| The Lefka Tree & New Aural Fashions by Mark Sargent |
|
|
| by Mark Sargent |
|
|
Mark Sargent, our Odysseus, wanders the world for the Corpse, to bring news of nouveau labor. We also present his technology for "aural fashions," patent pending. Now and then Derrida haunts him, so he calls Lacan to exorcise him. And when he's done, guests who won't leave show up. Mark just sent us birthday greetings and a poem we aren't supposed to show to his wife. (Hint: it'right after "The Promise not to Trackle.") That was in 2005. At the end of the year 2011, this didn't seem to matter as much as olives, mortality, and the groans of our fading generation. In 2004 (Sargent disdains chronology) the poet was in love with Blaise Cendrars, the toughnik. Blaise Cendrars, the midcentury French poet, was an adventurer, a poetic journalist (see "The Trans-Siberian Express," translated by Ron Padgett), a novelist, an opinion editorialist, a radio personality, a playful genre busters (he busted many genres, gangster-style), and a lover of many amused women. Sargent's Cendrars infatuation must have corresponded to the adventurous confession of 2005. In 2004, Cendrars wasn't the only poet Sargent was in touch with: he modelled for Kenneth Patchen (see Recent), and he took a ride in a horse-and-buggy affair with Dr. Williams.
THE LEFKA TREE
I. “We’re all waiting for quitting time”
The guy with a fistful of grease stroking that tractor, those Pakistanis lugging sacks of olives outta the orchards, even, calm, revealing nothing they stare as you pass, bees, sparrows, those eagles screaming through the blue are all waiting and Bobby Bales, how he got from that cute photo in the high school year book to the angel of death in Kandahar is one miserable Odyssey that couldn’t wait for quitting time, just picked up his tools and headed south.
Mud igloos with a hook on top so you can pick them up with a crane and move them around, this was the idea pitched to me today. The guy had never asked himself why one would want to move around a mud igloo, but the kicker was you needed 25 guys busting ass for three days to make one. Sheeeeit, I was reaching for my check book, damn, opportunity like that doesn’t come ‘round very often. Oh, and they’re really waterproof.
What else? Well, I’ve got this huge dead branch dangling over my caravan. I look up, way, Oh fuck, that’s a sword of Damocles, what’s the plan? I don’t have one, but I thought of taking a shotgun and shooting that bit that’s holding it up. But won’t it crash down right on yr caravan, I mean, your permanent place of abode at this moment? Yeah, it might, but maybe it won’t? Okay, but I’d get the wife and children out of it first.
We watch his wife and two children drive away. What’s with the car? It’s the gearbox. First and second are just about gone and there isn’t any reverse. My mechanic says it can completely breakdown at any moment. Jesus.
We’re dreaming big here in the old country and improvising with what the wind blows our way. All this stuff is going to come together as soon as I get plan, I need a plan. But then it was quitting time and we got high and drank beer and the night birds began to sing.
2. Wind off the sea
An ant has perished amid the rustle of life beneath the tree. The Damocles branch still dangles. All manner of infant mammal plod about or whimper and cry within the curtain of muffled clatter of leaves adjusting to wind and still there is no plan. It is not future uncertainty that paralyzes but the unrelenting sameness of the past, for all the hubbub and motion there are no departures or arrivals, only the minor mathematics of labor and commerce: a kilo of this, five Euros of that, fifteen hundred kilometers South of Bucharest the tribe is bumping against its shabby limits and still the chickens come home to roost with all the exquisite design, fragility and lack of meaning implied by an egg.
3. The Kung Fu master has no ride
The branch of Damocles is done.
We waited and a man came, an actor/acrobat who saw the problem, he backed up to give himself room and just ran, barefoot, at the tree and up it to that first branch 4 meters off the ground and up he went and detached the branch.
Damn, I missed it.
And, I’ve got a plan. What? Yeah, I’m the man with the plan. As opposed to those running the country? Yeah. I’m doing farm animals. I got three little pigs, two sheep and I’m getting two cows. You ever worked with animals? No, I don’t know anything about them. I’ll just learn as I go. You certainly will. There were three sheep but we lost one of the them, it got tangled in its rope and strangled itself. So we cut it in half. Josef held its rear legs apart and I just went down the middle with a chain saw. ‘Sef was covered in blood.
Once again, I missed it.
Yeah, but you can eat it, we’re roasting it tomorrow. And after lunch there’s a Kung Fu seminar. Of course.
Next day we arrive midst a huddle of men trying to diagnose a motorcycle’s illness, something about the oil, the kickstart but then a growl, a grumble and Takis roars up the road.
A ewe, not so pungent, the best lamb of the year, and there in the great shade a dozen of us tuck in with vigor till we are heavy with meat.
So what about the Kung Fu? He called, he can’t make it, the Kung Fu master has no ride. I said, Okay, but the pot’s on boil. Ah grasshopper, may all our cryptic utterances squeegee away the condensation of illusion and may the donkey of good fortune always be tied in your orchard.
Nevermind the martial arts, we walk through the fig orchard to the beach, the sun flashes off the churning waves washing great stretches of empty sand and over the hill come two fire planes roaring, huge lumbering yellow swallows swooping over the sea to drink. Somewhere near is burning, the planes return every ten minutes arcing over the blue, pounding along the waves then laboring up barely clearing the eucalyptus trees along the shore and the boys are manic in the surf and radiant in the September light.
Life’s too short for idylls, we snatch these foaming moments on the curl, even the children are too old for innocence. We float in the luxury of the sea yet always the waves push us towards the beach, the lies we find ourselves leading, beknotted with so many everyone pulling in another direction yet the rotation of things churns on: every year the turtle people show up, the animals breed, the tree grows, the plans, our gestures fall short of the fatal.
March-September 2012 NEW TECH: AURAL FASHIONS™  “at frequencies only clothes can hear”™ Which ain’t just for dancing, no, yr pants be groovin’ just sitting down, y'all, and that muthafucking shirt is pulling in Radio Mozambique like a dog recycling the sonic geography into T-bone technology something you can sink canines into, that tears when you twist, I mean get yr neck into yr eating, flail & growl & do yr worst cause yr socks are tuning in to the goddamn Crab Nebula, the recurrence of the carrier wave can be ridden wearing these duds, I shit you not, megahertz o mutable sensation straight from the helium rich torus, gamma rays o joy flooding through yr knicks, oooouu check it out, yr threads got greater fidelity than you and all you gotta do is a little amplitude modulation and the animal in you will neutron across the electromagnetic spectrum like teenage orgasm, yr partner’s, a supernovaing white dwarf whose pitch you’ll never hear unless you leave your hat on, that stocking cap is a resonating instrument, a way to occult the nebula that only the groove gets through and there you’ll be, free from atmospherics, pulsar winds at yr back, a cosmic radio receiving and transmitting, big bang conduit and aurora bop
Iterability for & after dan
“I speak only one language and it is not my own.” Derrida
a rain so fine it weaves thin blurs in the air a whisper really suggestion of no matter no way to describe pain or its antecedents or the words used, save they are not the others, inherited in a grid and at work within
“You can’t bear my already having said what you want to say.” Lacan to Derrida
that slaying in reverse not found but lost in a wordless contagion not secret but moving that way
“So, prison, did you discover how it smells?” Genet to Derrida
BIT bomb but no detonation, mere traces of, there is nothing outside of the sex not even hunger or thirst only penetration
not invented but plucked from the shelf, from a cupboard of public secrets a way to say body and mean air, atmosphere, the sex of encounters, of impact with foreign history, the word appeared before you used it forged in the furnace of the mass. Past the oppositions we re iterate and fall short of the prelinguistic mark, its re lentless possibility leading us on… la fin du monde, chaque fois unique.
2 December 2012
“And the promise never to truckle”
You let them in the door and pretty soon they’re wearing your flip-flops, using your toilet paper, tossing blouses over chairs and generally wiggling into your life― a religious man would be on his knees offering up thanks but I just nod to the chaos machine tossing off sparks that leave the landscape charred but delicately fertile. There was something in the bible about a mustard seed, how did that one go? No matter how hard you slap a donkey he won’t give you any milk? Fig trees, lost lambs, forgiven brothers, god’s wrath and oh, the evil ways of sodomy.
17 August 2006 “Because I am the size of what I see”[1]
I am driven to write letters that no one will show their spouse, mad recounting of lurid outdoor coupling, orifice after orifice filled to capacity with human stuff and the juice, a torrent, tsunami of life lubricant keeping ecstatic the friction.
Nevermind what happened, who entered where & who, what tongue reached what nerve bundle, for I dwell in an alternative universe charged by imagination bound only by the finite moments of awareness crammed into my stay on earth, foot-tapping, a drool.
My own liquid is a churn, bubbling up over the brim and hissing as it hits the burner, whole limbs swallowed and birthed again out of the canal of life, the dilation elation and the chant of approaching flight, ground control is no control, goodbye, hello moon.
A nerve was coaxed to the water’s edge and the urge to submerge, to penetrate the all enveloping element and sink below, down where the currents nudge rather than compel, a surface of sensations wetted, stroked like snake entwining muscle.
And supple; elastic contractions sprung from the pitch, tone, chord of contact played as bio-melody, bird-song suffused upon the multi-hearted beast a swim towards the orb, the burning planet, the promise of fusion in the orbit of magnetic return.
And the letters will be read and refolded and slid back into envelope, wee portal to another world squeezing shut again.
3 January 2005 Mark Sargent
“None of my women have tears in their eyes, you can ask ‘em about me, I swear.” Cap’n BH
Between the rains I work the olives thrusting a ladder up into them, sawing away and raking, the animals lounge beneath waiting for nothing, snow on the mountains above heavy the clouds, heavy the mind, Captain Beefheart is dead. I tear a tongue outta the sky smash the fruit into oil drive a ouija disk through the entrails of the day that curl back with the tenderness of a serpent, keep turnin’ that wheel, mama, I ain’t dust yet nor done but have my mercy dial turned down low to make the no go faster I chase disaster petal to the metal in reverse ‘cause backwards is my insideout. Give me a shout, sistah, before I crash into my former self where I hit that long leaning note and let it float.
18 December 2010
WE WERE CRIMINALS TOGETHER
As Blaise Cendars once said to me, Marc, he said, roll me a cig, would ya? I did, lit it and held it to his lips, his arm was, at the time, manacled to a heating pipe that ran the length of the cellar. He inhaled deeply. He was French, after all, and Spring was long in coming.
22 Feb. 04
ADDENDUM
The historical difference betwixt B. Cendars & B. Cendrars is that the former lost his left arm in a Chicago slaughter house under auspicious circumstances while the latter the other in the Champagne offensive of 1915.
The former’s arm was never lost, he carried it with him in an ornate hand-painted wooden box stuffed with laurel and cinnamon and bits of love notes he had ripped apart― he would reconstruct these messages by pulling a scrap from the box and shouting out whatever word or partial word was legible: …stop… stard… ou… trong… ever… defilement… ig… human hell while the ripe arm filled the room with a sweet waft of decay.
23 Feb. 04 "I am that he whose brains are scattered aimlessly…"
|
|
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
| Featured Art: |
|---|
.jpg)
