He Admits He is Delirous in Thinking of How He Carried Her
“I am delirious in thinking of how I carried you,
I know it in your mime of my delirium to me.
And at dawn when our attention turns to
each other, we smother our every
revenge, we garble thought, mangle
words, recall in kisses how we
carried us. From the tango tangle
of that stone’s revenge, our mime of pain
in release of attention in release from the angle
of that construction, I, insane
to the smell of you, the irrelevant
weight of you, the invisible rain
on the dawn of you, the errant
world in that klepto-nanosecond, that shrine
immaterial, that materialised present—
for our attentions are sometimes too available,
for restlessness of the forklifts threatens
the very truth of dawn, renders it metaphorical,
for in that moment I carried you down
from that ledge and you felt
impossibly light we were graceful,
that you in fact must have carried me carrying you
in order for it to have been possible, the idea
that for the exact length of a suspended thought
mimesis and truth were one, dawning
and attention equal, anger set aside, space
opened its vacumn to clarity so clarity—like
the unspoken composite beloved—could appear.”1
Mr. Subramanian Hides from Rhetoric’s Shadow
(Duet with Mrs. Subramanian)
If you blur, my love, it is only
because we are close. The waking west
beats time upon my skull; that night
it widens in the collective mouth. To
whom is this gift of the already built
given, to whom it unhindered go?
I know you are so anxious, dear,
before the sprout might pierce
the surface, before the dead chance
to revive. But the noise it drains me too, remember,
and my words, once spoken, evanesce.
Must you hold me like an empty vessel?
Forgive me, my love. Their armies somehow
entered; now they guard each cell and
membrane. And some voices are so clear
in the din: the TV’s circulating bang bang,
the paper’s forever grey. Day after day the spell
goes on. Everyone has their say.
Yes, everyone has their say. The air so thick
with assumed allegiance. And despite
the lawns so tidy, the skin
so bright in a mist of spring
no one is allowed to be happy.
I fall dead to your ears, dead to your eyes.
But the speed of rhetoric at my heels!
I cannot run fast as once I did.
The gunman in his tennis shoes
leaping from right to right
somersaulting from west to west
into my vulnerable heart.
If you blur, my love, I suppose
it’s because we are close.
Is there room in our house for others?
Do I dim when the sirens blare?
In the spell of that noise too:
our wayward agile selves.
If you blur, my love, it’s only because
you are close. But the rhetoric
it creeps like the agile dead, shines
like a searchlight in the second
before a reborn dark. And its figures:
so quick, so unstoppable, so gone.
That day, by the western ocean, dipped deep in
the widening dunes and never, for a moment, lost.
If you blur, my love, I suppose it’s because
we are close. The prison of the present
unhouses the prison of memory. And suddenly,
I am not at all against memory.
And when they came it was
from the west they came—unhindered, agile,
so good looking and so dead—
in the spell of noise that followed
you lost your vision. But
if you blur, my love—
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