Issue 32: Jonathan Catherall

TWO AFTER RONSARD

I.XXXIII

Cest amoureux desdain, ce nenny gracieux

crosses the mind

that the rebuffing with shammy leather

the being cut to silky ribbons

& all the kiddies rides clinging on to the poison quills

of yours truly most beloved plaything the pushmipullyu

is merely a dialectic

& I could give love-bites to the tapeworm eating my dinner

the tapeworm gorges on your polyunsaturated affection

& I shudder with pleasure

each time you draw the softest of wool over my eyes

in a climate of respectful intolerance

where the metonym won’t stick to the side of the fridge

& you give me a new leash of life

as Hegel said to the bishop

.II

Tinder informs me I’m less

than a kilometre away from myself.

Sean Connery surfaces from the water

rubber-masked, gold-tongued &

late for the previous poem.

Your safeword is Tolpuddle Martyr.

Size queen takes bishop.

My safeword is Critique of the Gotha Programme.

I didn’t know what was going on,

she put some super hot sauce in the condom & slipped it on my erect penis.

Your safeword is Once Again On The Trade Unions, The Current Situation

and the Mistakes of Trotsky and Buhkarin.

I was going crazy against my bonds was almost fainted

when she opened my blindfold.

.III

All happening at twice removed.

The postmodern jellyfish the egg mcmuffin

The death of the otter.

The word love etc etc.

Each of the gaps in the correspondence theory of truth

& here I go & stick my winnowing oar in.

You say to me, your mouth is brutish & mannered.

Kissing is good as exfoliation of belief.

Camus is rolling a huge football uphill.

He’s spreadeagled forward over it back-

& neck-strain locked into permanent reversal,

& dust makes the light redden into dusk

as Minerva strokes her owl

& takes the indirect free kick.

I.XXXV

Comme une belle fleur assise entre les fleurs

Like a beautiful flower sitting among the flowers

you picked lots of herbs in the new season

and sent them to me: one reason seemed to be

to learn their names and how they worked,

though I couldn’t work out if the main idea

was to heal my wounds or open them again

or maybe cast a spell to witch away the way

it hurt, the sense of burning up, the tears.

None of these, I think: once Love has got in

and been there for a time, there’s no remedy.

I think it was to remind me that from day one

I should have picked what I could, not to forget

how stubborn old age shadows our every step,

and how the flowers only last a single spring.

.II

Oh & I’m a flower sitting in the middle

of a field of flowers collecting young herbs

& sending them to you like any of this

is making rational sense? A pharmacist

like your mother or Derrida in spirit?

Though there’s no distillate of you

or the schtetl of my petalled head

simmering & approaching Stimmung,

if anywhere there’s justification for it,

it’s that, available in two expressions,

Seedlip Garden 108 captures the essence

of the English countryside with sophist-

icated top notes of the handpicked peas

& hay from the founder’s family farm.

.III

touched with biology

conjuring harms silence labour power

eye to eye across the basil

any elixir bridges you, now how

to kill it shoring up under the doorway

with velvet flowers peeping out of text

slithering finally to land & fielding

its animal slights a dose of pastoral

from a tipped cane or pipette careful

sequencing here a tilted skeleton

key there an antagonist

vines run up & loop around

the faint abyss of carbon rings

& all of us caught in the hexagon

Jonathan Catherall has recently published his first pamphlet, the cybernetic bestiary a setting in the flesh, with Contraband. Its opening poem can be found here in Blackbox Manifold. He is working on a book of translations of the 16th-century French poet Pierre de Ronsard. He works in the charity sector and edits the online magazine Tentacular.

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