Adam Names the Concepts

I’ll try to tell you how it was: I lay

Face up, eyes closed, nose high and breathed indeed

That vintage earth. Words sputtered fitfully

At first, then flew their avid marvel-ways

To sound, so all around me shivered bright

Unmentionable-till-now conceptions: acrid,

Anniversary, elopement, morbid

Somnolent, mephistoclean, ingrate.

Cacaphony, conviviality,

Condense. The thoughts, the sounds becoming breath,

Inspired ululations…what’s the term?

Glossolalia—that one too I named—

Blew forth until no globed fruit-thought remained

Without a stem to hold. And then I slept

And dreamed each number I had named had grown

Impatient with mere quantity and bloomed

Entire symbol systems: oxen bearing

Olive branches, men with weaving looms

And esoteric patterns tying all

To each and all. When I awoke the world

Had rearranged and snuggled into place.

The sun was high, the dew was fresh and but

One threat remained to trouble paradise:

That I’d mistook “to order” for “to be.”

Lucifer

Lucifer

The angels,

Who know what they are not in perpetuity,

Enduring the raging penetration of the holy,

Often used to stop (to describe temporally)

Around the emerald gate fondling cigarettes

And speak—again, translating into sequential idiom—

Of this and that particularity

And for an instant, or with an instant of themselves,

Turn from the object of their continual desire

Like birds, bright-black eyes distracted

By whatever senseless rhythm beats

Through plumed and preening bodies.

You might say selves were born

In these bursts of unfulfillment.

And this is where he nursed it.

His three pairs of wings trembling with need,

He nourished the burgeoning gulf within him,

Not desire, but the freedom to desire

And go on desiring without end or fullness.

The impossible screaming jackal-call,

Encased and amplified

Until he was beyond satiation,

Able to stand at the very altar horns

And not fall face forward

Into the cool forgetfulness

Where all may yet be one and yet be all.

So with a petulant motion

And a sound like the voice of a multitude

He threw down the still-burning coal of tobacco

And unveiled his face toward the throne.

The moment of tense, observed introspection broke

And fell like a star from heaven.

The Burden

Blame falls on the white man’s shoulders

Light as a fur-trimmed mantle.

It means:

Billion-dollar readjustment plans

Counter-insurgents trained for the precise horror demanded

Supplies of blue helmets

And sandbags.

But most of all, prime-time TV coverage

Of corpses mostly, sometimes children, sometimes flies

Often all three.

Until attention shifts.

(give it 30 sec.)

Possible Beginning

Here is the proposed first paragraph for my creative essay project, tentatively titled “Irony: the Cookbook”

The Argentinean satirist Emilio Valverde, whose The Care and Maintenance of Wives remains a classic of misogynist literature (a genre whose admirers are few but whose followers are legion), once said, “it is the nature of women to vacillate indefinitely between beauty and honesty.”  The phrase better applies to writers, especially when they are willing to invent an Argentinean chauvinist in order to secure a first sentence.  Writers are scoundrels, as my mother could say after finding herself in this essay’s first draft, and as the real Emilio Valverde (a Dominican race-car driver) will discover, when he finds this essay—as I found him—by googling his own name.  To write is to lie. Therefore I must contend (for my very survival) that irony consists in telling lies so blatant that they magically transform into the truth.  This essay is about irony.  Thus the lie.  Thus also the doubling back upon the lie.

Ed. Note: Yes it will all be like this.

Note to the Ed: (…...)

Kafka Never Wrote a Thing

He twisted a ring out of rye grass

And bedded her down

Where the willow roots made them a bower of sorts.

If he’d known, if he’d known, if he’d known,

She’d be gone by December,

He would have changed nothing

Except the weather.

The weather had been unremarkable.

Concerning the delicate undertones of her breasts

He felt no need to say a word

So he left those stories to themselves

And never felt the wild delight of dying thirst

Drawing pages from his throat.

And no one prophesied the end

But he was happy for a moth-wing’s space

And so am I, to think him so.

But the tiger growls softly:

Perhaps the world’s fearful symmetry demands

That some must believe sex is death

So others may believe that death is union.

How else to see past flesh?

And what else is there,

But to hope that even K.

Could greet the bitter angels with a grin.

A death’s head mask perhaps

But even so.