A Day for Bastille
Hard couple of sweaty hours. Time, incorrigible, leaden. Like a rusted French crown.
Beer holes, bag moulds
thumbs
stuck on tacks.
Empty boxes
of styrofoam
caskets.
Leaned over the small cupboard, over a hot plate. Pushed back the tacked table cloth. Pulled hundreds of bags left by the previous tenant out that my dog would never use; let's face it, the cornstarch will evaporate the plastic first. Collapsed boxes saved for a move that hasn't happened. Hauled out a picnic blanket, a folded umbrella lawn chair, a large backpack on wheels with one wheel broken.
A collection of cardboard tubes line the back like fallen soldiers.
Then shoving
the full cardboard wardrobe
with its dried blood smell
in.
Thinking about ontologies,
multiple trajectories,
about events that disrupt,
about Alain Braidou's
Being & Event.
About how French postmodernism bursts critical space as I seque from area to area of impossible overflowing clutter, from splintered to post-Cartesian thought.
The musty back room of spider shadows repels: during the day bleary hung-over light from its tiny funerary window; at night an unexpected red bulb.
A half wall enclosure built in the corner, inexplicably, and an iron lock;a bastille perhaps.
Where I store suitcases,
collapsed boxes.
Queen Margot,
sweeping through this cloistered closet,
oh, its been a long bloody revolution.
tags: closets, Bastille Day, Alain Baidou, Queen Margot, poetry.
rich and rolling in the extravagant landscape of revolution(ary France), and the trails of multiplicity indeed.
ReplyDeleteBut wow. Very tired, and need to come back in the morning to re-experience...
Marvelously visceral. The tension really sings.
ReplyDeleteThanks Ira,
ReplyDeleteand Elissa,
It's perhaps too wordy... not sure if the postmodernism line works, but needed a connective between the closet(s) and Braidou (who I haven't read yet, but he's on my list!) and Queen Margot (just saw the DVD) and the French Revolution. Otherwise too disparate. Not sure how far I can push strange combinations of sensual life with the imaginal and the intellectual. It's usually easier to do one at a time!
Is it fun writing these wordy prose poems? More like torture... if it works, great. Or it could be terrible. Like throwing ingredients together without having any idea if the meal's going to be edible or not.
Yes, the window in the back room is exactly like that!
And long strands of old spider silk and dust hanging everywhere.
I wonder if it'll photograph?
muchas gracias! :)