Maudlin Song
Jewel of my ancestral gaol, the oil blue-black, the servile entreaty, the maladies that dance with the light. Jail trumps our habits like ancestral bells quitting the tower. My jail neither past nor future.
The gallows exude a less absorbing light than that old rule of herbs, leaden inert delusion.
Two jokes: idolatry and the armor of sacrifice. Or, two devices: color, luxury— magnified luxury— sorting out messages from the assay.
The horrors of your least metonym, maidens and ogres, your playthings and notaries. The mane and plume vault the menagerie. Kill-cycles and meals. Jail never jails the mantra. April, a domesticated meaning, trapped lion. The honesty the menage the message. For criminals divested of their shattered moans, jail sits intact as the calming eagle.
Mah... what a fate my language perfumes and telegraphs, like quailing guides that safeguard justice from my caresses. Sand my servant, pour your vital memory from my corpse, and pull as if escaping jail's vacuum toward parity. Past that one fitful desire no goal can contain. Jail extorts a fractal cost per minute, the tenant's thoughts, the declarations of drones,
and our bones, where jail's cold chapel finds its family.
***
See these avian antecedents— the whole point of the history of the US!
Meaning rains.
East winds bend the evidence I conjour and theoretically hate. Jail then pairs compartments and reversal. Like a race that seemed jaundiced, a poor pillar telling rooms of brow-beaten kills long past the dew.
Jail, my apple, history of the states filled with eagles. Jingling fate, man as the vowel that tears sainthood, justly dance, with teat and root, dance these plain soups, these views of bison, these remnants of sodomy, this culture of the many. The least drizzle cures the cruciform surveillance of my formless self, efforts lost then found. Jail seeking assist. Leopard, your sport persists in these arteries, a piece of a rose for the soil. Plus turds. Retreat. Your ass bisected by the niceties of men
and yet more. Jail's dance, the savant's dance, under-age clairvoyant, a vector veering at these infants.
Jail me my supermen. Past plus lion equals setting-out, crying out, like the Christian in my jail. None finer can pass through this mirror. Dance as we pass, my tangents. Swell, sand, familiar manna, quell langour, parlay hell. Jail— neither voice jamming, a dance less congealed than Christ's, a dance to conceal the sovereign, resplendant due-process.
Quit this you silly psalmer. Jail never retrieved a quail from a hunt. Plums of the vagabonds, plums from gorillas' asses. A race to infiltrate the taut culvert, the people coming dirt, a raisin, a nation eating science.
Oh our science of astute reprise, pour a cup and pour a flame, the antique, on this lame descent into philosophy, less remedy than votive, female on the off-chance popularity arrive. In less divergent principles a less jovial intercedent. Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chime in...
Late science, notable nonetheless. Lethargies. Lemon demands. Pour oil on the tourniquet, then pass.
At last this vision of numbers. News allows the leftist spin, but cresting the true crest, the oracle, sequined jail, the jail extends. And the last haunts of explorers save pardon & pain with jail vouching for their tears.
***
We sang paeans to agents. The literal approached as a porcelain Christ with made-to-order past, whose genitals man aimed stoicly at liberty. This too: an angel dispatched an angle, an evil.
Jailers denied their past saw gods & men feasting. Jail soothed their anxious knees, but eternity kept asking.
My voice became a pledge to armor the I. Quills built stories meaning only soil. My journal was fading, excepting all hope, as the wind blew leaves and massed nothing. Primates perused my tannis root like nagging brothers. I shifted case in an urge to shout, to roil the liquid forces, to come through metal, bouyant, to face the ancient red stars, ancestral automatic food.
Justice visited upon a member's denial, peal of bread & oil, fusions. Certain masks of me juggled the runes & faced front, then jerked the door, in jest. I oiled it brutally. Your lens found the insolvent cease-fire, memories of our dislocation. The jester I melted at our affairs so polite and suave.
May penance justify this maudlin jape. Horrorific lap dance, leaving our best unsummered being to resort and grieve.
***
Our part has passed, and anon we savor remoteness. Chained to her vice, our sage quits her post for a ration of sufferance, & along that road the pledge of reason quits counting. O sage, my bat, my reinverted, my trainer.
A ladder to innocence is a ladder to infinity, set in the past's corner with almonds and meat, dugouts and transoms.
Aliens learn quickly this farce of the self, learn through their collars.
A key! My lover's quirt is a fatal adornment. A quest, a saintly image attached to quills, to coarse, bristly jail, quiets with man-songs the jailed tenors. Sundials and sands marching.
Pluto, gardner of my justice, verdant lab experiment, sensual soul still leaping, dissected curvature that curls the past, that sets her off— in these pints of vileness nod the managers. Later, you'll peek past the stage.
Ah, jail suits these temperments purged of dwelling, left to deported wills. Divine image of debt, this land is a verse of perfection.
O my abnegation, o my charity moving in your icy bath, pretend
profound dominion soothes us best!
***
I'm a cored out infant, jade mirage, a forgotten, tradeable, surly, serrated tool-belt of a me, who severed ties to the old urges and lay grovelling all night, sacred person slaving in jail, voyaging vexed son, ideal like steam blowing, a letter, a veil, a fluid dolorous ring. Jail flairs up, dancing village. I'll await the deflowered saint plus a bum's sense, funk voyager with limpid liquid soul, poor timing and sad glory in this sad season.
Sure the roots pardon our dehiscience, sand's greeting, sand's habits, sand's pain, unvoiced entanglement & curved guilt.
Fabulous force: a viola is our force. Truth says kneel down; truth says kneel for spun truth. Vast enemies part seas, respond with truth. We need this terror as justice needs its toothless cadaver.
Are men in jail less regarded than dew? What lack, what tenet seeds this mortar? Quick-sewn quest, jail renconstructs our mounted entry past view.
Dancer I, labor map, parental soundings, cement rage with noise. Come and gaze and unlamp the circular dance, latched and chambered voice, come and tremble, dance like florets! Bone dance, Christ's jail like jailed voices under flame in the fuming of a seal. Eastern gaucho, a drone, toothless yet rich, ashes, flambeaux, heard in millions of tin earrings.
Must I orgy at the comraderie of females in quiet interludes? Past memes of companions, jail me viewing deviant runes, foul and exasperated, to face the pellets of a kind execution. A plural you enabled the gull's descent, too comprehending to pardon an ant! Come join the march,
priestess, professor, martyr, you who tromped on my living like justice. Jail this jaded ether in a purple city; jail the jaded eating croutons. Jail suits your lariats; quit chanting & dance the surplus. Jail needs a complement, a past that lofts jargon past the sense of morals and sues for a brutal temper.
The guileless young feelings that voted for lumber suit jail better than negroes. Man in jail puts on a stage those views intended for neglect. Your mediated, ferocious avarice marching through all neglect. Magistrate, thought all neglect. General, war all neglect. Emporer, your deranged reason all thoroughly neglect; you are the one licking the non-taxable boots, the fabric of Stalin. Come people, it's inspiring. Watch the fervent end of cancer. In farms and vineyards see tenement respectables filling demand in another bowl. As plants align east of this quitter's continent, you whom the follies read, poor purveyers of potatoes, sense misery. You enter your various royal desks and start to chant.
Corners jut from the core of nature and carve a city. Pass the shots, shouting lest moths dance on our vitrics. Christ with tambourine, dance, dance, dance, dance! Jail my voice & meaning: Let the past seep out of you. Let the blank debark. Jail toms for their séance.
Fame's soil, Christ, dance, dance, dance, dance!
"Maudlin Song" is from A Season in Hell, the present is a homophonic translation.
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
October, 2009
Poems
Bill Lavender translates Arthur Rimbaud
Adjunct Assistant Professor and Director of the Low Residency Creative Writing Program MFA, University of New Orleans, 1994. Bill Lavender has a BA in English from the University of Arkansas and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans. He works for the Division of International Education in the Metropolitan College as the director of the Low Residency Creative Writing Program and Managing Editor of UNO Press. He is adjunct Assistant Professor of English.
Mr. Lavender's most recent book of poetry is transfixion, forthcoming in 2009. Sections of this book have been published online in E*Ratio and Fieralingue, and in print in YAWP and Fell Swoop. Books also include I of the Storm (Trembling Pillow 2006), While Sleeping (Chax Press 2004), look the universe is dreaming (Potes and Poets 2002), and Guest Chain (Lavender Ink 1999). He is currently associate editor of Exquisite Corpse, and edited an anthology, Another South: Experimental Writing in the South, from University of Alabama Press (2003). His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous print magazines including Jubilat, New Orleans Review, Gulf Coast Review, Skanky Possum, YAWP, and Fell Swoop, and web publications including Exquisite Corpse, E•ratio, CanWeHaveOurBallBack, Moria, Baddog, Poets Against the War, and, more recently, Big Bridge and Nolafugees. He has published scholarship in Poetics Today and Contemporary Literature.