Embedded Files
TWO AFTER RONSARD
I.XXXIII
Cest amoureux desdain, ce nenny gracieux
.I
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
.I
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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