More Galway
IN THE HOTEL OF LOST LIGHT
1
In the left-
hand sag the drunk smelling of autopsies
died in, my body slumped out
into the shape of his, I watch, as he
must have watched, a fly
tangled in mouth-glue, whining his wings,
concentrated wholly on
time, time, losing his way worse
down the downward-winding stairs, his wings
whining for life as he shrivels
in the gaze
from the spider's clasped
forebrains, the abstracted stare
in which even the nightmare spatters out its horrors
and dies.
Now the fly
ceases to struggle, his wings
flutter out the music blooming with failure
of one who gets ready to die, as Roland's horn,
winding down from the Pyrenees, saved its dark, full flourishes
for last.
2.
In the light
left behind by the little
spiders of blood who garbled
their memoirs across his shoulders
and chest, the room
echoes with the tiny thrumps
of crotch hairs plucking themselves
from their spots; on the stripped skin
the love-sick crab lice
struggle to unstick themselves and sprint from the doomed position-
and stop,
heads buried
for one last taste of the love-flesh.
3 Flesh
of his excavated flesh,
fill of his emptiness,
after-amanuensis of his after-life,
I write out
for him in this languished alphabet
of worms, these last words
of himself, post for him
his final postcards to posterity.
4
I sat out by twigfires flaring in grease strewn from the pimpled limbs of hen,
I blacked out into oblivion by that crack in the curb where the forget-me blooms,
I saw the ferris wheel writing its huge, desolate zeroes in neon on the evening skies,
I painted my footsoles purple for the day when the beautiful color would show,
I staggered death-sentences down empty streets, the cobblestones assured me, it shall be so,
I heard my own cries already howled inside bottles the waves washed up on beaches,
I ghostwrote my prayers myself in the body-Arabic of these nightmares.
"If the deskman knocks, griping again
about the sweet, excremental
odor of opened cadaver creeping out
from under the door, tell him, 'Friend, To Live
has a poor cousin,
who calls tonight, who pronounces the family name
To Leaves she
changes each visit the flesh-rags on her bones."
5 Violet bruises come out
all over his flesh, as invisible
fists start beating him a last time; the whine
of omphalos blood starts up again, the puffed
bellybutton explodes, the carnal
nightmare soars back to the beginning.
6
As for the bones to be tossed
into the aceldama back of the potting shop, among
shards and lumps
which caught vertigo and sagged away
into mud, or crawled out of fire
crazed or exploded, they shall re-arise
in the pear tree, in spring, to shine down
on two clasping what they dream is one another.
As for these words scattered into the future-
posterity
is one invented too deep in its past
to hear them.
7
The foregoing scribed down
in March, of the year Seventy,
on my sixteen-thousandth night of war and madness,
in the Hotel of Lost Light, under the freeway
which roams out into the dark
of the moon, in the absolute spell
of departure, and by the light
from the joined hemispheres of the spider's eyes.