Our modern landscape is born of terror:
sorties of flying fish, sirens, swordfish,
a thing that writes white on blue sky then bursts
into hydras of many-headed birds.
Bombed-out Land Rovers, stone-birds sew the air,
bird houses shrill with comet-bird fuss;
nimble giant wasps ignite like matchsticks,
stick to walls to form a flaming corsage.
Squadrons of flamingos redden the sky;
that carousel, the old sabbath, still creaks;
warplanes and witches on broomsticks swoop
through the day-night of the new Walpurgis.
Apocalypse and the safeword is lost.
The long exodus of paleness and tears.
Recognize those fallow fields, those buzzards,
the church bell that never again will ring?
Carts of colorful bedding and under
a shawl a dead man lay like a lost shoe,
both hands hugging his belly. A stopped clock.
Wandering cows, carrion, unseen cries.
Where are you sleeping tonight? Discarded
knick knacks, children on shoulders of strange men.
People going who knows where, in their hair,
gold of haylofts. Their fear squats in a ditch.
Caught in death-throes, a man on a cart demands
his cup of tea, complains of profuse sweat.
A prom dress on the arm of a hunchback,
his bird cage retrieved from his burning hut.
A sewing machine too much a burden,
old man stumbles, dying. Mary, leave me.
The beauty of night comes on velvet wings
but in Brueghel's Hell we are cursed and fucked.
As the cold magnifies its piercing clarity this Paris sky seems virginal.
Never have I lived more star-fraught nights, and what growth Spring
engenders when the trees of the boulevards mimic the shades of the sky;
leafy boughs and fronds clog the river with elephant-ear,
limbs of plane trees, heavy chestnut trees.
On the Seine a water lily is the moon in the current.
The Milky Way in the sky swoons on Paris and swivels
from a sixty-nine position, crazy and naked,
and moves its mouth to suck the nipple of Notre-Dame.
The big bear, the little bear revolve grumbling around Saint-Merry.
My amputated hand faraway glitters in the constellation Orion.
In this cold and credible light, a trembling, beyond unreal.
Paris is like the image of a plant flash-frozen
to be reformed in its own ash. A disheartening dumbshow.
Drawn in chalk outline and wearing no signs of age,
the houses and the streets are steel and stone
thrown up in the empty waste places of the world.
Babylon and Thebes are not more dead than Paris this night.
Blue and green, inks and tar, its edges bleached with starlight.
Not a sound. Not a passerby. The weighted hush of the warzone.
My eye flies from the public urinals to the purple glare of the streetlamps
which defines the space where my mind finds refuge.
Every evening on foot I trek across Paris, from Batignolles thru
the Latin Quarter and traverse the treacherous ranges of the Andes.
The stars become bourgeoning fires, disconcertingly closer and
The Southern Cross looms larger with each step which one
takes towards it, emerging from the old world
onto a new continent.
I am the man who whose past has slipped its chains and escaped—
only my stump of a limb still pains me.
A rented hotel room to be quite alone with myself,
a new wicker basket to hold my manuscripts.
I have neither books nor kitschy knickknacks.
The day's newspaper laying disheveled on the table.
I work in my naked room, behind dingy and dull windows,
barefoot on red tile, playing amid half-flaccid balloons
and tootling some brat's toy trumpet:
I work at the end of the world.
We are the birds atop belvederes whom you charm
and each night we make a flowered branch of your shoulders to the arms of your beloved wheelbarrow
which we shear off sharply at the wrist with sparks aplenty.
We are the sighs of the glass statue propped on its elbow while the man sleeps
and we are big holes gaping brightly in the bed,
portals through which you can see deer in the clearing of a coral forest
and naked women sequestered in the bottom of a mineshaft.
You remember and you get up and you exit the train
without a glance at the engine caught in the grip of the immense jungle roots
and it complains of its ravaged violated boilers,
its stacks smoking of hyacinths and sloughed skins of blue snakes.
We preceded you then as plants prone to metamorphoses
who each night make signs which can surprise the man
while his house collapses and he is surprised at the unique furnishings,
his bed with the corridor and staircase.
The staircase branches out seemingly forever.
It leads to a gate of grinding stone and opens onto a public plaza
made of the backs of swans with an sloping open wing as a ramp.
The ramp turns inward as if to devour itself,
but it is not satisfied that our feet will open its steps like drawers—
bread drawers, drawers of wine, soap drawers, ice drawers, drawers of stairs—
drawers of flesh still attached to a hank of hair.
At this hour when thousands of mechanical ducks smooth their feathers,
we wanted you to smile and seize us by the waist
without brandishing the trowel that sculpts our breasts
as we measure the mark of your pleasure,
motionless in the gaze of girls who adore their man
after an exuberant fuck.
Sigerson lives in the Seattle area.
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