The inside of the body pushes towards the outside And I push myself through streets full of men Cafes full of men. I order a coffee from a man Men push through the street in front of the cafes Bargain in black eyes My life overflowing its bounds I can't buy food, negotiate the streets or bargain in this life There are men everywhere the magnificent saber of Islam in their eyes Men terrify me Beauty terrifies me Beautiful men terrify me and I would faint in the Barbes mud the inside of my body pushing towards the outside I sit in a cafe in Barbes and a woman walks by in tears The God of Islam is the God of Love and I know that love is a terrible thing and a god of love will finish my life Love is the steepest bargain of terrible price. The heart pushes towards the outside the heart is a souk one civilization dents another pushing towards the outside and I would pass out in the market-place men everywhere My life not such important merchandise The inside pushes me further out I would die here without murder or suicide Barbes or Essaouira full of men The God of Islam, eighteen years old. 100 francs a God with a revolver
Barbes Dec 4, 1981 ______________________ Rene Ricard God With Revolver Hanuman Books 1989
What flitted back across the hills yesternight, without a sound I thought was a long buried matter of the heart from the deepest recesses of a valley wallowing in death With my own eyes I saw her open a little doorway onto the garden tentatively venture forth, look here, there, then promptly disappear, leaving, in the end, still the very heart of winter, nothing but traces
1996 translated by Steve Bradbury ____________________________ Yang Mu Hawk of the Mind Columbia, 2018
Outside, nothing moves: only the rain nailing the house up like a coffin. Remember, in childhood, when it rained? Then, the whole world sailed down the alley: leaves, paper, old shoes, the buildings, everything like a circus going to sea. Now, the rain, the iron rain, with its little keys is closing all the doors. . . and I think we're all dead. See how the sky sits like a tombstone on the roofs.
Evening on the Farm
Time for a jacket now, and to put my hands away. I must learn from the stars how a field should look. But one by one, bright children, the stars rush downstairs to meet my horses and hay with their astonished eyes.
Apprentice
Because I love you I've learned to be this hammer that runs all day like a horse with its hoof in its head. In the afternoon my hands lie down together for a minute.
Twilight at the Shop
A whole day at the saw — when they come for the rubbish, I throw myself out with the dust. We smile and smoke and praise what's left of the sun. Dark trees have bottled its light. They glow like many beers.
Night-Letter Nightly I write you letters but morning is always a cancelled gray envelope stamped ADDRESS UNKNOWN. I've been wanting to tell you how things are since you have gone: the cherry trees still looks into your window and offers its arms full of small birds of your last Spring. I've packed your luggage — that worn leather suitcase with the labels of epochs and sent it on freedom rides to Mississippi jails. Your clothes closet, once gay as a carnival of bears with your checkered shirts and poet's neckties holds the odor of dead flowers and more sinister than shadows motes of dust in faded sunbeams swing suspended from bare wire hangers. Your rough jackets have gone with their bearings — they have given me their last embraces to link arms with new companions and your shoes are out walking again on new picket lines. But the grief of your old eyeglasses that you patched with Scotch tape is more than I can bear. Lying in the lamplight before an open book they watch me from a void of vacant lenses as I go from room to room on perilous journeys groping with my fingers to construct your face, seeking the answer of your lips upon the sundered air the way it was the last time I kissed you under the wings of the Angel of Death. ___________________ Olga Cabral The Evaporated Man Olivant, 1968
Olga was a very early friend to Longhouse — we miss her.