Monday, March 8, 2010

Code man in black mac / Liffey:

According to Joyce
the Coffin lay in its bier
& the mourners knelt
L. Bloom
C. P. M’Coy,
Dash Mc’Intosh
& several others
I don’t recall who was
The Figure
Standing just by
Over there
Now gone
Mistaken for name of the figure
The boy turned man
O the boy turned man at the grave sight
The thirteenth mourner
& as Joyce puts it
Mistaken for a stranger
But disappears
Of a course to become judged in his black mackintosh funereal attire
Ever muted
By a stoppage in prayer
& Paddy Dignam’s poor corpse
The word benign like the divine
& him bursting
& us so benign
Oddly dimpled bowler
Mentioned on the head of a mourner
Standing aback of us
Entirely of a nature to disappear
Mourner of the other 12
At the plot of
Poor Dignam
& as I said Joyce said
Paddy Dignam
His legacy of
Good humor
A bent elbow for the fun
Bon mots just for the world
The grave
The one in it
No balm like a black balm
A balm so sweet
Of choices
Strategically arranged
A life steered through
& around
Navigable they want us to believe
And down along the sweet flowing Liffey
The crones squawk
Indefinably
Notions of flowing
Of hair by the river
A woman’sssssSssSSsSSssss long strands
Same as desire
So cunning
Languor of the siren’sssssSS sSsSS Ss SSSSsssss
Eternal flesh
No longer a boy
A man now
Per chance transformed
To invisibility
O black in his black macintosh
No longer
A boy
I’ve a rare bone to pick with the river Liffey
From which
It is clear
All speech flows in the world
The heart-stopped-world
Spoken to
The bone-yard-world
Flowed through
By a river
The bone-yard-tune
Creeping under
The stranger’s black mackintosh
Like a desire he detests quenching
Out of the grave’s cusp of loam
Came Liffey
A moment in it
Both grave & Liffey
Some shuddering belch of an “Excuse me,
Are you in there?”
If
& when

No comments: