| EARTH TERMINAL & GRAPH accidents of some future date�gerard malanga the lines, coming towards us where they arrive from is impossible to tell. we lie on floors, couches but the dream & no ideas persists to speak in place of us. died, perhaps, & were stuffed w/ bird feathers like an eider down there is no other furniture in the room no tele- phone, the off-white plaster of walls accumulating stale air. it�s tuesday or wednesday, antarctica seems closer than before. sound of aeroplanes 11.55 pm which war is it now? said i couldn�t afford to know who you were. i grew up then, but you were still there to outbreathe & outlive. it was snowing also though i can�t find that letter you sent from. did it exist? to simplify, development of character, a thing sentimentality intrudes upon. the day, it is like any other. thinking flight to be temporary, wrestling with inbalance. our time is cause for sleep, but at what price you cannot say or will not COUCOU DUBUFFET a cowslip, a crate, a heap, a cuckoo. l�abus d�alcool est dangereux pour la sant�. this should be thoroughly obvious. the sky is a red & blue monkey puzzle. a contusion with paragraph breaks. a brownstone, 12-tone row. momentary grief, nondescript. to shut up & live in the present temporary form / �where man�s an inch high upside down.� the too- familiar orange night sky with rained-upon apartment blocks. why believe that one thing must lead inexorably to another, in time or in place? an invoice for �services rendered,� payable within thirty years. do you realise just how improbable you seem already? hurry up nobody wants to solve you anymore A CARTOGRAPHY OF REMOTE SENSING a crane swings out over the gravel pits. a sand bar, a mahogany ship. the sum of its being seen is not its fact. set sail in an �unfixable storm� its eye bright on the harbour. the chain of memory is resurrection, fish-blue a curtain hung in the sky on the liturgical eighth day. & what if all this made no sense, even to you? our rehearsals are not conducted. �art is a trick, full of nothing.� but such a con- clusion is never reached outright. travelling inland through the night, the issue involves more than traffic. wide grey fields of background static. everything has come to depend upon irrigation. a landscape blazing with violent electric moons like ripe fruit they have dropped away from the tree. a green sky, a viridarium, which stands for truth. since words, when they communicate, have no effect. the same is without notation, the over- coming of difficulty. or the fault of not resembling SCREEN TEST PORTRAIT NUDE white from white. a half-dressed plate of fillet mignon. room service. fictional sunsets come & gone over the sunset strip. refrigerated air. lean, nylon red eyed, pouting through a twelve inch fringe. patty hearst on the other side of the surveillance machine. old glory waving in a black & chromed night sky. space invaders, junk mail. �every cloud has a silver lining,� packaged in tin foil. the burning mountain in last year�s horror film. poisoned senators like fish lying on the surface of fetid water. who can prove otherwise? the cartoon rapist lounging in the yen shop has nothing left to sell. a face only �you� could pull off, whose presence under such circumstances is equally unconvincing LETTRE DE CACHET don�t apologise for having sent me your letter. someone dies or disappears. there�s no sequel. soon their faces are framed with garlands. a true or false memory: wide streets, street-sellers, min- arets, & so on. all that�s uninteresting. do you see? l�h�tel magellan, june. seven red & nine green, the �keys,� perhaps, for RESPIR- ATION. to see the pieces otherwise, a sideways glance. why not cremate the dead in museums? you ask: no, i am not suffering, not waiting. that strange milieu in which people talk to one another, pretending there are four walls instead of three. i�m not telling of the blank page on which it all hinges. each false move, signalled by a special hand-sign. but the story took place. when? i think of you often. then i found it, i was swallowed up (c) louis armand, 2001 |
| LOUIS ARMAND 5 POEMS from MIMO PROVOZ (forthcoming from equipage, cambridge, 2003) |