Canto 1
Once a warrior of the word, now I heckle the darlings with cause
As Igrope my way down memory lane
On my hands and knees, camouflaged.
Assassins, those other dears,
No less addicted to comfort than I,
Have ways and means, and from one assignment to the next, they fly
With their customized valises. Government
work. Corporate entities—
I did prefer dining out. I still rummage out there, roaming through
Ghostly shops of ghostly books –
Still looking for Ennius to no avail.
Why, you’d think he’d have a place between
The romances and the local horrors.
You’d think he’d have a goodly spot
Between the DVDs and histories of art—
I should’ve known it then:
The showier people aren’t always the best.
And all the clichés we would escape
Catch us up later with a vengeance—
But yes, the odd hostess of the odd triclinium
Would stomach my verse and gall my spleen –
Good times, those.
For, long ago, at the seashore villa
Where Gibbs and I bonded on the belvedere,
She in her long gown and wide floppy hat,
I in my ball cap and smoking jacket,
I was considered somewhat promising.
Canto 2
Foreign agent? I was a stay-at-homer,
Misanthrope’s misanthrope, a local somebody
At the kitchen table, my sleeves rolled
up,
Dealing myself hands of solitaire,
Hearing out the traffic reports,
Dealing myself hands of solitaire,—
The Diamond Queen an oracle
(The Jack of Hearts in cahoots),—
And I was in love with Louise who loved Puccini.
Loved Jane the cashier who loved long-haired pooches,
The girls good for any barricade.
Dealt myself solitaire, Jack Daniels a pal.
And the mornings of a west coast burg
That followed the evenings in a socialist hall
With rubbies and junkies and comrades of chagrin
Who were redundant and they knew it, knew the writing on the wall,
How beliefs die, how old evils give way
to fresh kills—
Canto 3
I’ve been supine - been exudatious
With my humours on this old lectus, getting old.
Aginthorpe subsists on pistachios
And imbibes memory in modest digs
Where he hears Pindaric echoes.
The Venetian blinds, being drawn, are magnets for so many episodes of
dust,
The memorabilia on the walls so much dust.
That one, for instance? Her bosom had been
Aromatic, richly pungent nosegay of
Gardenia-scented isotopes—
Even so, I keep what faith I can. I have tropes at hand
(As well as deep background truths)
For Aphrodite, Psyche, Bacchus, for long
lost youth.
Even so, I, John Thomas Aginthorpe, my name-parts
Reflective of antecedents, catch-as-catch-can patriarchs
But not dissemblers of the hour guaranteeing dishonour,
Am caught up by spent but unrepentant days
Of presidents, economies, any number of
travails.
I, John Thomas Aginthorpe
Am in unholy league with poets dear
To my cratered heart, Romans who nodded off to the empire’s
Plodding pace. Now and then the dreams
of napping emperors were
Nothing more than wresting worth
From imperial end of times—
Canto 4
And the first of them to mean it? Make way, you,
For Gaius Caesar Julius Augustus,
He by far the most consummate of the swains
Who tumbled down the chilly centuries.
See how disciplined he is,
God-to-be with party card? See how he quarantines
his sentiment,
How he soldiers his prick as he sweeps the board clean
Of rival claimants – after Phillippi? See how death –
Endless black night – comes to you by way of that
Centurion’s spine-hugging sword,
you a threat?
Ah then, you can’t
see it. Well, no sweat.
Just that
you’ll not die in a republic—
Oh, as I pick my brain, as I look for the means
By which to recollect how I was meant to live
According to the dictates of faith and reason and
Sport and art,—
As I keep myself company with artifacts –
Antique Parker pen, antique plumage stuffed
In a vase lapis blue, and here’s
my tattered Tacitus,—
As I recall Nixon’s grand paranoia
And Jimmy Carter’s smile, the ‘Hi ya’
That was lost on Iran and the GOP,
You might laugh, and you may as well guffaw,
But I fear the departmental voice that
leers the joke’s on you.
Oh, as I lie here not infirm and consult myself,
Abusing the honoured dead in dishonoured earth,
It strikes me that Abe had better luck
With his humble origins, with his four-scoring
Than Claudius the Gimp had with wedded
life.
And it strikes me that Honest Abe Lincoln found
A richer trove of love of union on
The moon’s dark side where all the
strings get pulled
(Or else that dark side is a situation room
Where one gets it on with some sweet street urchin
Playing all ends against the sun in its
foundering course).
Canto 5
So you’re one of those
Who believes the hype your life’s a junket,
Your ticket punched, your bags X-rayed,
From Here to Eternity stitched
on your brow,
Life a PX. You believe the guff your broker peddles
That you’ll hit the ground running - that you'll make your
reality as you go,
As you coast your way along the imperial blue,
As you come down on a speck of earth,
Your wants giving the natives stuff to
do—
I go to meet with the enemy of my enemy,
Bent on recon, butt-ending contrarians
In conflict even here.
Yes, let’s hear it for the poet who's got flair
For raining on a parade while shilling
for his—
He’ll be shovelling the driveway or walking the dog,
This man who might’ve written Berlin Alexanderplatz
And wrote Tartuffes in a minor vein, the enemy of my enemy
Being my enemy—
But can he save us, he sitting pretty
On top of life's brevity, on top of life's art,
Genial man of letters with pedigree?
Just that, as I sit in a barber’s chair
And recall Norma - how she and I would drink sherry and eat
Chocolate-dipped orange peels and almonds and else,
This barberess of heaving bosom and face
Having at my silver hair, I tender this
much:
Who isn't an idle pamphleteer? Who doesn't concoct
A sulferous brew of politics, that sex police,
That verse constabulary, those gendarmes on the look out
For every gross dissidence a dear can think
up
So much more
paranoid than one's own paranoia—
And would
unread bards jump bail?
You bet they
would.
To sum up, I’ve been inert a while, lying low,
Low magnetic readings parlaying sparks
Into high obscurities of verse.
Or shall we speak of auras on me while I swoon,
All the while remembering kisses, smiles and moods,
My marching orders near to hand, burned through my heart,
The Great Dismissal, we all of us muddled in
Each our antiphon?
Canto 6
I regret nothing – I rue it all –
The affections sworn by, divorces sworn
to.
The vegetative gods, those Tammuzes and such
That Priscilla swore were the end-all and be-all,
The reason for the coursing of our
blood?
One dreaded the Easter time of year.
Sing it out: how Aginthorpe loved at the start,
And in the middle and in the end, whereas she,
She only loved me a bit in the betweens,
The beginning too fraught with beginningness,
The end too hard on a dear one’s raw nerves,
The middle – good God, what was all that middle? –
The dear boy that I was a passing fancy
In the airy, leafy grottos of her mind,
Nixon in those heady days despising the Jew
Who made him a candidate for legacy.
Canto 7
Of liberals headed for a fall,
There was this loon at whom the gods spoke,
At whom something hissed, at any rate, she
Getting her coded signals
By way of adverts – for example, that winking neon W
In Vancouver – it haemorrhaged dossiers, perhaps,
As a Chaldaean cosmos was her handler
While a Newt was the House Speaker,—
And besides humouring me, she had ample congress
With African drummers of impressive pects,
With bearded folk artists and freckled women
Who cherooted and sangria’d, troupers,
Aides-de-camp to drunken sot-gods and pushers,
Her accent a bloody Brit's, her sex a bitter
honey
Made from
dark bees and darker blooms—
Just that in her the passing of time, high-end sacred time
Was like the hum one hears when taut wire is
Pinged, flicked by fingernails, and it sounds
Like a cicadas’ choir in holy Argos,
Her watery eyes lucid, but intelligent
With what? That the bubble would burst,
money men
Misstep, and druids like her cool their heels
And tell an electorate I told you so.
Canto 8
I was modest in my outrageous greed
For truth, for transcendence, for any spare
meaning.
I’d lean against some fireplace,
My ingenium as personable as yours,
A grand fire hot-footing it on the logs.
And I got my traction in a time of cults,
All the while keeping a straight face, all the while
Surveying the wear and tear of my cuffs,
Never mind the abyss in my shoe’s bottom,
Reciting verse to my best bosom pals,
To skeptics too lazy to steal my style,
Harrington’s dimples dimpling back at me,
Just as they are doing now in that photo on
The wall.
You see,
incidental to the means,
Hardly
the end-all and be-all of the ends,
The poem
writes me who was a fool
For having believed that people mostly mean well.
One dreaded the Easter time of year,
The awful contemplation of
Chocolate bars and trumpet blasts,
Agrigento, hill town of countless epochs,
And I was semi-archaeological, Orpheus
swinging by
To bugger Priscilla in the shower,
Her Cupid’s bow mouth rebuking
The suburbs that would’ve killed her,
Roses in the bell towers, and in one’s attendant dreams
The almond blossoms and poem fragments—
Canto 9
Now Mark Antony, charming bully, was menace,
Drank deep, as deeply as the fishes drink,—
F—ked with verve, abandon, and drank some more,—
Hated the pompous, be they Romans or dolts
From Biarritz, hated M Tullius Cicero.
And Georgia Borgia – so I used to call the wench,
We both as drunk as skunks on the ballroom floor –
She had no committed grit, none at all
(Even as she in her red high heels would frisk up
A neo-liberal righteous tone of empery)
That’d keep faith with Jackie and
Jack.
Clinton was cute when she thought on it,
The meaning of is his is-ness, his business,
As was the exploratory cigar, just that through it all –
The is and the cigar – winds of change blew
And the financiers got brazen, and, old dog,
Diplomacy fetched a new dog’s tricks.
I miss the
kisses, the sweet lovemaking
Though
I’m sure she misses me not a whit,
Few years
left in the time left for living,
The psyche full up, grief and all that s—t.
But what with all these bright lights, can we hear it now
For Railroad Al who, old and frail, groused about things,
Like snow, for instance, some eighty years worth of neige
Be it powder, be it wet, be it packed, azure?
Sure, let’s fete old Al with special mention.
Canto 10
And Railroad Al, average when you get down to it,
Grieved the loss of innocence in Farnham, Quebec.
Apples were pleasures. There was the steamy sugar shack.
Popped his Don Cherry, Montreal, on a Saturday night,
The hockey masterly, sin, and the sky
Was the limit if you knew the places to
go.
But when Al still sentient, ceased grousing
About Mulroney and Pierre Trudeau,—
When Al ceased grieving, ceased praising
The simple plaisirs, he had his ticket punched
Around Somerled and Hingston somewhere.
Amiable fellow. Nothing untoward.
Canto 11
She was a love-thief, too, this other one who
Knew her deep past, adored Sertorius (he a hardhead, Roman, in
fact),
And comprehended that it’s all a bluff –
The present life, career, seductions and
marriage,—
And we had a night or two there on the train
To a Sicily of another year
In which to cuddle and pretend.
Almond
blossoms on the air.
Heat rising
from the gravel-bed.
Everyone
homesick, smoking Marlboros bought in Budapest—
Yes, on this old lectus I am, for the most part,
An hiatus, a live wire sparking non-sequiturs
as I finger my tie.
And what’s painted on my tie is unprepossessing,
Is not the stuff of the famed, fabulous shield
The lame god fashioned for Achilles
What with
its capital E Earth, the heavens, the sea,
The
sun and moon, the starry shapes of men and women,—
Brides in
procession, lyres and flutes making music,—
Assemblies
of men, claims, counter-claims and back again,—
Armies, goddesses,—farm
and labourer – idyllic life,—
The
kingly estate, the feast, the vineyard of golden grapes,
More music,
more dancing,—cattle and dogs and lions, too,—
Sheep
pasture with sheeps,—acrobats and then
Capital O Ocean,—something like that—
No, what’s here on my tie is less than epic treatment
Of Tropicana palms, martinis, girls of
upswept hair.
Just that last but not least, this canto winding down,
In the lee of the deficit lies the surveillance state,
The operative word extrajudicial, remember that,
And that J Edgar Hoover was no Maecenas, nor was Goering,
Nor any number of fools who come to mind,
That, in some power brings out the kinks,
mightily—
But when it comes to life’s little flashbacks –
Necking with girls in thick tweed and thick socks –
What I most recall might surprise you: childhood’s red woolly mittens
Beaded with clusters of melting snow—
Canto 12
Lilli-Anne on her sofa, with her ear-to-ear smile
Was cheerfully negatory, one for all time.
Rebuffing me, she only received
The ardor of Latin revolutionaries in a state of duress,
Her hazel-green eyes set wide apart, cheekbones
sculpted.
But her gibes, her sallies, her zealous jests,
Even her off-colour humour went radar dark
After one of her loves was tortured and lost,
Tossed from a military plane in the sky.
It was
A wan social democratic smile she wore after that,
Took the self-doubting, Old Maid’s route
To life’s meaning, librarian who
could’ve told a putz
That Marduk the god or Bel or Zeus Belus
Would come to the chamber high in the palace
For fructifying coitus on a gold couch
Between augustness and a girl hand-picked.
Pimping or piety? Or did the one activity enfold the other
And make sacred business, the tolling, the telling of the hour
For Jack K and Marilyn M, and all those randy who were resolved
To take their chances in the martini luminescence
By the swimming pool?
Love, you
see, is not only blind,
It
sees far and it sees deep,
And what it sees it blesses.
Love, you
see, understands
So
much more than it can say,
And when love ends it crushes.
And I drove
an old coupé with a tin-can feel
And she was gardenia-rich behind the ears
While Lully and Corelli vied in music,
While Buster Keaton aped an ape,
While dying for art could save a day—
“You must take the A train
To go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem -“
you weirdo on goofballs—
Or else
there was no trickle-down to the masses
From
every Versailles and so, who cares?
Memphis crumbling
into bits of sand—
So too, Ptah, god and genius engineer—
Canto 13
Now are you with me still, I all lorgnette and knickerbockers,
The Ring and the Book breaking news,
On my mind, as it were – the opening sequence
Such bravura:
Do you see this square old yellow thing
I toss in the air and catch again,
Its soul measurable,
Its courtroom dramatics a palpable tension?
But our crime writers, getting down to cases, will declare
It’s the innocent who are a trial, toil
and bother.
It’s the guilty who are so much cheaper
to defend.
There it is – what’s happening to things,—
And we exist at the pleasure of the financiers,—
We exist at the pleasure of their secretaries
And we exist at the pleasure of their wives,—
Though I drink my tea and thrum my guitar
And receive kisses due me on the cheek
As if I were a potentate of love,—
Though I tickle the muse and stick out my tongue
When it snows, the stars in their numbers newly increased
Three-fold,—
Though I read books and ogle girls
And know of persons dying in lonely rooms, some of whom
Have brave and hopeful love-curls,—
And now that I’ve committed rhyme against a phantom government
I ought to build cases as when there’s madness
Political and otherwise,—
The singsong, loopy aspect of rhyme, rhyme which I used not to countenance,—
Rhyme for all manner of persons.
I am rich in all manner of persons,
In you and you and you, in that Anacreon who
Drifted from island to island in a straw hat,
Went polis to polis, lyrics in him
Glittering in the diamond sun—
Canto 14
Now a portrait of
John Quincy Adams used to give me pause,
I a fifth-grader, intern, insider, he being hickory and rectitude, me
The sort of love-child who never much trusted
Massachuesetts, Puritans—
Oh wait a
minute – who wants poseuring
As
when she poseured with some other twit
And left
me to rue my chauvinist guilt
Which is the fortress that that dear one built.
O that I drank fine whisky there,
Almond blossoms on the air,
Orpheus orphically swinging by
On the eve of the Resurrection—
Canto 15
Here's other action: Montreal café, and two old Ninotchkas
Park themselves
On all the saint’s days, fur-capped, long-fingered, bejewelled honeys,
Fading, venemous flowers, dear girls of
rosewater eyes.
And who knows what histories they’ve seen and which abetted?
Who can say what they’ve starved and stymied,
The inside of a stone, it’s said, as restless
As the stewings of the heart?
Or that there is in my head too much idiot speech
As was put to me by too many critics, how
best read John Donne.
Poor Donne. Poetry undone by exegesis—
Or blame the lonely chatter in the echoing phone
Such as stems from one’s mum of eighty some years
Who speaks of politics amongst her decrepit peers
Such as carves the nation into edible bits,—
And she remembers her childhood Nazis with
A memory of sunbursts and icicles,
Her Brandenburg winters.
“What will happen to our children? What must they see
Before understanding fails comprehension of event?”
Asked Lydia of Seattle in a bar of piss-soaked sawdust,
She who preferred sailors to poets in
Her adulterous bed.
Canto 16
Things can happen, things like this: John Buchanan misplaying his hand,
Sparking horrors, a most uncivil mess—
Things happened to Oedipus,
As did to some hoser on Death Row,
And you wait and see, you’ll wander about blind – you’ll
put out your eyes –
Anxious child at your fingertips, each
bloom you smell
A dig at you, a reproach to you, a hiss
From every weedy ditch and frog hollow
From Sept-Îles to Mansonville, nature’s world
Turned inside out, your demise a sop to the agency of
Redemption, no matter that you abided a
while
In a fine, stone house, heard out coyotes in the night,
Sipped ice wine, supped poutine, licked gravy,
Heard out Herr Bach, f—ked yourself senseless in heavy weather,
And put your classic car in a time capsule
All the while you cursed the diocese.
Canto 17
This couch, this time machine, this garden of humours
Slung between hope and roiling darkness,
As when, in the end, a thief is moral
Compared to the law-abiding minion
Who tortures for reasons of state—
This couch may be a last refuge, the way things have tilted
At a phantasm that, like you, boasts alternate endings,
At the windmill always luring us on.
Covington? She had no right to go and shear
Off her hair like that, no right to spoil
the effect of her loveliness—
“Hello?
Can’t hear you. Yes, this is John Thomas.
No, you can’t
come up. Why? What? Still can’t hear you.
Because I
know you – you want me blotto,
The better so as to get your way, you fiendish amorist.”
Ex nihilo then, a sex dream early
In the hour before first light and the crows
Start yapping,—but so much of life, like fame, is mistaken,
The psyche a hedge against emptiness.
So it is - the psyche a hedge against emptiness,
Though it be no more than a mirage that afflicts us,
As a spigot with valves is what determines us, seeding us with chemicals,—
And she was a darling and I sighed, being
a darling, too.
Nothing for it but to assuage, assuage,
Though she must inspect her mirage in a sheet of glass,
Only that, enroute, so much will intervene:
Dying birds, dying bees, credit scams and
Leverage, more leverage, and failing that, try again,
Civil strife starting small, thinking large
and ambitious-like,—
And I shrug at a ghost – Virgil? – that in any case slinks
off
In horror of homo novus, his way of saying
Pravum est cor omnium his civilization,
The barbarian musings mine—
To be sure, The Second Inaugural was, at the outset,
Touched by a sunburst that poked through the March cloud,
That gladdened the heart of Abraham Lincoln,
Thousands of on-lookers in elemental mud,
Pennsylvania Avenue after the rains,
With malice toward none, with charity for all –
Considerate words hitching a ride on
The back of a disunion’s war-weariness,
But even so, even so—
That the doom-shout wears thin quite quickly, you know,
Dies on the breeze that it generated, catcalls, jeers and hisses
The irked, the piqued chorus now, the disgruntled
That makes of a democracy its unholy messes
As once induced warm, big-hearted sentiments
In the tears of cold-eyed politicos.
Then I, gravitating, came to a place, and now Canada
Of a parliamentary kind, and mackinawed authors
And mescalin, and hamburger-in-a-nest
Which is what the Aristocratic served, Vancouver, vinegar-sodden
fries,
The landlord’s shortwave, Radio Moscow.
For all that, the point of it all was MaryJane,
Those sardonic socks she wore above her knees,
And she smoked her Craven A’s, made ribald
Fun of Diefenbaker.
Canto 18
Now psychopannychia is – yes, so I thought it was –
It’s the soul asleep, adrift between death and rebirth
As spotted in the neighbourhood, the woman often seen: old, jilted bride
Thick-lipped, lame of foot on wintry Sherbrooke,
Who, her life lived, has yet to get over the hurt,
What with her cheap paperbacks, grim tea
cozies,—
She stands in for all lovers who are given joy
Of promise, are disabused, and this used to be
Political. Psychopannychia is that
For which Calvin had no use, none earthly, none heavenly,
But appeals to me as something very much familiar,
Something in the eyes, in a disembodied smile
Such as one raises on a bare-branched mapled
street,
That hardly ever emanates from the bibliothèque
As these are people in the main who have places to go
And people to see, laptops stuffed with subtext,
And they have drifted far, very far from
this now ancient episode:
Robert Kennedy shot, pumped with lead,
Justice and hope triply jilted, never mind
That for years he was a despised bastard,
No impartiality of the angel in him,
But all the rigour of a devil.
Canto 19
You may think I haven’t had the time,
On account of the darlings and the books,
For the ceremonies of silence, and yet,
There was always God’s enwrapping breeze,
Some soughing wind denuded of deity,—
And there were old movies in dark, isolate rooms that came alive,
Women in whose eyes one went silent,
Laughter in which one was hideously alone.
That bird on the fence was always all plunging life
(Dead birds such an affront to one’s thoughts,
And dead sea creatures, too, on a smooth beach),
But no, not much in Aginthorpe of repose.
Canto 20
Even so, Pamela, and she used to say, as we watched the silent flicker
In the privacy of her hallowed boudoir,
That here, here’s a proper evocation of history,
Her gin-dark eyes popping out of her head
At a silly girl slipping the mask off eminence
Only to cringe in horror as well the girl
should.
For now it’s revealed – grisly countenance:
"Feast your eyes, girl, glut your
soul on my accursed ugliness!"
It was the phantom, caped and worked up who
Had remarked thus—and it is what we do –
We feast and glut and call it beautiful,—
And then later, and the Bal Masqué de l’Opéra
(And can Apollinaire be far away?) ensues,
Or life, the perpetrators kicking up their heels
At the grand soirée, and still later, and history,
Costumed panache, is nervy splendour, is a police matter—
I, Aginthorpe, soft in my memory of Yvette.
Top of the year in Quebec and we’ve had
The thaw and now the snap.
Canto 21
Love? Love is never at ease when power’s around
To say what’s what and here’s how it’s done,
your money
Or your sorry life. Love? It’s the
transient shadow on a slab of stone—
Canto 22
There I was all London drape but in Berlin, Hotel Adlon
That survived the bombs but not Soviet drunks
Drinking schnapps,—
And it was as if I were posing with
A grandfather clock – pendulumless,
Browning words in mind, his pure crude fact secreted
From man’s life when hearts beat
hard –
And it was not so much I was born an old soul, as old as a pharaoh,
Just that, in Montreal-NDG, hey,
I’ve been the life of the party and engagé,
Alexandrines at the flick of a wrist almost,
Doom shouts, doom prayers, and yes, with
kisses to spare.
And then there was this suppliant, her smirk angelic
Who was stealing a page from Beauvoir
When she took me on the beach at White
Rock—
Canto 23
It was a drizzly day, no tourists, local dogs nosing about
At the heels of retirees, the Gulf War in thrall to oil,
Her eyes rolled back in her head, communing with Isis,
So much so she was dead to this world,
She who’d never f—ked a poet before,
Not even as an after-thought.
Such a sweet face, such vile intent masked,
As she meant to brag, Aginthorpe the happy, willing fool,
No real harm done, the stairway to her paradise
Littered with dead bodies, dead poems,
all the also-rans.
As for Ptolemy’s shelves and the fire that burned them,
The flames were haunted by an impossible quarrel
Of Callimachus and Apollonius
On how best compose verses: by keeping
To a straight road? By mere concatenations
of episodes?
In which respect, I’m guilty of the latter,
And I make no bones about it: guerilla
Warfare.
Canto 24
Sometimes she died, sometimes I did
Over the course of things
In the name of love—
Canto 25
And before I forget, give to Coach Kimball his long delayed due
For not speaking to us of character, winning
the American way.
Just think Ronda at the victory dance,
What she’s likely to do, hands in
your pants –
Just think that, and you’ll be immortal
On or off the field of war, sissboombah,
Whether or not you ever intended to marry
the slut.
Life in the boonies. U.S.A.
So much for Pindar’s odes to the victors
Or would I were young and in her arms again,
Which was old Yeats in a state of regret,
His a beautiful sentiment, at least.
But drunk, we heaved. That is to say, touching memory, athletes upchucked
As our insides squirmed up our throats – desert nights, starry,
starry skies,
In Nevada or Utah, in some Connecticut
parkinglot,
Which was fine as it went, better than a
Rattlesnake’s bite or a scorpion’s sting,
Nothing soft that wasn’t also mindless.
And no, can’t say I ever witnessed rape,
As when Zeus, all camouflaged, abducted
Europa and – ah, love under a tree,
But rape was around, rape of fine feelings
And anything that was truly noble,
Unless you were rich, and then the crime scene
Was more palatial, more scenic.
Canto 26
The one wears the other down in the end,
If one would speak of virtue and intransigence—
Well, Montreal quite enjoyed the antics
Of Camillien Houde, four times mayor,
Who was Neronian, but not vicious,
Whom Mackenzie King humiliated,
Houde, for all that jail time, the better
man—
Canto 27
I’d take them to the Blue Pavilion for drinks,
Caligula entombed somewhere nearby –
Gin fizzes. (Shirl drank campari.)
Yes, and I’d feel an urge come on, one obnoxious in the extreme,
A sudden need to discuss, reprise, critique
The foreign policy of Truman, Harry S.
And Maddie, with her shimmering sequins, she
A kindly kind of vulturine bloom, curator
Of the world’s earliest gospel fragment,
Unaccountably prophesied, her words
Beyond both our ken: postmodern feudalism.
To which I remarked: “Maddie, dear, beautiful past measure,
Greedy minx that you are in the rites of bed,
It was the barbarians who were superstititious,
The civilized imperialists all for science.
Well then, what does that make us?”
To which she replied:
"Out of step. Out of synch. Out of
focus."
A similar
scenario is as follows –
How
at Wooster’s in Cincinnati
I had words with Hermione:
Canto 28
“You will find the Marquesas dry,” I said,
"Should you go there. It’s their relation to the trades.
Otherwise, should you stay, should you take on the chin
The crumbling mind of Ronald Reagan, and, oh,
What’s the opposite meaning of genteel? –
The sharpening rancours of the people,
It will make you brave, no doubt, but not
a clever girl.”
My interlocutor, all vermouth and olive, opal-eyed lawyer,
Glared through me as if I were spectral, and then,
Her poise regained, she laughed with poignant
charm:
“You, you come and go as you please, always.
Male privilege, you Ariel with paunch and bad teeth,
Though, God knows, the daily orders will
wear your immateriality down.”
Her laughter about to become appeal,
The music devoted to some imbecilic Lucille,
I took her in a love clinch then and there
And she swooned with an imperceptible shudder,
At which point I released myself and left
Jurying to its own devices.
Canto 29
If Mark Antony was always the man
With whom everyone must reckon a while,
Phillippi done, the agenda put paid, he in Asia
Amongst the anemone, the republican ghosts,
The wild, keening goddesses of mountain,
Plain and coast, he and his short-lived love-bloom
That was Cleopatra’s love mixed with scorn,
Sword and lust the doom shouts in his gut,
Mallarmé and Johnny B Goode also are
To the point of my terrible nostalgia
Of salon and railroad shack, of Tacitus and the parasol
That has guided my gentle fall,—how I lie about and fall
And smell the sea wind of Elba and Boney’s ignominy
And the black-eyed hibiscus for no reason at all,—
How I lie about and duly fall and smell
The clodded prairie of Master of Ceremonies Buffalo Bill,—
And the roses in the bell-towers—
How I surmise what shall come to pass when
The American vote counts for even less
Than it does now, its drift to right of centre
Mystical.
And the cold light of reason, even as it mocks
The grandiose ceremonies of political godhead, does not, willynilly,
Set us free. For that, what is needed is
a deeper mystery.
Canto 30 Coda:
And here’s what it’s been – yes, here it is: the weight
of the living on what’s alive –
The weight of her smile on a stubble-bit of grass, that bitter
old man
The light as air weight of a bird avoids
– is always unexpected, as when
The dream breaking, the waking moment
Prods the dreamer to name his name and know where he is:
Those houses in a row, the failures within,
The large dreams dying small, and smaller
still.
And, because you wish it, fondly let us
Speak of government – oh those thieves happy
In their coat and tie capitols, the shirtsleeves, though, that promulgate
Spook-generated chaos.The flu-infected
mess —
And yet from a pretty terrace, and with all the setting suns,
With tireless eyes I beheld the glittering sea,
Its texture of tide and wind, its dancing sparklets,
The birds beyond number in the sweep of a glance –
A silhouette of the world. Its dying. Its
bliss.
And yet her hand held in mine was tender knowledge,
It being so much, it being nothing at all
– that view.
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