Scarecrow & Other Anomalies (8 page)

One morning, the thousands and thousands of crows that circled over the city—darkening it at the height of day—disbanded in the presence of a squadron of airplanes.

The planes were bound on a clean-up mission whose implacable scientific rigor was evident from the first moment.

Without getting too close, so as to avoid the danger of contagion, the planes fumigated the rooftops with every type of disinfectant, dropping bombs filled with vitamins, aphrodisiac confetti and little balloons inflated with optimism, until a prolonged examination demonstrated the futility of every prophylaxis, since the population, topping the world record for extinctions, had been reduced to six or seven moribund hold-outs.

Only then, after obtaining this evidence, they ordered the destruction of the city, and a downpour of grenades burned it up altogether in a single flame, reducing it to rubble and ashes, making sure that the miasma of the certainty of death would spread no farther.

                        POEMS

INVITATION TO VOMIT

Cover your face

and cry.

Vomit.

Yes!

Vomit,

thick slivers of glass,

bitter straight pins,

worm-eaten words,

stifled shrieks of fright;

puke on this pus-flood of innocence overflowing its banks,

this slime of sickening iniquity sloshing from its trench,

and this fetid, denatured submissiveness brewed

from a flatulent broth of terror and starvation.

Cover your face

and cry...

but don’t hold back.

Vomit.

Yes!

Vomit,

retch in the face of this macabre paranoiac stupidity,

heave all over this delirious stentorian cretinism,

and this senile orgy of prostatic egoism:

foul coagulations of dried-up disgust,

pulped hulks of impotence already drowned

in a rancid gravy of boredom,

rotten chunks of soured hope...

hours split open by neighings of anguish.

IT’S ALL DROOL

It’s all drool.

Your drool.

Effervescent drool.

Caustic,

fetid drool;

black, rancid drool

which slavers slimily in a slobbering stream of stinking snot

from your gangrenous, cud-crunching lips,

from your putrid oyster pupils,

from your pustulous blisters encrusted with grit,

from your festering umbilicals of a worn-out quack,

from your buboes swollen with compounded interest

with usurious acts;

pestilential drool,

doctoral drool,

which mucks the silk settees with a slather of mucoid spittle,

which glops the plushest armchairs with gobs of congealing goo.

Yammering, stammering drool,

adhesive,

viscous,

which cruds the cork-lined walls

and plots a major crime against the breast pocket of a blazer.

Driveling, dissolving drool.

Acrid, oxidizing drool.

Drool.

That right! Your drool...

which clogs the hours,

perverts the air,

dribbles onto paper,

coats metal with unguent sputum;

infects repose,

eyes and innocence,

with its worm-eaten queasiness,

its virus of loathing,

of idiocy,

of blindness,

of indigence,

of death.

MIASMIC EXECUTION

What is this fog of asphyxia which congests the lungs

with the gasping anguish of a landed fish?

This adhesive and errabund stench,

which poisons life

and dunks us in viscous nightmares of mud?

This corrupt miasma,

which stops up our pores

with pulpy cravings,

with squished-grape desires,

does not arise,

nor has arisen

from these agglomerations of dirty hemoglobin,

quicklime,

caustic soda,

hydrogen,

uric acid,

that infect mattresses,

ceilings,

sidewalks,

with their tender souls

and their leprous gestures.

This homicidal smell,

creeping,

ineluctable,

flows from other sources,

ensues from other springs.

Filtering through all the dead years,

the rancid afternoons,

the gaseous sepulchers,

the underground passages,

it has agglutinated with the pestiferous saps,the fetid detritus,

the corrosive viscera,

the rotten splinters leaving the crime,

the purulent moronity,

the iniquity without sex,

the gangrenous inveiglement;

until it floats on the air,

fills itself with wind

and turns corporeal;

so as to fling open windows,

penetrate rooms,

snatch us by the scruff of the neck,

and rub our noses in puke,

while screaming its ill will,

its aversion,

its disparagement,

for all that blunts the acrimony of the hours,

for all that lifts the anguish of the days.

WEARINESS

Weary.

Yes!

Weary

of having only one spleen,

two lips,

twenty digits,

who knows how many words,

who knows how many memories,

graying,

fragmentary.

Weary,

very weary

of this freezing skeleton,

so chaste,

so clean,

that when it undresses,

I can’t tell whether or not it’s the same one

that I used while living.

Weary.

Yes!

Weary

of lacking antennae,

an eye in each shoulder blade,

an authentic tail,

happy,

loosely dangling,

instead of this hypocritical rump,

degenerate,

stunted.Weary,

above all,

of being always myself,

of finding me each morning,

at the end of a dream,

there, bumbling into myself,

with the same nostrils

and the same legs;

as if I didn’t long

to breach a crack in the wet crust of the beach,

to offer, to the dew, breasts made of magnolias,

to caress the earth with a caterpillar’s stomach,

to live, for months at a time, inside of a rock.

BLOODLESS DICHOTOMY

My hand always shows up

later than another hand that mixes with mine,

and together they form a hand.

When I am going to sit down

I notice that my body

settles in another body that just sat down

where I feel myself to be.

And at the precise moment

I enter a house,

I discover that I am already there

before having arrived.

Thus it is quite possible that I may not attend my own funeral,

and while being watered with commonplaces,

I will find myself already six feet under,

clothed in a skeleton,

enduring the boring news and floods of false tears.

NIHILISM

Nothing from nothing:

is everything.

So I love you, not a bit.

Entirely!

For nothing.

PROWESS

Everything,

everything,

in the air,

in the water,

on the earth,

jumbled and acidic,

disintegrated,

lost.

Water made horse before cloud and rain.

Bulls transformed into submissive pulleys.

The hoax unveiled,

no tutu,

no tits.

The impudent lie exhibiting its rump

in every position,

on every corner.

The voracious moths of cooked-up expediency,

costumed as hyenas,

as tapirs with tool kits.

The ceilings emigrating in furtive flocks.

The windows spitting out dentures of pianos,

sauce pans,

mirrors,

carbonized legs.

Therefore look

without a pinch of moss,

my heart of tinder,

at what we did,

at what we’ve done

with our poor hands,

with our skeletons of winter and summer.

Unleash the fire.

Applaud the disaster.

Process,

with rubber,

the pustulant appetites.

Prostitute twilight.

Worship baloneys

and the dried brains of softened walnuts...

As if nothing more existed than sweat and disgust;

as if we yearned only to nurture with our blood

the roots of rancor;

as if it weren’t depressing enough

to know that we are nothing but a pale turd

of love,

of death.

DOWNFALL

I plummeted,

I fell

among splinters and bones,

among teardrops of sand

and showers of glass,

then I heard them shouting:

“Down!”

“Farther down!”

and I kept falling,

turning round

and round,

among stinging ashes

and mangled screams,

“Down!”

“Farther down!”

in a spiral,

revolving,

engulfed in demolition,

in murky tourbillions,

of flakes and fragments,

of slivers,

of howls,

“Down!”

“Farther down!”

among rubble and ruins

ravings,

reports,

asphyxiation,

within a horror, within a mystery,

beyond breath,

beyond light,

beyond recollection.

VORTEX

From the sea, to the mountains,

over land,

through the air,

from one mouth to another,

spinning,

whirling,

between furniture and shadows,

fretful,

screaming,

I have lost my life,

I don’t know where,

I don’t know when.

QUIBBLE

It appears that I am living,

that I exist amid this noise,

that I can see these walls,

that these hands are mine,

but perhaps I am mistaken

and walls and hands

are only things remembered

from a former life.

I said “it appears.”

I don’t guarantee a thing.

NARROW PURPOSE

Too corporeal,

limited,

compact.

I’ll have to open up these pores

and disintegrate a little.

I’m not saying too much.

LUNARLUDE

        to Norah Lange

I SAW HIM leaning against a wall, his eyes almost phosphorescent and, at his feet, a shadow much twitchier and raggedier than that of a tree.

How can I account for his weariness, that look of a dilapidated and anonymous house that is known only by objects condemned to the worst humiliations?

Would it suffice to say that his muscles sought relief from the strain of supporting a skeleton so gangly that it was capable of wearing out even the most recently donned clothes? Would it take any special persuading to see that this same artificiality of effect ended up by giving the impression of a mannequin lumbered in the corner of a storeroom?

Eyelashes brimming with the sickly climate of his pupils, he hung around this café where we used to meet, and, rooted at the far end of the table, stared at me as though through a cloud of gnats.

One certainly would not have needed a well-developed archaeological instinct to confirm that I am not exaggerating or overstating the case when I describe the fascinating seduction of his allure as an impudence and impunity recalling something extinct... except that the wrinkles and the shiny veneer of these corroded vestiges, corresponding to the same premature decrepitude suffered by public edifices, were all too real.

Although accustomed to abiding hour after hour in silence, he could at times be prevailed upon to relate some episode from his life, or to recite a poem by Corbière or Mallarmé. Never was it more dreadful to be in his vicinity! Amid the incessant fumes of a cigarette, his voice, full of soot, resonated as if it were belched from a chimney, while his immobility lent him the murky intrepidity of a portrait of someone whom no one remembers and his dentures stubbornly persisted in contriving the most grossly inopportune smiles. In vain would we try to bring the content of some verse to life. After the silence of each strophe came his breath of an unmade bed, the misgiving each time his skeleton emitted some noise, while his beard grew with the same susurration as that of beards growing on the dead... And for someone already on that slippery slope, it took but a gesture or glance, in which we could see something akin to those pairs of stockings that hang in hotel wardrobes next to desperately twisting dickeys, to prompt thoughts of suicide.

Even if we resisted these excesses, how could we contemplate, on the other hand, the bramble patch of his wrinkles without imagining all the lost nights, all the hollow and helpless murmurs that, stratifying themselves with the slowness of stalactites, had formed creases of fatigue that not even death itself would iron flat?

In order to survey them from one extreme to the other without losing myself in the process, I found myself forced to examine them with the same concentration with which I follow routes on a map and, thoroughly absorbed by this outward record of his mishaps, rarely heard what he was saying. Even on those occasions when we found ourselves alone, when I didn’t miss entire phrases, they reached me with the same intermittence as when, through an opened window, one hears the chopped-up noises of the street. It was useless to refocus my attention! Always some word leaked away, some particular so essential that, before I could answer, I had to undertake an endeavor equivalent to translating an encrypted document. Garnished with the same premeditation as those dishes that arrive elaborately mummified at a dinner table, his dialectic—aside from other things—did not stimulate my appetite too much, since he compounded an abusive employment of paradox with an insistence upon quoting from as many books as had fostered his fearsome ability to handle rhymes, an ability that he demonstrated often enough by means of a sample of verses as worn out as the envelopes on which he had scribbled them.