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JANICE AND ANDREW MARVELL ARE ONE
Janice, come show your soul, and tell
whether I have contrived it well, in moments
when I speak to you as if I could recreate it. As if my
sentence could startle you. Soul, soul, soul,
how can you paint a soul? What’s a soul, who’s a soul? Fuck
it,
now all it’s several lodgings (if a soul
could reside in what we call dormitories) are lies,
lies, lies, comprised in galleries, artful suggestions
of hanging metaphors; and the great
arras- hangings, made of various faces,
Janice faces (none of which are you?) are violations,
are laid; and I am not...
That, for all frameworks, and all words
being only accessories, you’ll find
your faces in my mind.
Janice,
here you are, painted in the dress,
the prom dress, which fell off you that
night two years before playing pool. And here
a shadow I never intersected,
an inhuman temptress, a murderess of desire.
Using poetry as a torture device,
a contrivance to place you in my clutches,
in language engines more keen than
yet ever adorned a tyrant’s cabinet (this
cabinet or the one you may be leaning on),
of which the most tormenting features are
catalogues, similes, and images, black eyes,
when your eyes are not black, red lips
when your lips are not red, and curled hair
trailing as I cannot depict.
On the other hand, you are drawn
like a stick figure or a goddess, like
Aurora in the dawn, when in the east she slumbering lies
like an orange pigtail unleashed to bite the atmosphere.
You’re a collection of lines that don’t connect, and
broken rays of the sun, and as you strain open your milky
thighs,
I am the light craning stilts for shadows on your stubble,
while all the morning dove choir does sing,
LA LA LA LA LA LA LA
and manna falls, and we eat it up, and roses spring,
and we eat them too, and cut up our mouths,
and behold at your feet, wooing doves are perfecting
their harmless loves. And we eat them, too,
blistering birds, we serve them with toast for breakfast.
Freckled enchantress, you’re
tossing off references to your restless lover’s ghost,
you’re eating too much, you are
not even here, you are somewhere that
I cannot see, and by an obscure light,
you’re raving over entrails in a dusky crackled cave,
divining an image of how you wish to be seen,
an image of low long you will be smooth and clean, peachy
and plump, and juicy and fine.
Who is the lover that you disembowel to
ascertain the future, Janice? The one ahead of me I cannot
see?
Lord Claud? Andrew Marvell? Djangus Khan? ME?
Ah, against that vision,
you’re not really an enchantress, I don’t think,
not on purpose. You’d sit like a venus in a misty ocean
cloud.
Showered by pearls (or beads of semen),
as a rolling wave of representation appears,
bearing a mass of ambergris, blowing
sea wind and perfume thru the rise of the tide.
Red ball in the corner pocket, my head
rotating in action, in hole, why did your body
disappear, leaving only a faint scent of
pungent orchids and an empty box of air?
Irretrievable information,
the ghosts of your faces,
these images and a thousand more,
all stored in my gallery.
No bullshit? No bullshit? No bullshit…?
No galleries, no pictures, no
evidence of all the forms you could possibly invent,
there’s just a series of disconnected metaphors,
which tease me, please me and torment me,
and of all the pictures (which are not) the face
at the beginning is the best, at the first
moment where we meet, when life begins,
where the posture remains, the look with
which I first was taken...Jan/ Janice,
tender shepardess, gently pushing a pool cue,
your red hair hanging loosely in air, transplanting
flowers from the green hill, blowing them into
my eyes, while my lips freeze to kiss your
freckles, to crown your head, to anchor your
bosom tightly. So frail, I would that moment
had perpetuated itself. But had it
occurred before we checked the clock,
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