For E.J.P.
(pace Leonard Cohen)
Moonlight marbles our melancholy dead—
Fragile as bone china or blossoms wept—
Swept—from trees by lightning-chalked, Sturm-und-Drang Dread.
(Pear wine—in cups—is where drear tears once kept?)
Let Pratt chalk up martyrdoms as savage
Reckonings, nurse pear vin that moonlight caulks;
Plus, count Chinese bones the petty average
That leverages steel rails through mountain’d rocks.
His epics—skeletal as train tracks, prayers—
Debunked no teachers, defrocked not a priest.
He deemed governors dream-statues of tears—
Scotch-soaked seers, the minstrels of the deceased.
Perhaps my reading is all wrong? Better
Is Cohen’s? (November sheds numberless leaves….
Who can interpret—to each set letter—
How beauties go to graves the grey wind grieves?)
The sounding rain rounds against walls. Next, snow
Grouses, souses, salts white the earth. Could Pratt
Elect gun-smoke over perfume? Rainbow
Over fire? (That latter is my salat.)
Government breeds Commotion, thus History.
A poet’s chronicle? Ironic Prophecy:
All goes rotten—is forgotten—perfectly.
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“Trancelating” the Verses of Agnes Fong (Lucero)
(pace Agnes Fong)
XXVI.
Impossible it is to hope
that the dust
that bleeding bulls kick up
won’t reek bitterly
and cling to the air
like algae sliming rocks.
Others may sniff the wind—
convince themselves of a cigar scent—
the smell of a parlour
of politicos full of the good will
and bonhomie
produced by Cuban tobacco pushed
smoulderingly blue-grey
out the lungs
and by long pulls on fool’s-gold Scotch.
(Their glasses have traces of crystal—
not just the ice
that freezes so joyously in their brains
if they gulp too quickly
the chilling satisfaction
of the gargled liquor.)
Others may dispense such nonsense
or bromides.
But in this gritty era,
the bulls’ snorts reverberate
as the picador lances
pierce and punish
their blood-scarred, palpable hides,
so they die multiply,
in the bitter grit of ruddy dirt,
and the cartilage and bone
of the beasts
dangle long spears from their backs
and flanks
(each such weapon resembling pizzles—
or black, penile tears),
while the stench of their wheezing, panting,
staggering, toppling,
is ruinous to our own breaths.
Yet, others describe an aroma
like cigar smoke lofty
among marble pillars and marble thresholds,
where silk-threaded gents
in leather-backed chairs,
talk about final recourses,
abandoning half-measures
in favour of Scotch that is smoky
and cigars whose scent is strong as fresh tar,
asphalt,
while alternative calculations
are danced away—
with waving hands—
as insignificant as white lies
or as fairy tales to seduce
or police the peasants
(ourselves).
Thus, we must identify
the stink of bull-blood in earth—
reflecting “inhumanimal” massacres,
so that all mirages are dispelled,
and Truth cuts grooves
coincident
with our trenchant, salty mouths.
XLIX.
Footsteps upon the sea?
Aye, Jesus’s, phantasmal….
Eye the ruddy wound in His side.
He strides—glides—upon the water
with the triumphalist air of Caesar—
though bloody as a Caesar salad
(clad in rouge dressing);
or with the vigorous mien of a czar
facing down the machine-guns
of cold-blooded Bolsheviks
(a troika of stony minds, salty mien,
and swampy morals),
all iconoclastic chandelier smashers,
who love to prove messiahs
just as fragile as bread,
and as ruddy as wine.
Hear Jesus’ soles smoothing the seething sea,
rolling over the surging sea—
as He balances, beautiful,
while calculating the turmoil that He must ford
to bring His apostles home—
without tracking mud into the house.
[29 janvier mmxxii]
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Off the Pig!
The Year of the Pig—MMXIX—forbid any supermarket Schmaltz
as it crescendo’d—
or, rather, diminuendo’d—
not yet bruiting innuendo of Plague—
(the Emergency still yet vague,
the People’s Republic finding no faults)—
in the shaking, shivering exhaust and extinction
of the terminating and annunciatory fireworks,
forked first into the sky at Beijing—
with the whole moping world hoping
that a garrulous, scurrilous, simpleton bully—
his asshole constantly in the public domain—
his image spittin (or shittin) in our faces—
would get chucked out—
maybe even fuckin put-down by his own S.S.
(Secret Service—
like Caligula got pressed—pure piss—into his hearse)—
if we were lucky….
It was a time of Weltschmerz,
but not as bad as it was shortly gonna get—
folks unable to breathe—
just like any expressionless trumpet.
We were immune to all but the Pain swooning through Africanized melodies.
Save that Pier Giorgio was gone like a soundless saxophone—
even if we heard a righteous scream
cut through inward dankness—those tears conjured by telephone
injuries or even each inglorious wet dream.
Yes, he’d escaped the looming, bland Melancholy
of lockdown, shutdown, the thematic spiral
of governments into viral
Incompetence—when every funeral marks a folly.
His coffin went out the church
before—often—the infections came—
wherein a spiky pathogen stuck to some perch
in our lungs to fucking buckle every frame.
I tell you he was as regal as Humanity—
an undiminished emperor of Verse—
who slipped TV reporters’ Inanity
(on whose glib fibs—gibberish—we nurse).
Year MMXX hadn’t even truly begun
when we planted Brother Di Cicco’s innards to decay.
But renowned is his inked Fabrication:
Changeless as is our Anguish, renewed each day.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Guilty Pleasure: Re-Watching Goldfinger (1964)
XXX-citement? Carting off a myriaton
of Fort Knox gold bars
as schemed up by schupo Goldfinger—
a crime that’s gotta kill off the most devout killjoys—
i.e., the bloodsucking, phthisic vampires—
of Censorship
(those atrophied baristas,
rankly cranking up their head-wanking guillotines).
In that scene where the Chicago mobsters squeal,
I mean, turn pratfall-clownish imbeciles,
as they inhale cyanide wholesale
(so the dirty bozos get wiped out as if by RAID),
Goldfinger—
the jaculent, feculent, petulant, flatulent,
portly, papier-mâché psycho—
is as unflustered as a billionaire Pope
scoping out a Porn shop.
Earlier, when Connery’s sly, suave, unkillable Bond
reconnoitres a balcony,
and corners a card-shark moll—
(a virtuoso of sleight-of-hand,
aiding,
via radio and binoculars,
Goldfinger’s fleecing of a rube),
and beds her bikini’d bottom,
he thereby inaugurates
the villainous Goldfinger’s implacable troubles,
disrupting his cult of Champagne and foie gras—
though the trickster tart
is left a gilded carcass still decked piously
in panties—
a corpus delictus—
ship-shape Wreckage,
beached on a bed overlooking a Miami pool.
Later, Pussy Galore—
Lesbo skipper of a slangy menagerie
of buxom pilots—
dismounts from a chestnut steed—
the stallion sure-footed,
but her ass now saddle-sore—
and after being thrown for a loop
in a theatre of hay and equine feces—
falls like a hen beneath the vulpine hero,
and is brusquely pierced, penetrated,
which is the cost of having lost prostratingly
the judo ballet.
(That close-up on Pussy’s face?
Tenders a peerlessly beautiful, gold-haired siren
amid a pillow of hay,
and we are undistracted
by adversarial odours of genitalia—
alongside the sharp smells of horses,
all innocent of a soap-and-bleach stable boy.)
Constantly meandering shivers!
That’s my reaction, scoping out
the tragedian’s hullabaloo of a plot—
Pussy’s aerodynamic Flying Circus
supposedly dispensing lethal gas
as diligently as a sailboat is rigged….
Soon we ogle the thrilling death throes
of Oddjob—
chaotic flames fluting from his chest,
as Bond hotwires steel bars,
electrocuting the dapper, pinstriped, chunky assassin—
the felicitous killer—so that he enters Oblivion,
so infinitely definite.
Conjured is dark, lugubrious Sorrow
at Goldfinger’s pitiless Defeat—
his meticulous Deprivation
of his would-be irradiated El Dorado—
due to blood-seeking bullets
(splatting and splattering
with the exact same sound effect as
Porn comedians shagging)
and flesh turned to smoke….
Everywhere in Fort Knox,
a delicate rust mists over the gold,
while the rigid intensity of strewn corpses
sees them resemble
a garden of statues rained upon by tears.
Anyway, Time strikes us down unanswerably
just as Goldfinger’s get-away plane
becomes a plummeting, ill-starred meteor,
and the diabolical, melancholic villain—
vomited exuberantly outta the decompressing aircraft—
is no more obscure, gangland Nobility,
but incorrigibly pitiful,
all his drastic Bombast—
hot-air buffeted—
gone to icy, Titanic drowning,
offshore of Nova Scotia.
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The Call to Home
(for The Hon. Mayann Francis)
My Utopia? A round stone tower
cobbled from marble and shale—
such lone, ocean-coloured scenery amid greenery—
the super-verdant Three Mile Plains—
a dreamy, supreme jungle—
green—as sumptuously green—as an avocado—
where red-breast robins and black-cap chickadees
stage a torrid clamour, strident canticles—
their songs raging impromptu, glamorous arias—
phantasmagorical cadences—
airs—
in my ears—
while perfume buffets my face—
the blossoming of apples, the tang of pine—
an unmistakeable honey
of unparalleled sweetness,
heralding persistent Succulence.
And indoors, tabled,
are pears from Nova Scotia, pear wine from Nova Scotia
(Morocco-adjacent is Nova Scotia)—
sanctified bottles—
an ambiance of cinnamon and lemons—
the oneiric music of Portia White, trilling—
an enterprise of light
profiting every window.
Here and now I awake, still adrift in dream,
relishing a lingo of vino and aurora—
seditious, gold-dawn Clairvoyance—
mandatory sunflowers preening in the garden.
And when I leaf my pages,
the verses embody a Pantheon,
and I’m a colossus of wine—
as arrogant as Champagne—
or Dylan Thomas-wild, Malcolm X-disciplined—
a gardener corralling a jungle….
The 4th Poet Laureate of Toronto (2012-15) and the 7th Parliamentary/Canadian Poet Laureate (2016-17), George Elliott Clarke hails from Windsor, Nova Scotia, as of 1960 Clarke is also a pioneering scholar of African-Canadian literature, with two major tomes to his credit: Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (2002) and Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature (2012). A professor of English at the University of Toronto, Clarke has taught at Duke, McGill, the University of British Columbia, and Harvard. He holds eight honorary doctorates, plus appointments to the Order of Nova Scotia and the Order of Canada at the rank of Officer. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. His recognitions include the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre Fellowship (US), the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Fellows Prize, the Governor-General’s Award for Poetry, the National Magazine Gold Award for Poetry, the Premiul Poesis (Romania), the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Poetry (US), and International Fellow Poet of the Year, Encyclopedic Poetry School [2019] (China). His acclaimed titles include Whylah Falls (1990, translated into Chinese), Beatrice Chancy (1999, translated into Italian), Execution Poems (2001), Blues and Bliss (selected poems, 2009), I & I (2008), Illicit Sonnets (U.K., 2013), Traverse (2015), Canticles II (MMXX) (2020), Canticles III (MMXXII) (2022), and J’Accuse…! (Poem versus Silence) (2021). Clarke penned the libretto for James Rolfe’s triumphant, tragic opera, Beatrice Chancy (1998), plus two lyrics for Four the Moment’s 2022 Polaris Slaight Heritage Prize-winning album, We’re Still Standing (1987).