Laurence WEISBERG
POEMS
Laurence Weisberg . . . 1953–2003
. . . Occasional Resident of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oaxaca and Sulawesi. His published works include The Glacial Blush and Phantomatic. Uncompromising poet of life, his conversation and knowledge were luminous, generous, changing the course of innumerable lives.
I will drag all the images into the fire
Let them melt, dreaming of fire
The shock of their bodies shattering into blue air
Their voices drowning once more into the song of the sea
from ENTRANCES
The Night We Entered the Forest
For Alice
The lightning winds its roads through the branches of ancient oaks
Heroic weather
Night, by which you embraced heraldically the moonlit forest
A spider has come to lay her eggs in the exact void of your teardrop
A spider who has spun her web from the Pleiades to your starlit cheeks
Between the scream and the whisper your season dwells
Your season lives its light between the fall of evening and the wind
which rips open one by one
the jeweled masks of the beasts
Your season haunts erect the edge of illegible light
that erupts like the tread of paws upon the startled sky
flaming its twilight-voiced-blossom of inaudible laughter
For you are adorned
Most beautiful and solemn star
Lost one
who finds herself lifted beyond the song of the dream
into this forest
My love
adored and adorned
in this panoply of shadows
SUMMER
Bleeding like a vase
the inscape of fallen arrows
I return to the earth-trimmed robes of dream women
who open seeds with the rays of the moon
this tragedy of winter
the silent nymphs entering the mirror
spasmodically your slipper roasts the weave of the equator
it was the age of ELECTION
until now only lions came to drink the pond’s impossible cache of eyes
without the seasonal shudder of birds
where they would open their wings only in the heat of the wind
the violet ring you wear surveys the opulent fissures
which hyphenate the world
fissures where volume alone inlaid its agile roots
like so many perfumes the path drew to its vapors the swords of
dreaming plants
the fruits’ derangement the entrances of the centipede’s birth
a mirror silvered with the blood of a deer
summer a great blue fly
TARGETS
The brackish trail marked out by a honeycombed shelter of ice
with a fingerprint of blood
walks in mandibles of sight like a blue parrot
opening a canal of foreheads and fixes confluent armies
integrating a vast sulphur corpse
with Babylonian turbines that spin on
in rooms hatched from drums of stretched water
as if night could come unscathed from the mill of intrepid goats
who fill your eyes with the light of ritual murder
that will not unlock all the arms from the oars of a ship of roses
Castaway in Arcadia
jade seeds fall from bagpipes at the feet of a scorpion
who raises his cup with the lost look of space
a huge space of uninterrupted cries that call to us
from a tiny cathedral of crystal that bends the leaf of your eyes
where the wolves have gathered upstream
walking over a sword of vapor
cashmere to coffee in a poppy’s symbol
A mole near your left ear surmounts all but the Druidic bicycle
THE MARKET OF LIES
From the moment of the ascent blue fur reigned over the domain of knocking sounds
Twilight would fasten itself to our lips anywhere
The handshake was exchanged to the tone of gold
And yet we were escorted by a thunderbolt that appeared to us as twins
of the same father but of different mothers
We were handed a species of mental deliberation
With a tail of broken glass wetting our previous attacks
We rode through a nocturnal chamber illumined by creole hex signs
serrated long ago in the cave of the stringed-horse
Violent was the scabbard of kisses combined with a paw of milk
Four headed the wound ripened the bolt on the cliff’s heart
Three times the fungus was raised and declared “Fox Eyes”
Tormenting the mahagony minstrel who sipped blood from the light
of a diamond caught in the gills of a salmon
The scarlet arena that floats in the net of a wave you have yet to summon
Pronounces the virgin of the key or rather the virgin who has found
the key
Who counts on her fingers up to ten with the certitude of a lark
Like you and without you
On her lap the beach drinks Eastward the masks
With a silver finger thrown into the fire her last desert opens
without a word
Calling forth the innumerable and invisible queens
Veiling with their hands what their gaze deposits
Under the fossils of light you have dug your meaning into the water’s face
Like hypnotized trees we signal each other beyond duration
I unseal your invisible waist with the feathers fallen from my departure
That which rules with grace the bleeding mirrors her fingers surround
*
Timberous flowers in flight unhinge the sparkling sound
of the tortoise held motors
a lacerating memory of a door suddenly opened by vestual
beakers of blood
like wounds boiled in the heat of a cricket’s calyces
co-existant with the sedge of the hyena’s gravitational tattooing
leaned out of the octagonal waves of sleep
wet with the branches’ vibratile window
to turn to liqueur the elemental bird of the bridge’s signature
on the sightless interlockings of roads
where seeds of sound pushed to limits defend the waterwheel
of thorns turning a moth into a kiss of black coal
like so many fingers melted in a white room without windows
displayed for convenience secret and opposite
on the spoor of hearts we discover on the way down
I wind my way toward the black toward the folded hands of shell
deaf to the red shawl that discovers space with a lung unlocked
from its torturous wing of five eyes
a rose in each eye opens between the horns of a bull
where rarely seen stars form on the lichen shield of a vacuum’s
optical flurry
gathering the fallen masks the cobalt blue leopard
brings back its python body and gives to the triangle
its meaning
with a hole summoned by spinning signs of doubt
registered on the mother of myths in ink
like an echo rethinking the impossible in pairs
an echo through which night escapes like a crime
bearing its bride in pouches of boiling water
*
The line of the charm
as the body feeds on the air
Dance is unlearning the shadow
The body turning creates a black flower
a lyric
that speaks with fire
The moon treats your step
the earth creeping along your arms
into your sleep
which darkens the windows
with a liquid
that comes from your hands
what dream of echo could
replace the map of this iron geography
a meditation between
the space of each movement
along the ridges of the storm
what eyes catch only the crystal mouse
and the sleeping dog
that only pretends to be a comb
which is truly the fall of night
as gallant as any step forward
catch it in your arms dancer
let the flower that sings in your head
sing constantly
a lyric
that washes along the stones
of sleep
the sun arrests you
because you don’t know your name
in the dance
*
There is a terrible tension in each leaf of the tree
And each path finds you starved before the milk of horned suns
The earth breaks its teeth upon the gravity of owls
Startled within the wheel of your body
And in the silent hearth of butchered animals you stand
Haruspex
Decoder of bones and entrails
In the pirate weather laced with pine cone of muscle
With a crude tendon of steam
In the straining talon of twelve nights
Tinted blades fly from the faceless
As a serpent hides between the two braids of its own brain
And bees swarm over trees of blood
Like yesterday and tomorrow bees swarming
Through fire and through water swarming
I shall venture with you unknown dancer
Dancer ringing from the staff of my spine the high winds
I shall find you . . . even without you . . . know you
from THE GLACIAL BLUSH
CREDO
It is thirst for word bends me down
to fly and crawl within the psychotropic deserts
where human cacti toss the etiquette of dream against
the red stones that barely balance the void
whose dynamo takes from us the perverse hello
and threatens to fill those secret rooms of meditation with a terrible
human odor
Odor of man
tearing feathers from the mouthpiece of love
Odor of man
probing with his stupefying fingers
his own imprudent deaths
Reflections from the he final shields of medicine
herald the beginning of hermetic dentistry
where each tooth extracted by sonic lusts
becomes an eternal memento
of every furthering of the spirit
With each tooth extracted a new world is evolved
from the cuffs of Saturn
from the feather hostage and the script of the stars
A new world where all connections meet in my eyes
Eyes that Eros shamelessly flaunts
in the molting presence of the Sun’s torso
of leather and cream
that will someday erase the moustaches
on the habit of birds
This world exists only for the figures of purple
whose fingers of fish suck at the air
with eyes that no longer see
with breasts that tear the night in two
with flowers that fall through the water of the sky
The populations here have no allegiance to compulsion
yet nightly they wait for the image
that will play over their bodies unendingly
OBSTACLES OF SLEEP
The snail with the one cloven foot
burns my tongue with its solar bell
My tongue swollen with vertigo overturns the sky
with one dark stare
My grip is unfailing the dogs have crawled out of
the wallpaper of infinite meaning
they bear on their backs the infinitesimal theatre
of the air and closer their paws burn the wound
of night
and it is night with the end of salt
Birds pull with their rosy beaks the strings
supporting the fountains of glass whose spray
of sex collapses the mirror of sleep
and it is day with the beginning of lead
In my ear a tusk of light grows branches of flesh
and I touch the cry forced from the mouth of the rain
which is louder and more fierce than your key of sweat
My sweet stone you the antagonist a pentacle
within the short circuit of fish within
the blood of our desires come reside everywhere
about us
Eyes of brick cut the stem of your heart so carefully
Hide in the tree where I wait for your dream
and the allure of a precipice dark
and victorious over the earth
Paris, 1972
from BRIDESTONE
HYDROMANCY
The race of the spiders strayed to the posthumous gates
of the rose
with circular wires held in their beaks of sand
the infinite expanding in their throats
fortifications cannot hold or erase the indelible proof
of the river’s beating wing
arched suddenly over a green couch
(where an egg devours its shell of glass with 234 beats per second of
its heart)
arises with sword in hand
the executor of your desire
As an animal it hovers and displaces
As a stone it dances on the crest of a world
As a plant it speaks to the concubine of the lunar gales
sweeping back your hair with its flaming pulse
Reared like a wolf how could you not advise the lightning
to slake its thirst in the movement of your body
that glazed the Earth as it opened its head of wings
restoring to the Prince of Birds all the ladders of water
repeating the moon’s objects in their lair
in a dialect of flame
hearing itself
for fire cannot burn fire
except to witness
the strength of the tower’s two hands
moth and raven who form a window in the steel
who water the sound of your escaping through the limbus of the river
where fragments of the night desert the telepathy of the red dew
churning the sun as a mouth speaks it.
*
Like a sponge made of angel tissue
I drink these marbleized veins,
in the bar the music evokes an aurora of breezes,
the piano divines Pandora’s box which ruptures the perfumes,
I live at the surface of the soul
A powder breaks down my cords,
the train of my passion derailed
and roots unlinked themselves until cobras crawl from my icy drink
White powder! Strange sugar mixed with taba-root from your island
White powder stitched through swaying hoods which dilate like
Japanese fans over the body of one too early departed!
Your eyes that I would have banished,
that I would have petted with salt,
that I would have steamed and betrothed to the ants,
your eyes
buried like two tongues in the night
lit and crawling with dragon flies . . .
the end and yet
the deathsweat under my palm
as I peel your scales from my body
7 a.m.
from FATE OF THE BIRDS
THE END OF THE FALL
With my eyes I pulled the air apart and re-visaged the golden number
With my body I dived into the light-quarry of breezes
and set the night-avalanche spinning toward the spellbound
animals of the burning forest
Fate drank its first sip of air
And I for the feather’s last night drank the wine of ten thousand dreams
My fingers spoke to the hyacinth
And its mask told me sadly of her misfortune
My ribs extended their magic animals to the twilight
Dusk of lips and ashes
I walked into the ellipse of shudders
The night sky
Fossils that lit me in nacre-sounds
*
I have thrown up the sickness
I have thrown up tiny arrows that have missed
their marks
There is a red circle around the moon
My black vomit on the green grass
Birds from every direction circle
They come to pray in my sickness
They perch and nest in its branches
They will build a monument to my hysteria
I remember the simple music that tore from
my limbs an instrument of sand
which caused the birds to swell and burst
with heaven expanding
in their throats
I remember my broken tail
and my stupendous wings
Commingled in heat
we merged
in the food of worms
in the psyche of wings
*
What you were in the night
and in the occult chambers struggling with time
you are no longer
your body through its hidden signs
is more transparent now
you are drawn toward the black lids
and intangible ashes of my eyes
you close your eyes over the wingbeat
of hazy birds clinging to the threads of my voice
words and rains are mixed with your image
in the obscene alembic of mirrors
from broken vases your radiant breasts drink
the silence of the deltas
and rising toward the tip of my lance
I can see the actual birth of words proceed
to their bodies luminous with rivers
*
With my companion of silk
we will test the soil
we will taste the air
and once again we will resurrect
the arms of the serpent
which when burned again in the ether of rock
will fill the air with a timeless conspiracy
A conspiracy I brush my teeth with
A conspiracy that traps and skins
the stale odor of multiple amnesia
A conspiracy that will devour the savage throne
of the vegetable kingdom
and leave in its place a broken tooth
covered with velvet
an axe and the protection of the sun’s clay fang
Now that all thrones have rotted and fallen to dust
Now that history is no longer possible
I will beat my brow against the heat
of hysterical lacework
A sacrifice to the fire
that is no longer anything but fire
*
Rifles become the resin used for separating heaven and earth
as shepherds are lost among the manacles of their imminent seduction
which takes the shape of a boar washing its bituminous horns in the white
light of copulating screams
before and after time
The trunk of the tree reveals a lady
in spite of patriarchal incisions catacombed to the libidinal fuselage
hung in the smoke of dancing pears that explode like your comb when drawn through water
which doesn’t revive but incinerates its muse
The four walls and their echo when pressed together disgorge a shadow that smells like a corpse
but a corpse interested only in reaping what it has yet to see
as I have yet to see the ghost of the whirlpool heaved
through a jewel-beetle from Malaya
I remount the hidden cow the one that refuses to crack
I restore the angles of the manta ray
who descends the stairs of salt to the bed of its mineral children
On your fingertip the hour feeds its children
and averts disaster
You have obeyed you have fed your heart to the maddened orifices of stars
which burn like maps into the hives of rivers become carnations exorcising
the thunder
which saturates the runes of alligator blood with the floating hair of its
poisonous beads
*
Here on this terrace of perpetual twilight
A woman’s hand, a gloved hand, a black hand
Conjured from the blue of the sky
Offers me these flowers of wind with petals of violet blood
And faraway I can see her kisses
Outlined on the thigh of another more lifeless woman
Like precise teethmakers of phosphor
This woman refracts but never congeals
Her breasts are two flames seen through heavy mist
She has a voice but gusts of wind intercept her words
Touched by her body the starry water moves forward
Flows out to even more dead hours
Hours in which my image is burned into
*
Child of gold
chisel your portion of the eternal signs
into the wave receding past the world
you are the chisel and the message
you are the wave
you are scanned by a succession of lights and voices
in whose breast swells the pure lineage of revolt
the present and eternal revelation of words
all lightning is driven before it
you are not the weight of the void
you are its blood and the flower of its face
and tomorrow?
when the tall shadows rise
along with the women
who will imbibe the blood of their bridal robes with the stain of dawn
who will spill the green blood
onto the shaman’s heart-ash
who will pour moonlight over the bridge of their multiple body?
Let us redeem from oblivion
The sea’s gold
*
Her head became a solid block of moonstone inlaid with orchids and carved by the velocity of gazes. In my stomach an astrolabe revolved corresponding to her breathing which was visible as a cone of changing prismatic shades extending from her lips to any object that caught her eyes. When an object because of its particularly pathetic beauty brought tears to her eyes, the object explodes into deep violet then literally turns inside out becoming its opposite in a dialectically aberrant way. For instance, the keys on the table become the whiskers of a cat then through a mediation both eternal and instantaneous because of the extreme pressure of the light becomes a pitcher of milk with lightningbolts floating near the top like cream. The cream of the unexpected.
In the stillness he heard himself breathing. After some time he could hear another breath exactly like his own but half a second behind his. Suddenly there are two breathing but only one body. Then the two breaths become more audible more palpable and he feels a surge of energy visualized as a thin red membrane connect the two breaths and the sound of that breathing changed and has become indistinguishable from the antiphonal song of two birds outside the window.
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