The Transcendental Friend | 2001-03

[ Truth ]

[ Flammable ]

[ Becomes Red ]

[ Dream of ]

[ Bone ]

[ Tooth ]

[ Matter ]

[ Nota Bene ]

These Midnights of Flammable Torsos

There's no time to lose
Look here swoops the monochronic swallow
With an antipodal tone of approaching distance
Here swoops the swallowing swallow
At the horislope of the mountizon
The violonswallow with a cellotail
Slipped down the morning from a lunawing

—Vicente Huidobro, from Altazar (trans. Eliot Weinberger)

* * *

(6 Poems)
Kevin Varrone

O alpaca of the given velvety
onset of warm rainy O's
at high elevations
in the luxury fiber world
in la familia de la llama
O short-nosed aristocrat
and all your flaxen models
all your heavenly soft babies
of more utilitarian yield: you are the soft wardrobe
workhorse, you are so money and don't know it,
rapunzelled one micron at a time
in a mélange of clean, roomy
v-neck tenderness and flaring
on these midnights of flammable torsos

*

O May O
moist meadow of O
finger-length
flat and fresh and green
moist meadow
where the O cows graze
under the moon
under the dominion of O
and Saturn slain in his diseases
O finger-length
meadow of antipathy
and usual courses
O ompachine boiling
in the boiling sun.

*

O dodo you are my go-to bird
my 'heart-and-soul'
of consonant & vowel.

Mathematically sexual, you're everywhere & not at all,
omniscient & noncommittal.
(never "here" when you are "there",
never "there" when you are "here"),

You're the no
there there

you're in the pigeons but we've all got family
skeletons: you would never choke on rice
you would never take flight without your connotations.

You just do it, that thing you do. No fanfare, no hoopla,
disgusting bird.

*

O yale
your rapacity, your hankering
for gore. Sometimes on earth
sometimes on air
O flawed orpheus
and O your May thunder
your aphrodesial patch
your wanton loss of ferocity
vs. naked adamant.

Your 12 days of O
copulation your lack of repentence
your allegories which are all
allegories and your doubtful authenticity
which is Ethiopian.

*

O the jazz of this biographical era
the atonal anti-
phonal giddy O
Dominic your brays & whinnies
it is the h of them that shards me
O Pepino my italian mouse couture
in your italian mouse house,
Bougain Villa Mousé
on the plains of my living room
you are Pepino the one true and long lost
my tenor, me tenet, my aria
my amor I love you like a rhododendron
like all the loves of my life
which are, without exception, misspellings.

*

O catoblepus your spots and tushes
your needles
of dictate your expiration gaze.
You are my F Scott
my O my silhouette
and center, my core
my coaxed hern
my trained deformity.

O lover in this
thus far and O then some
in these declensions
in these aquatics
O when you are all undone
what you'll have done to my secrets.