The Mirror

"I only remember the onion, the egg and the boy.  O that was me, said the madman."   — Nicholas Moore  1 "I bite into an apple & then get bored before the second bite," you said. You were also Samson. I had cut your hair & locked you up. Besides, your room was bugged.  A former inmate left his muse  spread-eagled on the picture window.  In the glinting late-day sun we saw her huge & cross-eyed breasts appear diamond-etched against the slums of Harlem. You tongued your pills & cursed the residents. You called me Judas. You forgot I was a girl. 2 Your hands weren't birds. To call them birds would be too easy They drew circles around your ideas & your ideas were sometimes parabolas. That sudden Sunday you awoke & found yourself behind the looking glass your hands perched on the breakfast table waiting for a sign. I had nothing to tell them. They conversed with the eggs. ...

                                                   Ma faim, Anne, Anne,                                                     Fuis sut ton  â . . . Rimbaud Because there was no other place to flee to, I came back to the scene of the disordered senses, came back last night at midnight, arriving in the thick June night without luggage or defences, giving up my car keys and my cash, keeping only a pack of Salem cigarettes the way a child holds on to a toy. I signed myself in where a stranger puts the inked-in X's — for this is a mental hospital, not a child's game.  Today an interne knocks my knees, testing for reflexes. Once I would have winked and begged for dope. Today I am ter...

In town it was very urban but in the country cows were covering the hills. The clouds were near and very moist. I was walking along the pavement with Anna, enjoying the scattered scenery. Suddenly a sound like a deep bell came from behind us. We both turned to look. "It's the words you spoke in the past, coming back to haunt you," Anna explained. "They always do, you know."       Indeed I did. Many times this deep bell-like tone had intruded itself on my thoughts, scrambling them at first, the rearranging them in apple-pie order. "Two crows," the voice seemed to say, "were sitting on a sundial in the God-given sunlight. Then one flew away."       "Yes . . . and then ?" I wanted to ask, but I kept silent. We turned into a courtyard and walked up serval flights of stairs to the roof, where a party was in progress. "This is my friend Hans," Anna said by way of introduc- tion. No one paid much attention and severa...

In sealed box cars travel names across the land, and how far they will travel so, and will they ever get out, don't ask, I won't say, I don't know. The name Nathan strikes fist against wall, the name Isaac, demented, signs, the name Sarah calls out for water for the name Aaron that's dying of thrist. Don't jump while it's moving, name David. You're a name that dooms to defeat, given to no one, and homeless, too heavy to bear in this land. Let your son have a Slavic name, for here they count hairs on the head, for here they tell good from evil by names and by eyelids' shape. Don't jump while it's moving. Your son will be Lech. Don't jump while it's moving. Not time yet. Don't jump. The night echoes like laughter mocking clatter of wheels upon tracks. A cloud made of people moved over the land, a big cloud gives a small rain, one tear, a small rain—one tear, a dry season. Tracks lead off into black forest. ...

Remember that night, after the card game We went bumping down the road drunk insulting each other. You said things so vicious the next day you apologized. But I could not recall a one of them. I was robbed. Yours for that most momentous of words: "Vindication"— it is the labyrinthine word. All hail to Mighty Æschylus. Beat the devil, beat the devil, beat the devil, Beat the devil, beat the devil, beat the... (Hear the train Drive steadily on Towards nowhere) [From: Burke, K. (1968) Collected poems, 1915-1967 . Berkeley: University of Caliornia Press. p30]

I have moved to Dublin to have it out with you, majestic Shade, You whom I read so well so many years ago, did I read your lesson right? did I see through your phases to the real? your heaven, your hell did I enquire properly into? For years then I forgot you, I put you down, ingratitude is the necessary curse of making things new: I brought my family to see me through, I brought my homage & my soft remorse, I brought a book or two only, including in the end your last strange poems made under the shadow of death Your high figures float again across my mind and all your past fills my walled garden with your honey breath wherein I move, a mote. [From: Berryman, J. (1972) Selected Poems, 1983-1968 . London: Faber and Faber Ltd, p143.]

About resititution, say this, the money is nice. Buys schöne Aussicht, Schlagrahm, Rosenthal and Rucksack (my bitter, modest Wermut) O lovely handy twenty years later. Neither mangled, crippled nor marks, nor bruises on it. Honest cash money healthy as when last seen, separated, kissed goodbye— (Besides, I was hardly born, no more than Horst Eichmann; it was my father's business) Why where have you been my darling and how long I thought you one with dentures, gold teeth, babies' bones, the glue pots of the world had had you— (And why should they get fat on it? They're getting more than enough) Let's know ourselves my treasure. Come Bundesbahn together.                       Ashes Ashes                       fall down, all, fall down [From: Halley, Anne. (1...