Read an Excerpt
Music and Suicide
By Jeff Clark Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2004 Jeff Clark
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8214-0
CHAPTER 1
A Chocolate and a Mantis
The phosphorous cheeks of an ailing jester fallen that day
from an alien haze over jade lanes
to blades arrayed in ribboned mazes
created to flay a dilated spirit hole
He was a chaotic boy with phosphorous cheeks
and a glistening sphinctral sanctity
a violet fallen alloy of a Medium
and a gigolo to sleep
He was white waste of nebula-scented hours
fallen that day an alien length
to a place of stale rain and that day
to crawl crying to the side
was to harvest no more eggs of fantasy strewn out horizontally
and found by following a hare that could be a guide or a lie in fur
He was ugly when he ate the eggs, and in a trance
a chocolate and a mantis sat on his thigh
and said that Even broken or swollen
hysterical inside long boxes or on wires
or swallowing gray fay lures
to take and decompose both your lapel rose and the hose that fed it
you must offer a mantis your hand, a chocolate your tongue
then never again ill use or even dream to curate
fake faces or oases or their words
And sometimes you rejoice because you dream
and are engaged with a wet bottom
but dreamless to find that your senses are weaker
and you could feel no cigarette or Ra
no tilting park or clef
but the chaos of a sac of cracked slides
and scales, sucked-to-death larks and stabbing swings
and you knew that if you could be a jester bred to beg dream for eggs
if you could see a Jesus singing from a tree his own father grew
you could polish all of a cellar with spit
or hold the shined tile of your face to a suffocated street this Sunday
or sometimes to the crown of two real or even two envisioned thighs
blessed by suburban or country perfumes
because sometimes you contorted to kiss the side of a false staff
and you dreamt you were decomposing
were dooming your face
to have wanted to kiss a stick in a mirage
and not a marigold harem or a brown crown
You saw madness was to love a woman you extracted from a tale
of man-made everglades in which masqueraders play
and get sprayed from the cars of a passing parade
because sometimes your face tasted of the taint of those papers of escape
and psychic counts dictated your fainting or what you would trust
Sometimes you reclined so mistily on the wet lips of states
so shimmeringly on states
that a specter slid up a gold or silver surface
you never leveled until it possessed and emptied you
and now escapes to exist in other ethers
because what is to be burned
is equally unpresent in your urns and blurs
A Corpse More Constant Than Hearts
I still looked for you strangled
that single spring day of all lies by the side of a skyscraper
From behind came a seagull throwing up berries
we leaned where a shadow began to climb
Do you know why I wanted to kill you? I wanted to sleep
There are strong veins and money for any moment you would visit
The vice of vines, gun in red sun
Now a hearse at the curb
Is there freshness in the driver's questions
Was there pain in strangling was there a clock
was there more pain the warm morning
that followed strangling
at the top of which a three-quarter moon receded
to the south and further down a jet, still further down were clouds
Did strangling have a sound, did you think at all of painting
Like Cats Coming out of Clocks
Channeled for a periled girl
at the intersection of 2nd & C in a memory
Like cats coming out of clocks
Three seconds so a voice says
Like cats coming out of clocks
to fly so my eyes never find you again
from the Golden Gate to a range of saline
Like cats coming out of clocks
Or mistaken seers now gone foresaw a drop in a closet
Like cats coming out of clocks
But a parallel barrel obliterates a pearl
A parallel barrel resonates a pool in a garden
that dries and leaves alkali
Like cats coming out of clocks
You saw a lily tilt when you were ill
Like cats coming out of clocks
Or a hummingbird struck from the air in Oroville
You were defending petals from the hovering hoses
that surrounded the loud canal
Like cats coming out of clocks
Objects in the hallways here will rot
but where you go will you prey on the jubilant voices
Like cats coming out of clocks
of the Prancing Princes who lock us in trances of panic
Like cats coming out of clocks
First kill the Prince who sells this memory of an hour
back to the memory's owner
whose friend's hours were sold
to a rust orphanage in a fragrant orange grove
untended since the first breath
of the barrel or the mouth of the girl
who strewed the seeds
or strung the string through wet beads
Cama
for Lizi
So much is unknown, yesterday my life began
and tonight wants to remain here
again no choice but to begin
by writing what is continuously seen
pink silk pillow with black and gold diamonds
rings at the edges
Your profile in a picture, momentary heat
bruise at the outside top of a thigh
Bread and chocolate, blue nails
and in these words is nothing
that will satisfy me
Russet light in which I first touched you
pool-blue sheets, bedpillows cased in a goldenrod color
a belt and scarf draped over the headboard
Wellings and smells embellish the bed
Do you hear the music in that line?
Why not remove it? Why remove it?
Art is permissible sickness
Laughter and slight torment, liquids, cherry-red robe
Where are you tonight?
Where should I go? New music plays
the same black ink as last year
same cheap pen with which other words
I want this bed to be almost empty, no longer want
to be part of my lines, no desire
to be anywhere
only to kiss your eyes again
pupils and irises singular
Seers and haunters
Now we're beginning to hurt
I continuously lose you
I want to ask you something
will ask you tomorrow
Outside this bed, something else prevails
cleverly veils
Your face so unlike what I desired in winter
Comprehensions are hectic, Eastern descriptions
of senses without contortion
meaning for me now only more glass
coarse black hair and gazelle-like legs
Longing to leave but learning to meditate
Seams and delusional motes
Enlightened, slowly, or being driven madder
Both at once, the text says
further into disharmony, by this bed, by your legs
lips mixed with sickish music
No correspondence between
this writing and your face
Dilator
What I was lacking you brought back
I was building a clean, strong structure
and it cracked
I was untangling a lady's medicated braids
as she sought surplus purple for a gamay garment
Your money always shared in prescription store aisles
while malevolent mimes
aimed hoses into the ocean
with things burning right beside
But your eyes and words were sucked yesterday through blinds
over waves and daydream-made azure ghats
We scaled spires and gutted ourselves
Blue light spied through a gloryhole
Tan transmitter dismantled
and waning white noise escapes the collapsed baths
Green grams fanned through air
and the irrigation corps
dessicates in stations
A vaulted sky violent with nimbus symptoms
an ambulance tremulates lengthening silences
We never quieted cries or shot at odious offshore ships
Sick fractured voices from vaporous places
No longer even questions but the sound of questioning
Memories of azalea-colored lips that suck well
A woman who painted dosage boats,
trauma-dowsing dunes, flora flares
Her tongue a hoe of astral agriculture
The diceholes fill with dew,
her designs with lobal foam and beams
In an orchid store
Deranging rays, the fluttering inverted comb,
softly bouncing snout
of a dead sea horse
in a tank with darting disks and oval pieces
Blood does not accrue but moves
You pretend there is
something in the sand the water wants
backwash ramming incoming blue walls
past the bridge a black ship on glassy resins
Cunning things thrive in sunless dungeons
No longer her songs but the ache of playing
Pearls augment the neck of a woman in this park
an Asian boy chases a rolling melon
Our antitheses drain cathedrals with droll catheters
meant to clean
Missing Is a Stimulant
a circuit, bled memory
a séance of the veins, a liquid hinge
Deceit, the tones of dreamed sceneries
defaced by a single face
the day itself more marred
by these traces of fragrance
chances to fathom her absence
or collapse with the sap of plants
and sleep, and demand of a jasmine-scented face
How are you still so fragrant?
An object at a morgue or an organ
First Pastoral
Imagine if you can a miniature pageant on a hill
and picture then with me a boy
who's on a stool, a punished fool
and a panelist pours out his pleas
Removes his orange shirt
removes his face's glaze and bedtime insights
Lays him on the runway and laughs
Just yesterday this panelist had killed a dog
and cum in a lily cup
and the others say, Bend for us, spin around
Cry, sneeze, drown
and the lily cup in the boy's dream
is fed again
Imagine if you will a pageant on a hill
and picture if you can a boy
designed to be impaled upon a stilt
and bleed for a panelist's joy
G Major Quay
Now I write it in verse for the last time: birds found on the ground
form a grid of lost times
and the grass beside untended corpses still climbs
the best set and forum, looking down
I have been to the opera twice, a cloud in a warm climate
sitting where all work remains to be done
June sun so forthcoming that to see him in the sand oval alone
denies songs as being the perfect fit
that arcane tone flatlines in the aftermath of the poem
the helmet of daylight taken off
as white cotton of blossom motif from a tuft
and to know this one is to know them
again in the loge a fifth visit. Opera neither soft nor unsafe
seldom about work or the haste of lines
but belladonna and the bullman about to disorganize
for the last time ... the audience repairs to a sunny café
called the Deaf Man's Hands, down Quay Elém and to the right
specializing in dove and waves off the sea
drinks are served and a painter tries to say
This is the first picture of the last night
WITH GEOFFREY G. O'BRIEN
Shiva Hive
When I look at you, I see someone who loves another so deeply, so purely and marvelously, that I must always thank Chance I am permitted to know, through you, that love.
Can you tell me: is it a capacity that existed within you before you ever existed ... or is it, instead, the fortune of your having encountered one whom you could so love, one who could be so loved?
Your question makes me uncomfortable. You are idealizing, and therefore distorting, something or someone. You are engaging in a flight of fancy that, whether you realize it or not, is the shape that love itself takes. To love and to imagine are one and the same thing. An opening to what can never be fully present. If I were to confess any capacity to you, it would be the capacity to contain that opening, that emptiness. For loving has no meaning but "to be found wanting." Desire, also, is the rapturous study of distance. And the maintenance of this distance is an art that must be cultivated.
So is it your perpetual maintenance of this "distance" from that which you desire that is to be thanked for, at least, this marvelous love I see very clearly you have for someone; is it not, instead, simply that this someone has called this love in you into existence, and now, moment by moment, calls it out?
I leave my window open but the hummingbird — though it may hover near now and then — will never enter my room. You have the power "to contain that opening," while I, for my part, will cry that the hummingbird never comes in, or someday I'll trap and either cage it, or kill it. How then to get to where you are — or learn to contain "the not," the "opening"?
You are still idealizing. You attribute to me the possession of a secret, a position of mastery that I have to reject. You "see very clearly" what you want to see; it is a "marvelous" picture. Yet, even if your picture fails to correspond to my reality, we can meet in the space of that failure. A space where none of the lines connect. Words like "pure" and "perpetual" are not appropriate here. We are not looking for a crystalline being, but for something in the process of melting. Allowing each of us to move within the otherness of the other. That is the condition of the possibility of Eros. (No object can give birth to love. Instead, love is the condition for the appearance of the object. An apparition that must be awaited in the way that a poet awaits the inspiration for a poem.)
I believe sometimes I see in your eyes the trace of — what? — a sorrow, perhaps even a profound sorrow. If I've not mis-seen, or haven't merely intuited a false source of this trace, then may I ask: does this sorrow derive from certain disappearances?
I recall that you wear no fragrance.
Nor do I usually rouge my cheeks. But when did you look into my eyes, searching for signs and symptoms? Of course, by asking me, you know you will receive only the authorized version of the story. Yet it seems you believe that, if you put your finger on my most vulnerable place — whether it be love or sorrow — I will be forced to admit the inadmissible. My dear, I would gladly admit everything to you, as far as I myself know it. But I'm afraid you would find my life story exceedingly banal. I admit to having a melancholic temperament; I could even attempt to explain my nature to you by citing causes both accidental and necessary. But I couldn't bear your disappointment on discovering my sameness. If you want to discover my otherness, you will have to invent it for yourself. It is precisely what I cannot tell you. (I only hope the story you invent for me won't rely on so simplistic a narrative as the Fall of Innocence, where a state of original happiness is undone by separation. Rather, I think melancholia is induced by making too many connections between things.)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Music and Suicide by Jeff Clark. Copyright © 2004 Jeff Clark. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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