John Latta
HORSE AND BOOK
Morning, its unintelligibly blue sky swept clean. The rain, if it meant anything, meant its relentlessness, a word sucker-punched by its own exultant apery. Everything’s shrunk, is what I think with a kind of random hysteria at seeing how minimal the accoutrements of the surroundings turn out to be. Akin to the obligatory tough surface writing of the investigatory dick: routinely nodding out under a skylight drummed by rain. That night in Corot's plein air Dardagny where I jarred myself loose of a bag of cut 'H,' 'horse,' 'shit' (what we called it is gone, perhaps we refused to pronounce its name), out of its fit drubbing, and fell to turning the shiny pages of an enormous plate-filled book of Titian's ceilings. In one cosmology of the unkempt, the 'thin, catlike' Comte de Lautréamont is murdered by Napoleon's thugs. My unsung longing is simple: 'the common light again to share.'
QUERY AND LURCH
The cold-blooded ruses of the yelping sophists fill the crowds with contempt. Everywhere the unfocused hither-and-thither-y of some imaginary occasion missed. A faltering query posed in the form of a finger hoisted, limp with doubt, toward the unbridled gloaming, its yellow sky. A peculiar uneuphonious lurch of awkwardcy at dim day's cease. 'One books a hall to find a cohort to command, and for no other reason.' Stretches of wheat the color of diarrhea, the harvester's blade swung down through decay amp'd up by microbial raids and visible slug-chew. Thus I keep looking for the complete Petrarch, the one with the appendices of billiards table talk. Thus my dog, every inch the pèse-nerf of a global critique, pees on my détournement homework. Thus the subtle derisive homeboy look of the purely literary, its Homburg, its lack of efficacy, its tilt.
HELPLESSNESS AND SAW
In the novel's messy hovel: lines about the lumpy half-clothed sack of debris, 'nobody'd call it a man,' result of a blubbering jump off the Beaubourg's toy-colored 'innards exposed' exterior. Smell of human shit. Cops in trousers. Cruel-mouthed buzzcut Mayakovsky types, each 'leading' with a Dick Tracy chin. Lines about clarity's epigonous solace and the way its blunt sedulity unnerves the whole city, making each street seem clammy and defrocked, a black-ended umbilicus running between a portable here and a bit-off dubious nowhere. The whited sepulchre of the
sky, 'vnblemisht in its pulcritiude, & indewed wyth dalyaunce.' Oh lady of perpetual helplessness. The man bowing the saw—a prop for sarcasm's frank mewling—stops briefly between two deft Left-tempered quips about diamonds and
Bokassa, banks and Bangui, and resumes. Oh lady of the cobbles cleansed of human stench.
HYSTERIA AND IMPERIUM
Tired of the smug lack of thoroughgoingness of the shit-besmirched critical 'apparatuses.' Tired of the histrionics of the impure verb. I yank off my cohort and dash myself remedially against the one standing wall of the tycoon's hut. Oh the cowed serenity of hysteria, here in the loco imperium, here in the droopy West. Two mallards skim scum off the pond. A bullfrog thrums out its remorse and urgency, and suddenly shuts up. I think of the Irkutsk girl of the Lake Baikal region, coifed in a black helmet of hair, looking like a samurai of the Edo period, skirmishing with the local postmaster. I think of the black lava fields of Pico, its hedge-rowed verdelhos growing succinctly green under the cloud-ringed volcano. Schopenhauer says somewhere that 'extravagance springs up out of a brutish limitation to the
present moment': the vagrancy of unbecoming, a way of refusing to get it right.
Copyright John Latta 2013
John Latta's first collection, Rubbing Torsos, appeared in 1979 (Ithaca House). More recent is Breeze, winner of the 2003 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, out of the University of Notre Dame Press. Recent poems are found in
Lana Turner, Chicago Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Zoland Poetry, Shearsman, Fence, Tears in the Fence, Jacket, Notre Dame Review, Blackbox Manifold, Wave Composition, Infinite Editions, and Critical Quarterly. He writes at Isola di Rifiuti.
Lana Turner, Chicago Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Zoland Poetry, Shearsman, Fence, Tears in the Fence, Jacket, Notre Dame Review, Blackbox Manifold, Wave Composition, Infinite Editions, and Critical Quarterly. He writes at Isola di Rifiuti.