Rimbaud In Africa
1
Only a madman stops here.
Business is down. The news is bad.
You leave in the company
of savages or imbeciles.
Home is always further on.
2
The route you traveled
is no longer in use.
There is just this light,
scattering.
L’envoi
Straight in front of me
but wrapped in clouds,
you step naked and small
from the clawfoot tub.
Ancient voices of children
sing outlawed songs.
With what may be a smile,
a terrible rain begins.
Animal Life
1
Knives and chains merge into one vast night. I mash down on the brake. Rimbaud might have described it as the noise of spiders. Somewhere there’s a picture of me with a different face. Why force a giraffe into a flower pot? I keep thinking. I pass a sixth day in bed gnawing my side, but otherwise alone. The gods respond to questions only in the summer when all the windows are open.
2
Shiloh means “place of peace,” she tells me. I tell her that Freud endured thirty-three operations for cancer of the jaw. It’s already the afternoon when we’re visited by a man with sleep-tousled hair. Life has been reduced to the paper one accumulates passing through it. Years from now, we’ll make the rocks leap and split. Meanwhile, the circus bears must dance their creepy minuet.
What Love Is This
And when I fill you, you’re Atlanta,
smoldering and in ruins,
and I’m a cart loaded
with the groaning wounded,
we’re twelve grains of gunpowder
floating mightily through the air,
a new kind of pearl-handled combustion,
and the only patch of snow to endure
to evening on our quiet street.