I have selected a few poems that I like from the book. It is only a 55 pages text. It is divided into four sections: I) The Blue Room, II) Selected Joys, Collected Humiliation, III)Interlude: paradies, jokes, imitation and IV) autobiograffiti.
The poems I have chosen are mainly from II.
Music
Coast
This Goes with This
This, Though
From IV) 1 and 6
Legato of after-rain
on an iron roof, drop
following slow drop
exactly at the brink of disconnection
Something is being sitiched
together, but what?
Deceptive this seamless music,
and all the variations
of heartbeat, drumbeat
which repeat it.
I once thought music a gift
from places high and distant:
it seemed so pure,
so stupid. Later I blamed it
for everythingL all those lies
set to waltz-time, all those
plausible feelings in a minor key,
invitations to a lynching.
And listenting in private?
Ears blinkered with headphones,
or futtive Walkmans in the park?
Careful: the walls have ears.
Not even this - especially
not even this - is safe.
Nor this: the lengthening pause
between raindrops,
and in that pause
the continuo of human breathing,
an infection of silence:
noise and hush,
noise and hush.
At edge of sleep the colours of the world
run unreliably, like metaphors,
categories re-open for business,
the due word processes of reason collapse.
Each night I doze alertly, watching
for the accidental, absent-minded repeal
of natural law, selecting visions
From the dreamy, streaky shapes...
I like this sawtooth state
at brink of dream: the jerk awake and drift
back and jerk awake, channel-hopping
very strange Late Late Shows.
There is no risk. One step back,
I find myself safe, among things
hardened by naming and science.
One step forward...sleep.
Meanwhile, this narrow littoral
these volumes that merge and serparte
and merge again without displacement,
this giddy doublt and triple-mindednessS:
the nearest thing to simultaneity,
perhaps, This Side.
Yes, I remember special things,
reluctantly. I admit
to the stash of clippings,
the mantelpiece of shined trophies.
But it's the trivial I prefer:
remembrance of things past
bothering aboaut.
Once I was good at this:
trained study habits.
My mind was fast and empty,
and knew the tricks:
acronyms, repetitions,
the crumb of madeleine,
the knot on the finger.
I planned to know everything.
The present seemed too
singular, too here-and-now:
a township blinked
and missed. I always wanted
to be there and then.
I took notes
swotted the textbook
of each passing moment,
crammed the finer detail
till it was tested, re-tested, rote.
But the mind has a mind of its own:
a vain pecking-order of forgetting.
What remains is always chosen elsewhere:
selected joys, collected humilations./
This, though: strange comfort.
If I cannot have everything,
I can hope, one day,
for the perfect justie of nothing:
a complete, a fair and equitable
forgetfulness.
Significance everywhere, you say recalling
the day I smote my cheek against a wall
chasing a wide backhand, only hours
after threatening to punch you in the face.
Must all things be explained?
I mention the distribution of knife-wounds
seen once in a slab of flesh on a stainless sink,
or the pattern of tea-leaves glued inside these cups.
I even show you this poem so far, these images
selected by hunch and coin-flip: Exhibits A, B,D...
it's obvious: this goes with this goes with this
and always will. Somewhere deep inside
the dangling seventh must rsolve,
the laws of grammar will not be broke.
There are even numbers which predict
the swirling accidents of rising smoke,
or if ther are not, scientifiic Americans
will soon discover them. We sit sipping tea
in silence. You scribble solutions in the margins
of Mathematical Games, I adjust my poem.
On a screen in a corner a dog dies, a child weeps.
Not true, you tease me. Never happened.
But knowledge is noe cure, or escape.