N a p a l m   H e a l t h   S p a :   R e p o r t   2 0 1 3 :   S p e c i a l   E d i t i o n

L o n g   P o e m   M a s t e r p i e c e s   o f   t h e   P o s t b e a t s

 

 

DENYSE DU ROI

 

duroi

 

 

Because I Chose Her

 

We’d go in the amphitheatre

dine on bread

voice of Lear of Pericles

having broken the unwritten.

 

 

 

Your life leisures in three parts.

You miss it.

                                                      I spy through a seven foot crack

that extends from Pasolini’s eyeglasses

to a dying monkey at Brooks Air Force Base

in Texas.

 

 

 

Part One isn’t quite La Bibliothèque.

It is fluctuating attention & fear of falling

in

it is eating as a ritual

& cannibalism a deflation of instinct

                  pivoting on Your Eminence, shanghaied into

             genuflection before the conception of owl

       feathers under pillows, keeper of dreams,

& the hermit diamond’s inviolate table of contents

                                                      Admit it

 

 

Your cohorts face an androgynous courtship

dizziness in verse collective (mosaic & cinematic

vision) in the Holy Spirit the Lacemaker the I Ching

 

 

 

THE MORTAL PERIL THAT LIES IN WAIT FOR MAN

WHEN HE DARES TO CONFRONT THE ANIMAL-GOD

 

 

then

 

 

S A C R I F I C E:

 

 

of flying sauer

of gelatinous mass

of guide, in dream

of glass house, ice, healing

of limbo, plum tree, medicine

of labyrinth, doublings, dogs

of quicksand, theft, medicine

of Heraclitus, Gustav Mahler, Tommy Nashe

of how the city of Saint Francis

that tight-fisted grey rose

rose of high tea & nightly treats which, depending on your mood,

tend toward private

showings of VIRIDIANA, of how it suddenly

became Johannesburg, subway delusions

sequestered into a pyramid of the lost.

 

 

With the certainty of a pallbearer, a toast.

 

 

Part Two is bicycling in.

 

 

You take back 1/19th of a step.

It has something to do with nervousness.

“Paler than nature & all sleep standing,”

you dream or you die, eh, Mr. Burroughs?

 

 

A toast, then, Violet Eyes, to dead sure love &

having the long impalpable arms that occupation requires.

 

 

“Mercy I cry City” seemed important once

                                                                                                            & now this

pure pleasure of Parsons Green rising off the

tracks like a train depot in Missouri, artifacts of

                                    purple-bordered spring

                                                                                                            & now this

A man elaborating on the real killing fields

of wood, a polished clearing where the stereo

console came to rest & he never could, starting

up at two, three, four a.m. to march to Apollinaire’s

grave & coming instead to where Jim Morrison’s Eros

 

 

Hotel’s been mismanaged into balconies of dead film

directors, sweeling pockets of Gaudi.

 

 

The windows say, “It is not you.”

I look at my part of the sky with your vision &

vestibule.

The windows get bogged down in semantics, beyond

Chartres & the highway apostle, windows outstammering

the kilometers.  Autoerotic fatalities, I thought you

would magically appear

                                       to coincide with Eurasian cheekbones or

the color of Michiko’s kimono.  Preponderance of the

self-taught, it’s DEATH AND THE MAIDEN all over again,

on a vase painting in Palermo, the sea & the sea-born

Aphrodite.

 

 

Part Three is an airport.

 

 

Haven for strangers, a black-mouthed chrysanthemum that’s

straightlaced some mum affair, but still & foremost, the

solemnity.  Your channeling of Marlene Dietrich is structured

with many spectators like the Old Vic.  In the backyard,

that perfect remnant of winter.  Then I am a widow,

here by the wheel.  Because I chose her, she has many

daymares to choose from, faked-up, non-smoking Girl Scouts

out of uniform whose body, one, a chart this glacial nun

has memorized only to say, “Your veins are tired of this

business.”  Dying of not dying, the women in that desolation

screamed like the animals

the woman in that vial, held up to the almost blue

invisible burner, questioned the nature of that gift

tied with ocher & russet strands

speaking to compensate for sleep paralysis, a Poe tale

of indeterminate length (Is it as big as a bread-box?)

turning the moon into an archaic symbol of an issue

we no longer pretend to address

 

 

                  “Phenomenology of disintegration,” he said.

 

 

Angels temper the discomfort of the world.

 

 

Have you always spoken in a monotone?

Does it tarry between October & February

benign with maturity & gravity

(the face depicted in a French noël)

Is it May in a Liberty print dress

moving toward lucidity & computing the need

Do you want to do business under a fictitious name?

love object, ruse, miracle of the rose, Beate Beatrix, objet d’art

 

 

 

                  “none of my business” these “corridors of power

                  wrought into the figure of a sun

 

 

 

Who to turn to:

 

                  George Bernard Shaw

                  Albert Schweitzer

                  Gary Snyder?

 

 

And make an appeal, an inherent maternal element that solves

the Sphinx’s riddle.

 

 

Thin of it, Revlon yanks the rabbits from all its hats.

HER countrified blush anywhere from cinnabar to Oedipus Red,

semi-authentic freckles

like what

like Verushka in Lady Chatterley’s Lover

nosegays of bleeding animals

sumptuous as the military build-up

it’s reciprocal into the bargain

daisy-clipping, disinheritance, dreaming

academia: amphitheatre of the palest & death’s head comedy.

Eyes darker if I wait, she says, “Geese shouldn’t hiss at

saints.”  Eyes like gaslights at my approach.

Like now, I need an animal, freezing in my tenement mink.

He who would be valiant be, the coat is healthy with a

sound heartbeat.  “When I close my eyes, I see a pyramid.”

 

 

                                                                        You wake

                                                                        in the Statue of Liberty’s face

                                                                        Paler than nature

                                                                        & all sleep standing.

 

 

 

[Published in Filmmaking (Pantograph Press, 1992) by Denyse Du Roi.]

 

 

Denyse Du Roi is the author of the book of poems Filmmaking (1992) and co-author of Sphinxeries with Anne Waldman (1979). She studied at the Naropa University Kerouac School in the late 1970s before moving to Berkeley. Anne Waldman wrote of her work: “Denyse Du Roi’s poems are complex weaves, meanderings, montages of rich imagery and language which juxtapose the lush with the ordinary, the ancient with the contemporary.”