Project

^{translated by Tess O’Dwyer}

My tanks were filled with gasoline and wars. I was a lead soldier. I marched
against the smoke of the city. There were difficult moments and there were,
Hello! How are you? They were all worth the same. I had two pennies. I
could enter the city. But they closed the doors on me. I closed my soul on
them. They didn’t know what had happened. Did my soul pass by here?
Body, I said to you, how are you? I have been a lead soldier. The voice that
said it was not what it said. I almost swear by the road. But the segment,
the march loaded with clay, eyes of asphalt, hands of lime, legs of drill,
navels of cement, resounded, resounded, resounded—the anvils of the
hammer against the beams of the body—drilling, drilling, drilling me.
Marching in time, the wall and the latch, the heart, my soul, the precipice of
the trucks. And everything was black, black, black, white—like the asphalt.
And the world closed its doors—anvils and hammers against the sleeping
men—the doors of the heart, cities everywhere and little lead soldiers.

In the burned house I am eating breakfast.
You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,
yet here I am.

The spoon which was melted scrapes against
the bowl which was melted also.
No one else is around.

Where have they gone to, brother and sister,
mother and father? Off along the shore,
perhaps. Their clothes are still on the hangers,

their dishes piled beside the sink,
which is beside the woodstove
with its grate and sooty kettle,

every detail clear,
tin cup and rippled mirror.
The day is bright and songless,

the lake is blue, the forest watchful.
In the east a bank of cloud
rises up silently like dark bread.

I can see the swirls in the oilcloth,
I can see the flaws in the glass,
those flares where the sun hits them.

I can't see my own arms and legs
or know if this is a trap or blessing,
finding myself back here, where everything

in this house has long been over,
kettle and mirror, spoon and bowl,
including my own body,

including the body I had then,
including the body I have now
as I sit at this morning table, alone and happy,

bare child's feet on the scorched floorboards
(I can almost see)
in my burning clothes, the thin green shorts

and grubby yellow T-shirt
holding my cindery, non-existent,
radiant flesh. Incandescent.

                        1 

Every October it becomes important, no, necessary
to see the leaves turning, to be surrounded
by leaves turning; it's not just the symbolism,
to confront in the death of the year your death,
one blazing farewell appearance, though the irony 
isn't lost on you that nature is most seductive
when it's about to die, flaunting the dazzle of its 
incipient exit, an ending that at least so far 
the effects of human progress (pollution, acid rain)
have not yet frightened you enough to make you believe
is real; that is, you know this ending is a deception
because of course nature is always renewing itself—
        the trees don't die, they just pretend,
        go out in style, and return in style: a new style.





                        2 

Is it deliberate how far they make you go
especially if you live in the city to get far 
enough away from home to see not just trees 
but only trees? The boring highways, roadsigns, high 
speeds, 10-axle trucks passing you as if they were 
in an even greater hurry than you to look at leaves:
so you drive in terror for literal hours and it looks 
like rain, or snow, but it's probably just clouds
(too cloudy to see any color?) and you wonder, 
given the poverty of your memory, which road had the 
most color last year, but it doesn't matter since 
you're probably too late anyway, or too early—
        whichever road you take will be the wrong one
        and you've probably come all this way for nothing.






                        3 

You'll be driving along depressed when suddenly
a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through
and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably
won't last. But for a moment the whole world
comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives—
red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion,
gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations
of burning. You're on fire. Your eyes are on fire.
It won't last, you don't want it to last. You 
can't stand any more. But you don't want it to stop. 
It's what you've come for. It's what you'll
come back for. It won't stay with you, but you'll 
        remember that it felt like nothing else you've felt
        or something you've felt that also didn't last.

I once beheld the end of time!
   Its stream had ceased to be.
The drifting years, all soiled with crime,
   Lay in a filthy sea.

The prospect o’er the reeking waste
   Was plain from where I stood.
From shore to shore the wreckage faced
   The surface of the flood.

There all that men were wont to prize
   When time was flowing on,
Seemed here to sink and there to rise
   In formless ruin blown.

In slimy undulations roiled
   The glory of the brave;
The scholar’s fame, the rich man’s gold,
   Alike were on the wave.

There government, a monstrous form
   (The sea groaned ’neath the load),
A helpless mass blown by the storm,
   On grimy billows rode.

The bodies of great syndicates
   And corporations, trusts,
Proud combinations, and e’en states,
   All beasts of savage lusts,

With all the monsters ever bred
   In civilization’s womb,
Lay scattered, floating, dead,
   Throughout that liquid tomb.

It was the reign of general death,
   Wide as the sweep of eye,
Save two vile ghosts that still drew breath
   Because they could not die.

Ambition climbed above the waves
   From wreck to wreck he strove.
And as they sank to watery waves,
   He on to glory rode.

And there was Greed—immortal Greed—
   Just from the shores of time.
Of all hell’s hosts he took the lead,
   A monarch of the slime.

He neither sank below nor rose
   Above the brewing flood;
But swam full length, down to his nose,
   And steered where’er he would.

Whatever wreckage met his snout
   He swallowed promptly down—
Or floating empire, or redoubt,
   Or drifting heathen town.

And yet, it seemed in all that streaming waste
There nothing so much gratified his taste
As foetid oil in subterranean tanks,
And cliffs of coal untouched in nature’s banks,
Or bits of land where cities might be built,
As foraging plats for vileness and guilt;
Or fields of asphalt, soft as fluent salve
Or anything the Indian asked to have.

I once beheld the end of time!
   Its stream had run away;
The years all drifted down in slime,
   In filth dishonored lay.

So we, who've supped the self-same cup,
    To-night must lay our friendship by;
Your wrath has burned your judgment up,
    Hot breath has blown the ashes high.
You say that you are wronged— ah, well,
    I count that friendship poor, at best
A bauble, a mere bagatelle,
    That cannot stand so slight a test.

I fain would still have been your friend,
    And talked and laughed and loved with you;
But since it must, why, let it end;
    The false but dies, 't is not the true.
So we are favored, you and I,
    Who only want the living truth.
It was not good to nurse the lie;
    'Tis well it died in harmless youth.

I go from you to-night to sleep.
    Why, what's the odds? why should I grieve?
I have no fund of tears to weep
    For happenings that undeceive.
The days shall come, the days shall go
    Just as they came and went before.
The sun shall shine, the streams shall flow
    Though you and I are friends no more.

And in the volume of my years,
    Where all my thoughts and acts shall be,
The page whereon your name appears
    Shall be forever sealed to me.
Not that I hate you over-much,
    'Tis less of hate than love defied;
Howe'er, our hands no more shall touch,
    We'll go our ways, the world is wide.

A fairy came out of the woods,
A creature bewitchingly fair;
A dress would have stolen the beauty
Half-hid by the locks of her hair.

She said that not far from the wilds,
Where the rill gives itself to the brook,
She had seen what for years I was searching
In cavern and crevice and nook.

She led me the way to a spring,
Where to drink meant awakening love;
A draught of the cool, magic waters
Brought pleasure untasted above.

Expectant, I closed on her steps,
We came to the brook and the rill,
But the spring was not there nor elsewhere,
And the woodland was silent and still.

Then sternly, not looking, I asked,
“Where, O fairy, is that which I seek?”
There was nothing but silence for answer,
No fairy was there then to speak.

Clatter into the window this late night.  
We were flabbergasted, tired
of the newly-minted drunks and meth-kids
with squeals for fists.

We live downtown, 
exposed to the alley. 

Nothing dangerous, and we were not alarmed. 
But still, every sound turns us into pins on points,

a sleep of figuring out: deeply felt turns:
wrestling little autocrats

that fly or stick—nothing more than thistles 
or wasps, but a sting is always a sting.

It must be we who are having the trouble: 
it's our estranged perception of thinking.

Are we actually perceiving?  
Do things truly mock us?
Or do we ourselves mock? 

We must find our own modernization bill, 
a folly stamp that appeases us with its generous 
humanizing. We can be reckless, we can overreact.

Let's not be bewildered by the graces 
that sometimes leave us,
by our paunches that are not always gargantuan, 
that we haven't sewn shame in to suit our false selves. 

The fit of relief or deferment is near. 
What we find next is important. 
What would happen if our window 
arranged a life for us—
something intentionally
on view. 

And we looked out at the reconciliation 
of the rest of the world: 
Wasps and drunks and meth-kids
arm in arm in arm in arm.

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning