Grey-Dark Poems for Young Intellectuals
By J. Celan Smith
Copyright 2012 Jonathan C. Smith
Smashwords Edition
Table of Contents
Infinitives of a Drowsy Masochist
Overstuffed (An Inhuman Medley of Desire)
Apotropaic for Urban Ordinarium
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"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist."
--Rene Magritte
*****
Tomorrow's partners I see gathered
on tonight's pastures,
inside of light and other deterrants
whose currents of blindness within
I stall.
Nothing on horses, language
the antagonist
seems that heaviest menace without
whose tongue my amazement fails
to sway. It has fled,
this language,
here in the missing aim of my fires.
Where has winter gone, it asks,
now that at last the coat has swollen
around me?
I am tired. My grey eyes
blink ash. They no longer see
my body's wounds.
Long since, Time has ceased
its nocturnes: history, revolutions, eccentricities.
They found their
chromatic closures on land
that never swam to meet me.
The villages once told me to leave.
I should have obliged, but outside
the darkness felt savory.
Inside, it shaped me into that thing
I've become.
Maybe it's ice or frozen flab.
Eventually I know,
every word that emerges
is going to betray me.
Many curses are coming, but why do I
love so much
when sadness is my only flower?
*****
A diamond folds in on itself,
sheath after shimmering sheath,
slowing the sharp sounds
of ancient glass voices
that die encased in a tomb of selves.
Someone watches, assiduous eye
whose winds long to glean fruit
from the neck and lips of each voluptuous glint,
facets transformed more gently than
mirrors
eliding over the cold shadows of leaves.
Moments spread--ineffable ones--while
her heart drips,
thawing into a smooth, subtle trickle
that his desire drinks down,
invisible and voracious,
until the last drop expires in hot, fatal smiles.
No one else sees the metamorphosis.
The world empties itself.
Those flocks of midnight whispers fall silent.
Then dreams, aroused from ashen sleep,
pursue obediently their course
across deserted skies.
Never tire of his presence!
Open him out onto that vast dance of years!
Let him touch with aureate fingers
that marvelous surprise, small savory divinity
buried deep in your jewelled ocean.
For there an immensity of being seethes
off the roaring flames of your undying intensity.
There the spectres laugh
as the universe offers them eternal flesh
for the small price of one priceless embrace
that plays over
and over again.
*****
With every revolution of mind,
a piquancy.
Time remembers each moment
we don't
to forget its own existence.
Means the heartmail,
impossible suture of patience.
Each breath leans toward that
encasement,
there inside visible volume,
elusive someone inside,
somewhere.
Can you hear her?
Festivities of resistance are
her primal notations,
special voices just in case the fetish-knot
of solitude decides
to unravel
through thorough interiors and
the bleeding seepage.
Manically, the frontiers corrode.
With every glance of wind,
a tenacity.
An irriguous smoke twists spartan
inside the eloquent cage,
fingers collecting impatient rubble
from sullen, conscious impressions.
Wrinkles build eventual eyes,
incessant stones,
chloroforms of insouciance,
driblets from the queendoms saline
distentions.
Then the nightlight slipped inside,
feverish confederate
with so many unanswered assumptions.
The whole conglomerate of days
vanished
with each reticent envelope
of extinguished desire.
Inside the voluptuous walls,
with fury-dense heat,
could someone have forged the signs
by which every association would have
signalled
its own irrefutable demise?
She will remain inside
her box of choruses,
and I,
outside her and alone,
forever will dance in imitation
beside those buried fires.
*****
This irridescent tendril,
the nameless Event,
solicitous and emphatic
we inhabit as
Being's lustrous swerve.
My lip's inverted kiss
awaiting those closed ascensions
dusted emerald
across night's reptilian
awakenings.
But now
when it is no longer enough
just to listen?
Never the remnants of my requests,
only dense
incoherent rhythms
limned between keepsake eyes
and a young laughter
saturnine
and invasive.
The way desire awakes toward death,
despairs (momentarily),
then disappears
inside its distended cocoon,
a convalescence
recalcitrant levity of stone
until
from grey hibernation
it resurrects
once again
woven with a warp of equivocation
inside the glass chamber
of dissipation
where no sense ever arrives
to breathe.
Inside this failure
a silent cascade of light
that finds its fluid,
absolute
and distant.
What severant lens then
that sluiced to love's interior
lacks communication?
They see visions
epochal glances
through cryptic fields
while I am left to wonder
whose eyes and fingers are these?
whose voices?
Disclosure
swilled inside mercurial
figurines
always
with igneous hands,
my own manipulations
arrested
in their crossfade
like obsequious knees
bent toward these other
noble, euphoric fires.
*****
Which of us is unable to see
white doves clouding the streams where
once our two bodies needed
no company,
no kind animal wings, inside or outside,
to hide a distance
that did not exist.
With the splashing twists of Eros
we made the stars laugh
in the jealous glint of their smiles,
our thighs roving slowly toward open skies.
Now into dark mountains
your legs crawl,
leaving light behind
far from the clockwork fingers of mine,
these empty relics,
restless, futile, remembering
that now seem to grasp at only
nothing
or everything that once dipped our souls
in creamy animadversions.
Watching you go, I wonder
must my legs also take
those same steps now,
and resting, it is a mystery to me why
I see no dark mountains,
no sharp voices calling for me.
Somewhere the crude shapes of lucid recollection
resonate more decadent tonight
than a salon
and beyond expectation they seem stretching
eternally
inside my finitude
wearing eyes that make no inroads
into the forests of tomorrow.
Vibrating among lesser foam of a twilit shore
are pink carnations picked by panting angels
handing to me petals of sandy sound,
a voice that is no longer yours,
inchoate dreams flushing out my
forever spotless ignorance.
The paths we may have taken
together
we never took because
every vase inside our house wound up
broken
alongside the old dusty shoes.
The shards of glass gathered before me,
I am holding a jar of glue out to you
and already your shoulders are
turned fishing toward a door marked
"hopeful future."
So I will go home now
with the vision of just your back
and with the string in your hair
that you carry into the mountains
unrolling in my hand.
It is already too far unravelled.
The string will drop from my fingers
eventually and then I
will lay down for the last time
on a bed of sleepless streams
that will slowly drift my raft through
the range
to the wide, ever-gracious seas.
*****
The deep blue
of latest sky arrives
simmering
within the grasp of proud branches.
It wants to steal emptiness
out of those windows dripping
with yesterday.
Waiting,
awake but sharing no
vigilance,
my heart
a spout brusque with
writhing waters,