Issue 19: Ian Seed
Spoiler
At our gate, oozed mudlarks.
One in five has optical spore clusters
above the entrance to the fat beach
girlfriend. It seems larder
and his blind finger piece
or the other way around.
This plus footage. We’re going
for a slow one. But it is
the sort of smoke which stretches
the whole. Buggers pet.
My nose is coming in a uniform
on the path still and grey
scratchy down the valley in the distance
drool packages toilet resort
cobbled plotless and numinous.
Domestic
The plate got up and walked across the table
There was some fun in your eye
Spite of the no-nonsense no-how look
It seems I have been planning the tone
Born of a four-legged desire
I agreed to come to an agreement
Find the wanton thee by the roadside
It’s all one to me I should say so
Bringing it up on the bright bus
It’s all one with this wilderness
First it was the only one to marry me
I know who kept it so easily and young
While it was worth waiting for
Not down by the worst river but other
One side took it and then the none
For me to come to you this way
Is another story altogether
Come to us via a tearduct
Or perhaps a million of them
This head brought on a plate
No telling whose path this is
Once in a while we keep to it
Flying into the intimate space of you
Not crying out loud perhaps
Yet down the whitening heal of your cut
The distance dubbed over with unfinished rain
Prevision
galloping is an emergency gait and the people just drift over
often with rear feet at the table named Jack
most large animals are a rather mannered girl he was supposed to be
their feet and kept making fun of her contrasting strategy
starting out as that sort of evening retreats along established paths
which she loved so much that they know the location in emergencies
when noise is no consideration except a softer future heading south
The Being of Distances
I haven’t managed to distract you. She washes herself in cold water,
this type of thinker. Keep on the trails. It is not that God has moods,
astonishing Helene, but dear friend you have another burial, so breathe
with all your heart. I swear that with you I want nothing more
than the old carpenter – his hours slow, the years fast. This small being,
being alone, was at… Let’s not throw roses. You seem familiar and limpid.
I don’t know if you ever tried to remember a windy evening with no escape.
I exchange my tears. They pedal together in a street of the sea. One begins now
the cutout piercing cries which – me too, are you inviting me? Opening
his arms when they don’t see him appear gives me a sharp satisfaction.
She makes her way between the tears. Busy men (themselves included)
leave at a good hour, continuing to dream the true fruits they could touch.
Little by little the two of us keep raining. Time stands still. If in order
to choose among them on the evening of the second day, he threw himself
into an economic venture offered to him between wide legs, growing warmer,
would I like it when you lean on me? Yes, this life is sweet, but have you done
your sums, drowning in the truth? They march at my sides. I see them
from behind. One hopes to be able to discover a method. I cannot imagine
an end, listening far from the river. Would you like a cigarette rolling?
Longer still the same beauty, each morning he watched me working. We arrived
in front of the closed door. To disguise himself from himself he passed
as a nomad already on the plain. One morning the phone rang. Faithfulness?
Rather his own poverty when I shook his hand between two distances shining.
He put his revolver on the table. I picked up my school book.
The empty nada, naked feet in sandals. Between two horizons he offered
his hand for the first time. We embraced without a word. Yet deprived of consolation
again I saw fragile lucidity between one city and another, till I tore myself away.
Let it stand then. I was at his mercy, still smoking with an absent look.
The ink faded, and she cried demanding what I would do. To the fire, the fire officers
to decide the question of horizon without knowing any of his occupations. Your
mouth and mine. And the monsters? How is Helene getting on? Which perspective and sweep
for a population of thieves? What shadows climb the walls following
your solitary trajectory? It was few months after our separation, my face
like the painting came upon and countenanced the extraordinary calm.
Incredible voices called you to dinner in the sky before the stars
could put you to sleep. Now I am exposed, deciding whether to believe
in the cold of your blue eye. There are many candidates for what is real. I cherish
the police. Much darker now in his open hands, palms upturned,
I would like to rest, yet I pass to another call of the sky, sincerely
as a policy invite, the store of dead reality almost without gesture.
Yet we have to race through the halls, meeting three people named George
on the same day. Decidedly our flight is from the real, which sleeps with a sleep
different in itself, until a far voice puts us back on our feet. How much is that?
We brush up against tears. We are fairly under way. He carries fingers.
I see you truly, your hand which consoles. For Monsieur is good, Madame
is beautiful. In search of us, they ran out onto the snow-covered field, leaving us
with their own glimmering. The end is nothing if not a passage, voices heard from afar,
and laughter from those evenings of a time which no longer has a place.
Ian Seed’s books include Identity Papers (Shearsman, 2016), The Thief of Talant (Wakefield, 2016) (the first translation into English of Pierre Reverdy’s long poem, Le Voleur de Talan), and Makers of Empty Dreams (Shearsman, 2014). New York Hotel is forthcoming from Shearsman in 2018.
