Louis Armand
SONNET (for Hugh Clarence Ultan)
Who if they cannot love the police could answer
the stairs’ hegemonic laughter?
Though I, being the dour childeater of yr dreams,
shall sanction all –
protean as a many-layered bride,
allegorical as space-flight or the eye
of a self-fellating snake.
The timbre, for example, of nightly urinations.
Often for reasons unknown a storm abruptly vanishes,
becomes meteorology. Thinning sea-hair & renal
calculus. The dead forms are carving America
into our spines, but who will mime
the chorus of its & their declining
power? Yours was to be an unruleable country.
STILL-LIFE WITH SELF-PORTRAIT (“The European”)
I retrace the steps, adjust the experiment, discover
the secular & elemental co-ordinate.
This place to which the years had delivered him.
A prison-thin hand-rolled cigarette –
closed his right eye & stared at it.
Smelled of the old times. Brown dim skies
in an overcoat with swamped shoulders.
I stir crumbs of burnt toast into his tea –
a lukewarm plastic spoon – it is a kind of evidence,
an anagnorisis. Naming it would be useless.
He looks away as I clutch in vain –
the walls, the mirror behind the lunch counter.
First, because everything is form. Second,
by a redundant precision. The bisecting scar
invisible behind the ear, for instance.
Guilt before recognition? Half-mocking he fell,
his lips, his feet, he was the paper tablecloth,
the parting sea. I see it all exactly. Each word exactly.
This predilection, like a cyst – every effort at affirming
turns to retaliation. The dislocated “stuck
moment.” We arrive at the necessary
satanic disorder by a voluble tomography.
Lying there, sitting, standing, stirring the tea the crumbs,
a swallowing of tongues, I also, I fall I retrace,
needle-eyed. A line with points distributed
on either side – a look, an unlook. And spent the better
part of his days escaping from that picture.
I retrace the steps, adjust the experiment, discover
the secular & elemental co-ordinate.
This place to which the years had delivered him.
A prison-thin hand-rolled cigarette –
closed his right eye & stared at it.
Smelled of the old times. Brown dim skies
in an overcoat with swamped shoulders.
I stir crumbs of burnt toast into his tea –
a lukewarm plastic spoon – it is a kind of evidence,
an anagnorisis. Naming it would be useless.
He looks away as I clutch in vain –
the walls, the mirror behind the lunch counter.
First, because everything is form. Second,
by a redundant precision. The bisecting scar
invisible behind the ear, for instance.
Guilt before recognition? Half-mocking he fell,
his lips, his feet, he was the paper tablecloth,
the parting sea. I see it all exactly. Each word exactly.
This predilection, like a cyst – every effort at affirming
turns to retaliation. The dislocated “stuck
moment.” We arrive at the necessary
satanic disorder by a voluble tomography.
Lying there, sitting, standing, stirring the tea the crumbs,
a swallowing of tongues, I also, I fall I retrace,
needle-eyed. A line with points distributed
on either side – a look, an unlook. And spent the better
part of his days escaping from that picture.
ST PAUL SHIPWRECKED WITH A BURNING SNAKE
The heat breaks everything down.
Slumped into a corner
a dog rains on your hat
stirring the air noncommittally.
What else does a man with a
beam in his eye live to say,
but don’t surrender till you see
the colour of their money?
The sea runs out shallow for miles
like a lizard ogling a fly
forever out of reach, or a fly quizzing
a shape in the shadow of a rock,
which in the legend had already
become it.
The heat breaks everything down.
Slumped into a corner
a dog rains on your hat
stirring the air noncommittally.
What else does a man with a
beam in his eye live to say,
but don’t surrender till you see
the colour of their money?
The sea runs out shallow for miles
like a lizard ogling a fly
forever out of reach, or a fly quizzing
a shape in the shadow of a rock,
which in the legend had already
become it.
THE DEMOCRACY OF SWIMMING
It was a day to be silent, a day like any other day.
The world unknown to you, wallowing
in its shed tears – could be watched, the way
a gratuitously rained-on scenery is,
or a dog, or a whining gear.
If you throw a stone, the stone transmits its image:
the question is, does it suffer?
A five a.m. emetic – lancing the cyst
on a pineal egg, a hagfish’s eye – but
an intelligent species needn’t tell itself that it is.
You breathe, in a compulsive, formulated rhythm,
propelled by a type of resemblance.
Weightlessness, too, has something
in common with thought.
A photographic emulsion, a baptism.
There are actions never intended for repetition:
what are they for?
If the days of pilgrimage are over,
if the tedious enumerations exist to be immemorial.
It was a day to be silent, a day like any other day.
The world unknown to you, wallowing
in its shed tears – could be watched, the way
a gratuitously rained-on scenery is,
or a dog, or a whining gear.
If you throw a stone, the stone transmits its image:
the question is, does it suffer?
A five a.m. emetic – lancing the cyst
on a pineal egg, a hagfish’s eye – but
an intelligent species needn’t tell itself that it is.
You breathe, in a compulsive, formulated rhythm,
propelled by a type of resemblance.
Weightlessness, too, has something
in common with thought.
A photographic emulsion, a baptism.
There are actions never intended for repetition:
what are they for?
If the days of pilgrimage are over,
if the tedious enumerations exist to be immemorial.
Copyright © Louis Armand 2017
Louis Armand is the author of eight novels, including The Combinations (2016), Cairo (2014; longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Award), and Breakfast at Midnight (2012). He has published ten collections of poetry – most recently, East Broadway Rundown (2015), & The Rube Goldberg Variations (2015) – & is the author of Videology (2015) & The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde (2013). He co-edits VLAK magazine & directs the Centre for Critical & Cultural Theory at Charles University, Prague. www.louis-armand.com