from
Rue Wilson Monday
by Anselm Hollo
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carriage
purrs man whistles pounds post
in
distant rocky dark
reason,
weaving, brabbles
cognition
digs tunnel through Charlot's suitcase
zoom
cog motion seagull cry
arms
around everything
parallel
out of someone
else's
heaven tunnels
behind
doors past
lit-up,
frontal, still convinced
climb
reviewed
now
cautious move to igloo syntax
doodle
on smoke
watch
reflections flounce
*
once
again butterfly pulse entire percept
fictional
jolt of eye: arms, yarns
hit
me adventure come kiss me sadness
as
if me had me still
in
this ocean of "socio-political & aesthetic"
idiot
electric catacomb gibberish
tumbling
billows of stuff
something
there is in man
wants
to be top big banana baboon
but
I am not Robert Frost I am a baboon
mad
about the planet even this week
in
the America that was it had that phrasing
ecstatic
articulate and beaucoup
beaucoup
conscious disquiet
*
now
does the blissful somnambule recluster
a
dream a flesh-colored dream? say what?
how
to identify the ones who tend to war
&
what to do about them discuss
on
different color paper free up text
from
fuzzy spaces inside head. hey,
are
these walls "of" someplace? he stood
a
veteran user of mind's ear
for
tales of The Device
mortals
love noise hurled into gaping flesh
well
maybe yes. roll eyes round écriture
distortion
makes you enemies
so
either "say" things or it's endless postpreface
the
elsewhere gunfire problem whose is it
*
the
general infantilization
that
became a groundswell of our century (said Eva)
not
that we weren't part of it
when
we were young & cruel
"deny
yourself nothing" well that's one theory
only
the creature knows its awful secret joys
and
the mobile digressive figments collide (said Ann)
and
people don't read
poetry
because uncertainty
is
associated with punishment (said Mark)
is
stupid attention better than no attention
what
about hissing a poem instead of the usual
soulful
quaver or well-rehearsed scream
when
your memory goes forget it (said Utah)
*
gates
waterfalls shifting horizons
plastic
halberds gentle fugitives
una
Beatrice on the ramparts of Carcassonne
in
black miniskirt more like Juliette Greco
is
she thinking of "Raymond the Cathar Count of Toulouse"
fat
chance she's gazing at sudden
flock
of paragliders in the sky
while
the guide drones on & I think of
"fictitious
employment by no means uncommon in France"
he
means government employment
fictitious
government employment
but
then government is fictitious too
as
are the governed much of the time
look
for yourself in this pebble or pencil
*
now
does he know how to beam? contented?
grow
fuzzy? nothing wrong with fuzzy
blissful?
feel some place
keep
stupid demons at bay
let
them go or go on
hammering
nothing in Nothing Land -
this
be quite different
from
crazy hot soul of sudden beginnings
cluttered
& ever 'novel' inside
yes
that did make for impetuous bellows
violent
staggerings irritating ruins
before
it all settled into rose debris;
so
locate old hotel before books close
on
trundling troubadours. semicolon
*
draped
in defiance & bewildered hair
not
up to the waves of the task
ready
for the big mallet yet still chanting
"what
vast sky wagons? what balloon yard?
what
order to this?"
praying
for door back to scale
begin
the beguine may body begin
to
turn the big barrel climb mountain
regain
some sense of basic human
ever
esurient for flash of meaning
our
minds too orderly
in
ways too predictable
so
fill in the blank
between
fedora and wingtip shoes
*
came
down the old oaken stairs he must also have trod
who
wrote "old and young, we are all on our last cruise"
and
"to know what you like is the beginning of wisdom
and
of old age" or up those stairs again, to read: "the old
appear
in conversation in two characters:
the
critically silent
and
the garrulous anecdotic" Cousin Louis
who
first met his Fanny here thanks to Cousin Bob
who
was the more dashing the model for Alan Breck
and
perhaps the dark Master of Ballantrae
when
first we came here in August the pigeons next door
said
coo-COO coo-coo coo-COO coo-coo
but
now in November it's only coo-coo-COO
coo-coo-COO
so, time to go, soon
*
"that
the ants seem to wobble
as
the morning sun catches their shadows"
not
with us "too much" at all
not
with us very long at all the sun the ants
the
wobbling shadows all too hung up we be
on
a civilization devoted to the speechless stare
punctuated
by mindless speech
(&
WHO is likely to read
these
headthrob grumblespeak lyrics?)
"because
they do not understand that cacophony
is
at least as intricate an art as harmony"
&
she cries out in her dream "where are you going?"
infinitesimal
moods for milliseconds
kindly
provide a theme for these variations
*
crackle
crackle "good" "history"?
verify
tales of each ego?
crackle
crackle cerebral twitch
who
slipped on the caviar?
who
broke the hammer clavier?
&
that was by Stupid Staggering Desirée
(Jean
Baudrillard's favorite group) (who he?)
(I
think he invented The Meter)
(well
take him back to the meter office)
&
that is so bad it's really kinda great
crackle
crackle screeches whistles & ululations
(you
say communists, bro? those really happen?)
hand
me the righteous indignation but first
let
me negotiate this corniche
NOTES
Title:
after Guillaume Apollinaire's poem "Lundi rue Christine."
Its translator Oliver Bernard says: "Presumably almost all
of this poem is verbatim speech from various conversations in a
café." In "rue Wilson Monday," similar conversations
take place in the scribe's caffeined head, during a five-month stay
in a small French town.
Charlot:
French nickname for Charlie Chaplin in early silent movies.
"Eva"
- Eva Hesse, Pound's German translator, essayist. "Ann"
- Ann Lauterbach. "Mark" - Mark Wallace. "Utah"
- Utah Phillips. Great singers all.
In
1876, Robert Louis Stevenson came to visit his cousin Robert - then
a painter, later a lawyer, but also the author of good book on Diego
Velazquez - at the Hotel Chevillon (114 rue Wilson, back then "La
Rue Grande"), where he met Fanny Osbourne, the woman he was
to pursue across the Atlantic and the North American continent and
eventually marry.
"that
the ants seem to wobble / as the morning sun catches their shadows"
-- EP, Canto LXXX, p. 105 in The Pisan Cantos (London: Faber &
Faber, 1949).
"because
they do not understand that cacophony is at least as intricate an
art as harmony" -- Basil Bunting, "The Lion and the Lizard,"
p. 30 in Three Essays (Durham: Basil Bunting Poetry Centre, 1994).
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