Openings, Endings -- Stephen Sartarelli
I
Rot inheres in life
in culture
in cheese
(and alcohol)
in conservation
preservation
In existence
my forgetting
in passage
my oblivion
Seven centuries of angels
were not enough
sempre più soli
meno amati
più numerosi
How many we turned away
crystal bees their wings
the sting of elsewhere
Nature's night
the act itself
corruptive
Europe's void
culture-throttle
kein Recht
Our godless wandering
amidst the slaughter
and we said it was all
a clever lie
Rent a day some time
and see
forever to me he said
no tellin' what timber
be dryin' to a spark
en ardre haï, c'est l'art
(in our dry cellar)
charred at the body's edge
I awake
hail our universal
fatted beef
all of it
the new coulture
America bespattered
America ubiquitous
randy robins fleet of foot
long summer swan song
the knell, again, of an age,
chill of a blade
empty sanction
institutio ad absurdum
in your many, my death
inside or out
nobody believes what you say
anyway
homeless celestial --
ease into my irrelevance
yet to be or never --
I deal what is not
(this plethora cannot suffice)
I send you my broken St. Catherine
spotlight on the cold facade
flat moon on my dream-eye
Yell if you need to snap out of it
I love a soldier again
I am when I cannot be --
the fleshy hard surface
warm but stonelike
palm off the drift
so many children
in the wings
they have made me a sea-dwarf
star-snuffer
they see my turning away
free of belief
library of blank pages
beshit my fecundation
make chicken of my days
farewell to native grasses
the selfless overbearing self
most everyone dies an orphan
to be of the air
shed the soil
tainted name
to unname
time teetering
a breach in the light
nothing's shudder
these few things
between the acid stones
II
A life given as choice
but only for that
passage through this air
medium of our doubles
Every morning light
has looked like this
(sloping as it rises)
Hunger argues
it's only a point
liquid clarifies
before burning
What habits I have doomed
Time's labyrinth in stone
new stars in the flesh
In rot is new life,
the mold, the spirit distilled
cette joie bête des exultants
killing earth to advantage
what comedies of happiness
les larmes de mon vin
ourobouros cornucopia
I am always not yet
cut flesh off the word
to eat in front of others
I renounce the violence
of mattering
cling to sleep as to life
tedium my te deum
dust shatters my silence
past virtue is crime
futility the secret god
builder of necropoles
shreds of the year thy book
We shall spare the earth
a moment's breath
let her say no
and what happiness
may be granted still
dancing on water
invisible children
what forms we may find
frames for a new picture
of the nothing
What am I to make
of this memory?
sky-splitting exercise
rift in space
the wisp
my ragged sight
the missed conception
we used to want
And you fall
as I hand you the stone
just to feel alive
as I hand you
a few more tatters
for our partial map
moments of apartness
on this precipice
I reel
distracting to know
what we allow
to come into words
there our shame and honor
still the secrets of our rule
III
As we may bend our time
as we are spent
so we stand
words without echo
not enough emptiness
dust our obsession
(you do only
what you can do)
institution the stone
art the weed
in the cracks
Will we relinquish the strength of argument?
the nothing
colored only by regret . . . ?
The world is already used--
Whence this aggression?
(You can always divide and subdivide.
The counting never stops.)
Dissolve the thing
make light
burn the ground's black blood
planet of ash
nothing's perfection
trillion-footed earth
tongues of my centuries
this vital venom
the words close in
on the act
as ending
dissolve matter
unto death
we are made
of so little
unfortunate to grieve
so late
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