93. Park and Ride from Mid-November

but where

do we

escape to?

the light in people’s eyes

- naive but true projection

at this time

a few travellers

huddling together

in case

emptiness calls

everyone you know

is lost somewhere

oh, ripped paper

- that’s so corrosive

Indi un altro vallon mi fu scoperto.

Dante, Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto XIX, l 133

remembrance:

as the leaves fall

shrivel on the ash

You live under the sign of the provisional. Often with faint amusement over little debates: do you unpack this coral dress from storage as if, when the summer arrives in a few months, you’ll still be alive to wear it? Yes – but purely because you enjoy the zing of its colour today.

Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow (Capsule Editions, 2012) p 36

There was also my grandmother’s pink dress. She put it on everytime she set to cook. “I can’t bear any other garment but my coral dress.” She put it over her head like a big bright overall, and then as the next stage, spread out the array of her cookbooks. Now I’m ready, I’ll cook you something that will really heal you. Oh, she did.

Odda Réal Constant, My Broken Life (Burning Deck, 1980) p 93

feelings & words then

rotting down together

92. All This Silver Montage (373 Things)

Fig. 7: The Poets Don’t Do It Right Again

All the beautiful detritus arrives at once & very ruddy now – like the old map of empire declared it. We’ve just past Hallowe’en (again! – but did you really expect things to happen only once?) We’ve stopped counting, as the numbers begin to run out. Yes, it does all sort of empty into blunder – but, again, and again, what do you expect? You expect failure? Well, you won’t fucking get it then – crash and burn, baby, now! We do remember always to glow, here, before we end. It’s a rapid vestigial, or vestigiale rapido, nostra whatsit, nostra vita, la nostra vita vestigiale e rapida. That’s easy, that one. The terrain in this bowl, though, anything but – a muck & mess of old broken pudding-stone, obliterated & variegated. Why don’t I list the colours? What a maledizione! What an obelisk! What a legend of ripped pages. Continuing, familiar, dilapidated – the ethereal blue of positivity against the blood red of terminal moraines. How odd & constant the broken real. Trapped in institutions & nostra city verbale, like some soggily riverine Hejinian – Hey! Let’s follow these noisy, disordered children out! The wave breaks all this bloody appearance against us, in an angel’s eyeblink. That unstable & shaken. Here let me point to it, to these things, coloured, beautiful, broken, illusory, uncalled, and ‘ll

91. Play You at the Objects, Maybe; or, Most of the Right Words, But Not Necessarily in the Right Order

All this silver montage

- won’t you meet the detritus of Sawney’s Hallowe’en

not now the town of luscious emergence?

Light & each

it can’t crash at to this crunch

now

& empty into blunder

into this stone material

. . . just glowing

then we end

& hopeful we

Life should hear nostra

- louder here the feast

of la rapid vestigiale

life

All la guilty terrain than the old muck: the pudding-stones broken

Everything of maledizione where somehow

a golden obelisk of built p

“What we stop a positività comes this passage in dilapidation of what stop at this, the speranza of the coming moraines to present, the collapsing of relations on justice, is continuing.”

Constant (broken), odd real

La cave & this head

- splintered of institutions & nostra city

on riverine Hejinian & footsteps

noisy, disordered children out

Most angels’ blink insieme tinklings

- occurring unstable & shaken so

But you point but our thing

e ‘ll 373 things call?