pale evening as thin as cigarette paper over a back courtyard. Stairwell
of stilltime where a note on the ground said
How can the door to hell look so much like home
Drugs the same, as was the drift, the drink, the darkrooms, all the undefined millennial unease and isolation
White buildings, grey buildings; trails
spinning out into the peripheries
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More former worker’s flats. The perpetual cool and damp like nights like stone like shadows, cramped, but in the kitchen a small square of light. Potted herbs lined up on the sill. A young woman cooking with garlic and oil. Ashtray, a cheap bottle of wine. On the wall, just above the table, a hand-written sign: something about a locomotive, history.
Beneath it the crude sketch of a wheel.
Fire.
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& yet still stuck : masturbating to old lives, old thoughts, old
all –
but with what hope it always begins &
with what brutality always ends
You : utopia
utopia utopia utopia utopia
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( “riz…semoule…” )
starling-sleeved they came, gliding
across the cold concrete of the new (the now
in a spent yellow wake of sodium
this long slow path to anywhere else
Another imploded factory
Another rusted pedestrian bridge
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Bodies thin as shadows, a pale scorpion inked on the arm, miniature
zodiac at the bottom of a book’s page. Hard
light
gravel
sand
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And then one day awoke. In sunshine, or in grey, toward the interior, or by the sea. Something, somewhere, had been pulverized. The wake long. And in it a whining sound. Then bells. The quick click of a Zippo. Fever. Lights flickering, sparking in dark streets of noon. Harried, hurrying over stone, navigating a hallucinatory post-modernist Baroque.
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Behind the bar in an abandoned mining town a man pointed to a row of teeth
in a glass beneath the backlit bottles. My collateral, he said, and laughed.
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Isolated detail an impossible question.
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Refilling a green glass bottle, from the tap, afternoons melting into evenings, day after day, the shuffle between kitchen and corner, filling a green glass bottle, from the tap, day after day, it was what he had, that
& the sharp orange scent of citrus on his fingertips
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Corrugated tin.
Quick lime.
Sparse groupings of different pine.
Sand.
Thalassa.
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A story of cities. Of rooms. Of architecture and its opposite. Of twilight. Of being devoured. Of devouring. The figure stopped to look west, beyond the last buildings, the thinned-out treeline, avenue dwindling, pavement brittle, sky brittle, and further on into the backward: Amber. Apricot. Bone. Clay. Coral. Fire. Umber. Flame. Then the darker scene. Out on the plain, the indifferent clouds right before the cheek’s dull shatter muffled as the blow – –
Later, blackdraped groups winding their way through a sooted and muddy wail
of land.
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We wear the season’s wind, black
Flight now land to land, winged hands read what’s gone
from the Book of Light
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Presence:
Revive this dead mouth of
Desire. Silence
The gnawing drone home home home
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Read an excerpt of Alexander Booth’s translation of the late Austrian poet Friederike Mayröcker’s “The Communicating Vessels.”
Read additional poems by Alexander Booth in Berfrois.
