A Huapango for Junius Avitus

Accedit lacrimis meis quod absens et
impedentis mali nescius, pariter aegrum
pariter decessise cognovi, ne gravissimo
dolori timore consuescerem.
                     Pliny the Younger

1

Stepping out from the new Bangkok Café
Digesting the whitest
Meat of spicy chicken

Night hawk heard aloft
Orbiting the ventilators
Of Congress Avenue, this hot hot gulch

His high, strangled cry
A soprano raspberry
Reminding me of Rossini

Whom ice cream polished off
Boom - how come I slow down slightly
Firefly from split concrete winking

Cooks, octets and chickens
How come I slow down at all
All too soon will have had their fill of me

Boomboom boom - unwinding silver ladder
None too soon
Mysterious dame thou penetratest me

2

Staring at the moon a cat thinks
It is a dish of milk

The cat staring at the moon
Wants to include it somehow

It might be cheese with a mouse
Tremendously creeping up on it

I'll wait and see, the cat declares
The same as I say this about the cat

The urge is there: live without knowing how
Idea is there: for building shrouded systems

Tear off the sheet: what's there is featured
Stone or a royal sport of the unconscious

A point in time - rounded arms reaching out
With heat but no direction, say Come over here

Your aftershave is nice, I'll risk the consequences
Vague, outside, still the traffic roars

At leisure sea shells unwind their echoing forms
Silver in the moonlight fox fur crackles

And crystal fleets whizz oblivious across the bridge
Their juggler, hands behind his back, distracted

A point in time split into infinitely small
Sensitive fibres could tomorrow resume

Existence as a hero, scribbled fish: I exist
Like everybody, waiting for a rhyme or crash

To work the change, a crisis freshening the sun
Yet suppoose the sea shell, suppose the idea

Unqualified create only to disregard
Those singular fables which invent the cat

Uncontainable web, trembling with just what?
Whatever frenzy knits bones, whatever tenderness

Desires you to speak, on me your lingo's lost
You might pronounce wrath, or mercy, or both

You might shield me with ignorance
Rage at me for love I want to shake you with -

And how apt, settling under the baobab, the leopard
A dervish hat completes the cook who plays the
   spoons

3

You turn right
 at the second sign, soon, at the crossways
    of a bridge and a sea shell
      continue left to the cook
and straight ahead to the rhomboid of distraction

You will find a wing there
 and a corkscrew ascent
   to a second bridge. Do not miss the egg,
     clearly marked, you have been there before
and the lights give out, see, just before the dip

There is a field of cows,
  you pass it on the left. Observe
    the pylon, like a picked
       albacore backbone; if you stop
you'll hear the wind bellow in it, likely as not

Later, left at the fork
  and follow the loop. You smell woodsmoke
    if you're on track. Slow down
       at Silken Ladder, circle
Cat Lagoon, then back off and sleep some

There's a tidy walk ahead;
  the path is one you won't miss.
    Cobwebs will catch your shoes and face,
      the first aren't poison, but watch
for the purple ones, the stickiest, they mean forget

The Greater Evil.
 How all the sounds will keep you
  wide awake: the nosing, quibblous, of the fong
   click of bullwits, the oom's horn.
You'll soon tune in. Forward to the fork, here,

Or there, for the nth time,
 you have to decide -
   Stop till sunup, or fail -
     plod on, dance with your telescope, tongs,
your feathering tool, your grip of loose leaves -

Plod on, soon you'll see the
  gap in the boob trees.
    Then (inaudible words)
      (more inaudible words)
Brisk wind foretold it, boom, the unshrouded sea

Here all things turn
  their backs on you. Nothing
    watches you. Now it is too late
      to save your precious skin, it's
listening the other way, as if to another voice

The load of la matière
  and feelings that attach to it,
    the great dusts, groans, the golightly trees
      turn inside out, reform into a hole
and in the hole (involved, turning its back on you-

Or can it be Death Mountain?) moment dwells.
 Let everything go, gaze at it,
   as long as it is there, the moment hole.
      Never think all time is abuzz in it.
Never put your eye so close you could be blown away

By the grace it is giving out, pulse
  never spent, of carnal
    starlight a fountain, supposing earth
      and you, if ever again, eye to eye with a beak-
to-flower hummingbird, can figure time like that

4

Soon is a kind of never in reverse
Save when a phrase's gist is negative
Soon you'll die just when you want to live
A cry from Never posits to disperse

Spun like a top in umpteen kinds of time
Configured as in music or more flat
As lurching on from this dull urge to that
Ugly history leaves a trail of slime

A soon that could be now the future past
Emergent time tormenting in the rose
Skipping an aeon if the ground's too hot

Ah incandescent now again outlast
Soons that never sang a note but froze
To dwindle on the tips of tongues forgot

5

My heron has flown into the blue night wood
My sparrow into the perpendicular dust
My falcon, better than my wrist, loves the sky

What shall I do, mysterious dame, with this thought
It has angles and nodes I know nothing of
I am not very well acquainted yet with the dark

I am not afraid of the night wood, nor of dust
And I love the sky no less than my falcon does
With a pinch of salt I eat food as I need it

Also I hear in corners floorboards creak
As if somebody trod behind the shadows there
But I do not collect my times into a pattern

I do not work things out or drink white milk
Because white things are impersonating me
A white horn in a corner blows for a minute

A white horn in a corner when the creaking stops
Spreads a vista of stone gates and streaming hair
In an ancient city where I met you sometime

And the city to come is a far cry from my thought
The generation of thought a far cry from reason
When I see my falcon's face I am not in doubt

There are skies
There are dusts
There are losses we bear as best we can

There is an old book on the demons I might read
There is a new face to love, which I do not choose
There is a distraction from things and anxieties

It is for instance distracting to know this or that
And how not knowledge hurts but experience
And how you live, mysterious dame, in death

It is distracting never to be disenchanted
To have the spring of joy always bubbling up
To be sad without any thought of sadness

Distracting to be told your sadness was intended
Sadness the snout of a weapon pointed at life
Heron, sparrow, falcon falling from the sky

The tone, of an unfingered string
The fluidity, now, of the flight
The going on of everything at your ancient behest

Come to me again with understanding some other time

Note: Huapango - a Mexican dance-song of Caribbean origin, in which the dance steps of a couple alternate between trampling on one spot and hopping in a low arc to trample on another spot. Junius Avitus - died young, soon after becoming a senator, a protégé of Pliny the Younger, who loved him for his promise, his meticulous hard work, his willingness to learn (Letters, VIII, 23).