“les fleurs qui flottent/ dans la mer”
"I know you're in there - I can smell your brain …" Return of the Living Dead (1985)
I suppose if I were forced by powers beyond my control to come back as a zombie, a flesh eating one might be of some interest. Yet it seems so stereotyped, commonplace, platitudinous. And why a hunger for brains? I don't like the brain;1 the spleen is much better. Or gonads, ovaries, testes? Just think of all the Freudian symbolism in a testes-eating zombie film. John Osborne would go crazy. Perhaps the world needs a testes-eating villanelle? Something along the lines of Mark Strand's "Eating Poetry": "Ink runs from the corners of my mouth … I romp with joy in the bookish dark"? Or Wislawa Szymborska's wonderful "Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem;"
In the poem's opening words
the authoress asserts that while the Earth is small,
the sky is excessively large and
in it there are, I quote, "too many stars for our own good" …
Too much rapture for our own good … too much of everything for our own good! Maybe we need to start with corrections, then? One of my friends, Lydie, who lives in a little house on the French Atlantic coast, sent this to me about a week ago; correction of my little French poem. She wrote, in part, "I found myself really suprised this morning … I was not expecting … translations in 6 different languages including unreadables, and so on … I also read that you stayed in Armenia for a while; which explains why you translated in this language (I first thought you were insane) …"
Tu ne peux pas te regarder
dans les vagues. Toute
chose va tres vite. Mon
visage est cicatrisé
ou abîmé par
les fleurs qui flottent
dans la mer.
Thank you, Pimousse, thank you! With Szymborska's and Lydie's comments in mind, with Pablo Neruda's "Poet's Obligation" and "Oatmeal," by Galway Kinnell in mind, I thnk this is where we shall start, with a word, "oracular," meaning "1. of, relating to, or being an oracle; 2. resembling or characteristic of an oracle: a) solemnly prophetic; b) enigmatic; obscure" —
spit it out/ the word/ all oracular
words/ meaning: heat/ flash/ you, meaning: rapture
But let us not be enigmatic or obscure because we have nothing to say; let's not confuse or surprise anyone because its easier to be obscure than wise, sagacious, understandable. Because, because, words concerning empty poetry aren't the only thing that happened to me lately. Photoplay, cinema, moving pictures also surprised me. At some point in the distant past I thought I would be clever and devise a grand "list of every movie featuring a poet or poem I could think of;" string them together in some loose way and present it to the world. By all means, I thought, no one else could have thought about Hollywood's connection to the spoken word as source for inspiration and fascination. The list took a long while because I rarely watch movies. A little of what followed looked a bit like this:
Dylan Thomas' "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" in Solaris, (2002);
Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric" from Bull Durham (1988);
Edgar Allan Poe's “Ulalume” in Lolita (1962);
Langston Hughes' "Montage of a Dream Deferred" in A Raisin in the Sun (1961);
T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men from Apocalypse Now (1979);
"The Song of Songs" from the Bible in Once upon a Time in America (1984);
W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues" in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994);
Charles Baudelaire's "The Jewels" in La Letrice [The Reader] (1988);
Dorothy Parker's "Resume" in Girl, Interrupted (1999);
W.B. Yeats' "The Stolen Child in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001);
Federico Garcia Lorca's "Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías" in The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca (1997) …
Then, one fine morning before dawn, I discovered that Stacey Harwood had beaten me to the punch some time ago with "Poetry in Movies," a much more exhaustive list than I could ever hope to come up with published in The Michigan Quarterly Review. This just proves there is great joy not only in moving your arms but in discovering there are no original thoughts under the sun. Sooner or later I will discover everything I have written was footnoted a long time ago in some translated, yellowing, rag-tag autobiography, journal, hagiography. And yes, before you ask, the line: "talking vulgar of the furies" is a poor man's riff on Yusef Komunyakaa's book title: "Talking Dirty to the Gods." O, fou, fou, fou, sauvage, sauvage, sauvage.
spit it out/ my word/ all oracular,
crude/ we are always so crude?/ speak all these
words/ meaning: heat, flash, you/ meaning: rapture
except you don't/ buy it/ myths/ gods/ moisture
for you isn't hades' dew/ crises
you spit out/ your words/ all oracular
with rage/ doubting is rage/ each more vulgar
as if/ "talking vulgar of the furies"/
could mean words: heat/ flash/ you, could mean: rapture
too/ rapture without hubris/ a seizure
without a body/ you mouth a word:/ "please"
spit it out/ the word/ all oracular
in its fawning/ "you[r w]help"/ see? these lesser
signs hide inside the bigger/ our whimsies'
words/ meaning: heat/ flash/ you/ meaning: rapture
"i honk rapture"/ reads a bumper sticker
crudely/ we are always crude/ but with ease
we spit it out/ words/ all oracular
words/ meaning: heat/ flash/ you, meaning: rapture
- Regardless of Woody Allen quipping it is his second favorite organ. [back]