Eye <em>         bourne </em>

 

            “On Reading ‘On Joyce and Modernism’ ”

 

You hew and ken an auto-bio-graph

with a Oaxacan-blue, yellow-handled chisel, a large

rust-scaled ball-peen, angles scarred

forty-five degrees north, south and aft,

10 miles northeast, southwest in traffic

along a border, post-war-aspirant marked,

(angles, typographical cherubim, fallen hard

against “eye-car” coverage queries, mis-asked.)

 

Rename “The Modern” as often as you like, I still

can connect nothing before the kenning

beheads, if you know where I’m coming from, four

miles east, nine south of the border, up from the landfill,

where I lay incubating in the borough of churches and tenants,

spurned ab ovo from the queen’s new hospital doors.

 

            In the Era of Newsprint and Gloss

 

‘Only a shrug for death’ told TIME, datelined

the day and place of my first quadrennial,

the self-same morning Clive Barnes was mock-appalled

by bestiality in The New York Times.

Bestiality on off-Broadway, sidelined

‘into our ken’ the laggard twin of the perennial –

with only a shrug for death –

 

political, social, moral and cultural collapse.

4800 km across Fergus’s exiled twin’s

postmodernized plat map, Hyannisport’s lead diasporine

lay bleeding in an epochal hotel kitchen mishap.

Kiernan’s custom’s prediction – that piss, crap,

shite and onions dog all Ireland’s wandering clans –

scripts the cultural collapse.

 

            Modern Times, Post-dimensional

 

I am the you on your border, my pixels drawn.

I am the digitized image, excessively allusive.

I am anywhere but, anyone but, illusive

I yam what I yam, 12 time zones east and west of Maun.

You bleed deceptively as the day you were born,

you, always afraid a narrative, so like a loose sieve

you see the punctuational orthography drain – so elusive

you find each chapter – will turn out riddled and torn.

 

All of which is to say: We appreciate each others’

hiding places, post-proleptic tintypes,

or, if you’d rather, blackened iron or steel,

the elemental materiel past the shutters

where mothers & brothers shudder, and the linotype

beats time and time through the penultimate reel.

 

            Leaving Omaha, Part 3

 

The Emperor of Song, exalted in exile

688 years earlier

in pomp – circumstanced to suffer burlier

usurpers – over the Fuzhou border, reconciled

his voice to the tenor and vehicle, the bel canto style

Puccini transposed to Japan through our surlier

empery of song.

 

But Eamonn O’Donnell’s ‘just a name, dude,’

a lettered mask on a half-Korean face,

a veil whose every newly misnamed race

draws one quick laugh, reflexive and crude,

from peers, compeers, our empire’s spawn and brood

that kicks over borders at an unchecked pace.

Just a name, dude.

            Like father

 

“Shite and onions dog all Ireland’s wandering clans,”

he was saying, bottom lip pursed,

nose cocked 45 towards the door, “and the cursed

crap back,” and then on to those poor bastards with no chance

and their ragged reading, German lessons, self-help plans,

hi-liting James Joyce for phrases, savoring the first:

“Shite and onions.”

 

We kick over borders at an unchecked pace

in desert fatigues, Bradley tanks, Apache helicopters, Greyhound buses

midnight-bound through south Wyoming. The driver grouses

as snow piles more than a crystalline trace –

powdered drifts across the flat screen as we race

away from last year’s half-colonized rock garden, rushing

at an unchecked pace.

 

            Sea changes

 

Eisenhower, pinstriped, creased and pious

signed his God into each schoolchild’s pledge

on a 70.3-degree Fahrenheit bridge

towards summer, 35 years before “cry us

a river” flowed right to left, and a dais

set up for knighting – across the salted wedge

of an ocean of watercress, scimitar-edged

and parried – an ex-acting president at war with science.

 

That bookended chock of Grand Old days

flanked the beginning and the beginning of the end

of what “some people” called a revolution. But epitaphs

lurk and plash in others’ pens – clause, phrase,

paragraph – all poised for afterwards, right before you rend

and hew and can your auto-bio-graph.

 

            The history you don’t know

 

688 years earlier

the Middle Ages, pockmarked and unnamed

(they were too busy tarring witches they blamed

for plagues, calms at sea, waves of curlier

hair in the colonies) grew tired and surlier

until history’s scribes wove them a frame –

“688 years,”

 

he was saying, bottom lip pursed,

a can of Schaefer – “The One Beer to Have

When You’re Having More Than One” – in hand, salve

for the memory and middle age. The first

dug back into Gibbon for facts, a bratwurst

idled at his elbow, and he held court like a burgrave,

bottom lip pursed.

 

            Hurricane season

 

Midnight-bound through south Wyoming, the driver grouses

until the radio plays a variation

on the hurricane that leveled Galveston

in 1900. All the houses –

playhouses, outhouses, henhouses, warehouses –

kindled to the sea, and oral historians,

midnight-bound, threw south

 

until history’s scribes wove them a frame,

tape recording – six months before she died – Emma Beal

speaking her piece of their piecemeal

reconstruction. She spoke her memories the same

day Hurricane Agnes took diffuse aim

at Pennsylvania, and – reluctantly – the commonweal

wove her a frame.

 

 

 

            Mandate

 

After the sophomore soprano in Music History 101,

in 1985 – months before Baltic Freedom Day,

before Hezbollah hijacked a Rome-bound TWA –

after she sang “righteousness has won”

over coffee, and you and I and Gesualdo and Milton

plucked tritones, joined the devil’s party,

resigned as we were to 1,459 days

before our next shot at freedom –

 

we had a 21^st birthday event.

Louisville, less than an hour north of Fort Knox,

a bar where moustached men watched coryphees adorn

sturdy metal poles, planted in cement.

But I was wanting Wordsworth on the jukebox,

aye – and the yew on your borders, weatherworn.

 

One way to escape an epidemic

 

“Until the radio plays a variation,”

you were saying in late spring of ’84,

“until Queen gives place to Stevie Wonder

or at least Duran Duran,

until then” – you were worked up – it would be all LPs. You’d shun

pop music’s implications until September

played its variation.

 

The Middle Ages, pockmarked and unnamed,

could not have been much darker

than we made our adolescent decades,

lost centuries. Our new plague, untamed

long past mid-June of that year we spent mislaid,

en route to not becoming, in 1984,

pockmarked and unnamed.

 

            Plagues, glaciers, hurricanes

 

Lost centuries – our new plague, untamed –

“shite and onions” dogging all Ireland’s wandering clans,

even mine, in prose and anecdote – lost to famines,

failed will, apprehension, the shadows of kames

in mid-June mid-Switzerland, each quitclaim

before AZT, tuber blight, suburban proscription –

lost centuries.

 

The hurricane that leveled Galveston

could not have been much darker,

if we’re confining ourselves to personal markers –

(and we do confine ourselves) – than the one

whole half-life in an ambry or bin,

dwelling on the wind and hedged sun

that leveled Galveston.

 

            Leaving Omaha, Part 4

 

I always reach an acumination, or an eye

because of that problem with stepping in the same –

I almost wrote “shite and onions,” but that frame

holds another half thought – river twice,

according to the time-hobbled cliché. There am I,

on a Greyhound to San Francisco, the Plains

stubbled with in-grown harvested corn, the claims

obligation files put to death for the night.

 

Here comes the grand confession,

or at least a mental breakthrough,

even a balanced Wells Fargo balance or a laugh

a block from Market Street – but I can shun

self-knowledge and disclosure with the best, can re-ink a tattoo

as I hew and ken my auto-bio-graph.

 

 

 

            Junior year, the conservatory

 

If we’re confining ourselves to personal markers,

our voice to the tenor and vehicle, the bel canto style

sings a liar’s aria, free from bile,

mordancy, our charmed circus barkers’

performances of sincerity. That serpentine hostel in Osaka

almost caught us out, but it’s best to ape Weill

if we’re confining ourselves.

 

Long past mid-June of that year we spent mislaid,

our failed wills apprehensive in the shadows of kames

if ever kame came to Indiana. Still, no endgame

offered and shades and avalanches augured as we strayed

to the jazz club’s men’s room, pretending to be afraid

of clients from the bar downstairs who shared the doorframe

in that year we spent mislaid.

 

Galveston Seawall, one week before the solstice

 

She asked, did I want an orange or a banana?

then carved me a wedge – a keystone – of cheese.

I couldn’t tell her I wanted to be in Botswana,

Siena, swimming the Rio Grande with a Portuguese

 

guide, any elsewhere just to avoid

the adolescent import of my answer.

So I said: “I know you read your Freud,

but I earn steady pay as a latter day fan dancer.”

 

All of which is to say – and I do mean “all” –

a month of Sundays, a fortnight of birthdays

were never adequate to land the ball

squarely enough in my court, to hurricane away the haze

 

all that round, unspeakable month with its queer bullying moon.

 

            S147999 + Proposition 8 vs. the First Black President =

 

Initial reports gave the day of my birth,

the date the Second Congress (not the Third Sex) adopted the flag

the divine Ms. Ross had sewn after a zigzag

of trendy emblems, as the first fording of the firth

to heteronormativity, down from the rainbow and cake to earth

for California’s queers, into that knag

in which every Jane Austen novel plots to snag

the Darcys, Ferrars and Bertrams of worth.

 

But they sang in their chains for half a year

in any case, and in the end the date

proved mistaken, the right turns a pawn

to the next breakthrough, and this queer

takes two steps on the board and declares – too late?

I am the you on your borders, pixels drawn.

 

            The Accurséd Share

 

All that round, unspeakable month with its queer bullying moon

we raged in binary code against the machine,

against Mormons, exit polls, “mean-

spirited” being the kenning most in tune

with half our thoughts, the half that half-ruined

November, as we were welcomed and exiled to the Azbine

over that compound unspeakable month.

 

“Shite and onions dog all Ireland’s wandering clans,”

I kept remembering him saying, and with a puerility

particularly mine I wondered if the sterility

of our particular rainbow’s pot of gold spans

race, nation, outcast station – if Calibans

and Callahans and Queen and queers share liminality

with all Ireland’s wandering clans.

 

In summation

 

We thronged the border, post-war PTSDs, heaving

only a shrug for death this time,

addicted to the quick laugh, reflexive as Anaheim

in the ’60s, in desert fatigues, Bradley tanks, Greyhounds leaving

for Omaha. We tarred witches we blamed for weaving

spells and constitutional revisions, making it a crime

to cross their borders.

 

I am the digitized image, excessively allusive.

Until then and that it was all LPs. But I shunned

my early epidemic self, suburban proscription,

fears of the jazz club’s men’s room, my abusive

month of Sundays and sonnet of birthdays, the illusive

binary code I had my machine fashion

in a form so excessively allusive.

 

            Denouement – part 1

 

Rome – it has been said – was not built

the night before Christmas. So the self roams its autobiography,

scavenging chapter headings for a cartography

cut to the heart of the latter, the gathering of silt

building a delta of post-guilt,

past-due Renaissance Self-Fashioning Geography

I almost wrote – but that’s someone else’s book and orthography,

names and theories stitched to someone else’s quilt.

 

Aren’t they all, though? I hear

a Manchester accent saying with an unuttered laugh,

echoing from last night’s DVD, a bourne

as good as any from which to tear,

hew and ken an auto-bio-graph.

I am the you on my borders, pixels drawn.

            Afterbirth

 

It’s only a provisionally-queer poem,

objection duly noted. Full of shite

and onions the way a quote’s plagued with the blight

that blots more pointed thoughts – the loam,

so to speak, of a primal scream that rabidly foams

to unearth, unrhyme, unobfuscate and bring to cleaner light

the facts, just the facts, carbonized to a single byte

or pixel or even crumb now we’re so near home

 

and still empty. Still stillborn – I meant

to bring up the metonym for paralysis, ‘sadly borne’

home in the master’s first true story, one graf

into the collected works. Yes, my eponymous parent,

I am the you on your borders, pixels drawn,

who’s hewn and kenned this auto-bio-graph.

© Christopher Flynn