Monostichs

Monostichs 1

Enmeshed in misunderstandings who can carry the torch?
Rugged, cultivated too, some old French people.
Manet's mother's face is large with patience.
Manet's father was gruff, in pain, annoyed.
In Manet's portrait his parents' eyes are downcast.
On Papa's table, a scrap of tapestry, a snuffbox.
Manet crushed his parents into a confining space.
Paint without fear your parents for them to see.


Monostichs 2

This model sits for one painter only.
Once there is a bunch of violets in her bodice.
Again she takes hold of the red fan in her lap.
What a nuisance. High time for her to marry.
Next he paints emptiness between violets and a fan.


Monostichs 3

Village industries still thrive beside the river.
People in light clothes enjoy boating parties.
Dusk falling, accordion music floats up to us.
Dogs romp in long grass, children call.
Singly some gulls slant across green water.
If time allows we walk down there for supper.


Monostichs 4

A knob of goat cheese, fried sprats, the dolmas.
An aubergine in a chilled savory sauce.
Sliced thin, a delicate lamb cutlet.
All occupied, eleven tables on the terrace.
Knives and forks are plied vigorously.
Touched by knife or fork, china might clink.
Carafe here, bottle there, taste anis.
Sky profiles over there the coast of Lesbos.
Wait for it. Supper done, people sing.


Monostichs 5

As an unhatched ostrich Spira appears to us.
Spira is cosily at home in her egg.
Her egg's yolk is snow, its white is apricot.
Listen closely while Spira pecks her egg open.
Out of her egg Spira spills, lucky to live.
Tall ostriches have helped Spira to walk along.
Faster than a camel Spira runs to battle.
Greedier than an ape Spira gobbles bullets.

*

The selfsame Spira is no other ostrich.
Over the underside of the unconscious Spira doodles.
Of Spira's doodles made, dreams appear to us.
With Spira we deprave complete strangers.
Spira runs away laughing with a basket of roses.
Oh, that ostrich calls to us vibrato.
You can't call Spira anything you please.
What an ostrich has joined let no man put asunder.


Monostichs 6: Sequel to Monostichs 5

Past the eleventh hour Spira reappears.
Spira has reappeared as an oyster in Libya.
Much gunfire lacerated Libya sixty years ago.
Closer and closer it is coming, the gunfire.
Spira crouches tighter and tighter in her shell.
The oyster Spira is making a declaration.
The oyster declares imagining to be key.
(Discover good sense buried in the commonplace.
By key Spira means what starts everything up.)
The oyster insists: imagining is the trick.
Oysters assembled on a dish repudiate Spira.
Champagne flutes quiver at the thought of her.
Just listen to the gunfire in our street.


Monostichs 7

On one flank the boats, shops on the other.
The modest promenade can display no crinolines.
Boats at their moorings, awnings to shade café tables.
Footsteps of mortal and animal go pitterpat.
Ear to paving, listen to the click of claws.
A chamois, what's more, Spira has left faint hoofprints.
Wheat is tossed by the wind but singly people settle to work.
Always till noon, from early morning, trestles, a platter.
Why here, Spira, when the mysterium tremendum is your haven?
Black sea-urchins heaped on the platter, shiny spines.
Did not a mariner's eye glisten in the entrails?


Monostichs 8

It fell out that tonight I noticed a hiatus.
Have our narratives retired it fell out?
So it fell out that I took a second look at it.
It fell out that in 1891 Renoir mislaid his walking stick.
It fell out that now I read of this in a letter he wrote.
What the devil, I mislaid mine in a dream last night.

*

Casual as it might fall out to be this phrase is occult.
Out of what, besides, does it fall?
What is this it that falls out, anyhow?
I infer that the phrase was born from an old bowl.
Out of the mother bowl fell the lots of Fortune.
So ID we say has taken command of events.
ID herds and jostles events into their happening.
Renoir's recovered walking stick lends presence to mine.
Beside this perpetual falling out there are some occasions.
Friends fall out, platoons, nestlings, you name it.
Only the figure of speech tames the raving of Chance.
The figure applies to time twisting and turning.
It affirms a falling out into bottomless Chance.


Monostichs 9

Spira steps testily round the mirror of analogy.
The angle at which a figure tilts exasperates her.
Music is a woman's joy manifest in abundant wavy hair.
A woman's joy in abundant wavy hair is manifest music.
Reversed in the mirror, affectation or banality?
If Spira quotes, where do which words come from?
Woman and joy came from the lips of an Orphic phenomenon.
Cultivated circles heard concerts by the Lamoureux orchestra.
Which of the figures then is the original?
In a moment Spira will shriek at the original's affectation.
Spira trailing a long ponytail suddenly breezes away.


Monostichs 10

As he became older he looked more like a Neapolitan.
Something wrong with his eyes; bladder infections.
Never could they dazzle him, the laundry women.
Seldom could the dancers see where he stood.

*

Golds and greens and reds gainsay his gruff speech.
What of cats? Fellow creatures he must push aside.
Careful now, who else will be a dinner guest?

*

Do not stand behind frisky horses like those of his.
The busy nude is all discretion in her sheen of gold.
Morning noon and night he's peevish from lucidity.

*

Alone, old, almost eyeless he goes trudging by.
There's an even worse war smashing everything to bits.
They strapped to his leg a catheter, an impediment.
He'll keep his stick firmly gripped, he peers and peers.

*

There's a crack in the fence for him to peer through.
Air is foul with coal smoke for him to breathe.
Now there's a pit to peer into where his attic had been.


Monostichs (Spurious)

In Urga has dawned the day to rent a smart new bicycle.
Over huge billowings of earth pedal beside the nomads.
Arriving in the Caucasus the bicyclist is offered an AK 47.
Ippolitov Ivanov wrote the music for holy space and loneliness.
Treads of charabancs broke the road of jeopardy and spices.
Silk and stories, west and east the lands are robbed of them.
If periwinkles grew there, they died like reefs of coral.
Dromedaries gone, 400 billionaires amassed fortunes.
Rent a bicycle? An heiress would sooner sniff Miss Cassatt's Corbelic Smoke Ball.
A puncture in Mongolia thwarts the lust for competition.


Monostichs 11

The jackals are always there, you can sleep sound.
Our tents are of a textile they can't bite through.
The knell tolls clear from a grandfather clock.
Night air smokes out all thought of biting a windpipe.
Cling to the edge by fingernails the homeless, the heartbroken.


Monostichs 12

Thomas à Kempis epitomized in 1441 The Book of Job.
Of old they spoke: Self-will gainsays God's.
The will of God may be the Devil's in disguise.
By cherishing detail drive the Devil out of it.
Worry not too long who forgot her teddybear at the pharmacy.


Monostichs 13

Can a man so bewildered leave any good thing behind?
Redskin left no trace so Evil Spirit could not harass him.
Egyptians took ship for yet another Sensible Place.
For William Blake there might still be hell to pay.
Ingenuity will not delay earthquake or hurricane.

*

Omar tells a fool his reward is nowhere.
Books ignored, words abused, personal memory wilts.
The gadget does things for and against you.
Now brutish live music deadens a multitude of minds.

*

Monostich, monochord, could you be related?
In the happy hunting ground go seek Pythagoras out.


Monostichs 14

How from a film of skin could eyeballs come to be?
Fish, chicken, man, and kite, a million other eyes.
The manifold of life exhales the exquisite animations.
Rocks and soils are not stabler than submarines.
Give thanks to those who continually find them out.
Spirits of play engage with things invisible.
Nothing would meet us without an impulse from the Imaginary.
Suppose that the beginning was in the Imaginary.
After the beginning the Imaginary struck it out.
Suppose that Spira in the mirror took up the fight.
Give thanks to those who have in heart the Trembling Pivot.
Whose play averts evils of the Imaginary, thank them.


Monostichs (Spurious)

Was not God in the first place a name desperately extended to reverse the Unforeseen?
Coherences of poetry and painting are victories but still we soldier on.
Some coherence comes in daily life with effort.
By the conformity of the astronomical universe we are not consoled.
What avails coherence for the woman whose nose they cut off?
We swarm but are not driven like a swarm of rats.
What avails coherence for generations of the destitute?
Whirled beyond the circuit of the Bear Mrs Cammel said Hello to me.
Now the hate groups proliferate and intelligence plummets.
It is by their proper names that we call the great reasoners.


Monostichs 15

In celebrating the artist do not go overboard.
From Altamira to Caravaggio it was no straight road.
Bewitched by pictures we naturally lost control.
The great picture measures a mystery of flesh and bone.
Seizure of control may hardly at all affect a destiny.
Sweetly on waves of air she flies to the rail, Miss Finch.
Aptly the heron avoids entanglement of his huge wings in persnickety twigs.
An image differs: True to itself an image depictures what was there.
Many many vanishing points for the mountains bordering China.
It takes spirit to perceive right limits for a whole thing.


Monostichs 16

Here's Spira as she walks, unaware of rousing appetites.
The little restaurant has for hostess a young ship's figurehead.
The figurehead jumped ship, she walks among us, Spira.
Her walk is lissom, she's never less than upright.
She does not slope or stoop or sway or plod.
Quick suppleness he also saw, when healed, the blind man in the Gospel.
See her sail along, hands crossed over her pubis.
Look at the dining space, her motions alter what we see.
Wall and mirror ripple for an instant, ceiling frisks like impasto in a painting.
To music in a school of dance she learned to walk.
Shove tables aside, make space for Spira dancing.
Algebra, observe, your equations will be solved.


Monostichs 17

Print on the billboard changes, not so the writing on the wall.
With its first white petal cup the shrub rose amazes us.
Return, father. I am here beside the river, fishing.
I cast my line. You turn the pages of La vita nuova.