Jerome ROTHENBERG
from A Book of Concealments
A MAN IN LOVE WITH DEATH
A man in love with death
is still a man.
He sees his hands bleed
with another's cankers, sees
the blood cold in his eye,
a rosy episode
smeared over walls & door.
The others enter through it,
sit beside him.
What does he hear?
Where does a life
begin & end?
How fast? How far?
Who but the dead
can claim an end
to numbers?
In his head he learns
to count them with his hands
they are more real
than right.
Deceit of numbers
raising questions in the mind
that's helpless
& of doors that will not
shut the others
waiting for a door to shut
behind them for his voice
to be a voice
that speaks for them,
one of the lonely
dead.
A DOUBLE SCHISM
There is a pope
who waits for you,
a pope who sits on cushions,
paints his fingernails
a shade of red
so much like blood
it scares the dead away.
The men who stare at
their own faces
on the screen,
who write on air,
declare
his holiness.
By night the father
breaks apart,
halfway inside the window
cut in two.
He is four fathers
now, his eyes
awash with tears,
with bells that sound off
in his skull
A double schism
links to
double happiness.
The four who are
our fathers
call themselves
the pope.
They name their brides
America & point
their tongues
at heaven.
They are everything
his mother
wanted ministers
of grace.
A trickle down his leg
is sign of rapture.
Two plus two is five.
The fathers without
issue are the lords
of those who do.
THE DRAUGHT OF VIOLENCE
The strut of fabled men
like women
leaves the gun uncocked,
the crown unkempt.
A glow around
the pubis see the feathers
shine. Here sits
an apparatus
& beside it
boys flit by like bats.
The door into her bosom
closes opens
letting in a puff
of smoke, the draught
of violence
that draws extinction in.
A wheel inside a wheel
spins feebly dirt
that clogs its spokes
& turns into a mud
the mind of man
can't fathom.
Goons make love
in graves the water
seeps between their toes
& forms
a second element.
Sky is a third.
The man who slit
the pilot's throat not like
a man he is
but like the girl
who drove a spike
into her lover's heart
to suit their god.