TOM CLARK: YOU / coexistence

Thursday, 16 November 2017

YOU / coexistence

_DSC0831: photo by noppadol maitreechit, 23 April 2016

YOU (I)

The door behind me was you

and the radiance, there like

an electric train wreck in your eye

after a horrible evening of waiting outside places in the rain for you
to come

only to

find all of them, two I know, the rest scullions, swimming around you

in that smoky crowded room like a fishbowl

I escaped from, running away from you and my André Breton

dream of cutting your breasts off with a trowel

and what does that matter too them or you now, but just wait,
it's still early

to the children embroidered in the rug, who seem to be setting up siege

engines under a tree house full of midgets who look like you.

Where are you in this sky of new blue

deltas I see in the drapery, and your new friends wearing bamboo singlets

what are they doing down there in the moat waving tridents like stalks
of corn?

Me, I'll be happy to see their blood spilled all over the bedspread

pavilions of your hands as an example. If you come home right now I'll
scrunch your hat

between my thighs like a valentine before you have time to wipe them.

YOU (II)

You are bright, tremendous, wow.

But it is the hour of one from the horrible tremendousness

Of youth is about to depart.

The boats are ready. The air is soft and you perhaps nearby

Do pass, saying "I am for you."

This is as much as "Everything is great."

But desperation builds up all the time.

Life is nothing

more to me

strapped at the bottom

of the throat

Than majesty, I think. You are arduous as that

Ashtray. Swallow me! since

Your hands are full of streets

And I walk out upon the streets

And I think the girls are better looking, vicious, cool

And the men are flying kites and newsprint

Gets on my arms. I enter rooms --

Wild my steps like an automaton's --

Where batons are linked into some residue.

A gull is eating some garbage.

The sky is an old tomato can, I think.

I buy a newspaper and begin to walk back.

Smells torture the kites like gulls. Wild gulls, and

It's the tremendous sky of survival.

Few things are still visible to me. Baseball

Withholds the tremors. They fall, so

I drag you down and

You are akimbo as I stick it in

And everything is thunderous accordion April, great,

Risen from palms and hypntism. I run home

And dip my coffee in bread, and eat some of it.

YOU (III)

Today I get this letter from you and the sun

buckles a mist falls over our villas

with a hideous organic slush like the music of Lawrence Welk

I lay in bed all day, asleep, and like some nocturnal

beast. And get your salutation among the torn green numbers

in the sky over the council houses. And see your eyes when

the retired pensioners pass

me by the abandoned railway station -- this is not nothing, it is not

the hymn

of an age of bankrobbers or heraldic days but it is to sing

with complete gaiety until your heart freaks. I love you.

And go down amid the sycamores to

summer. Wandering by the lake any way

seems lovely, grand, the moon

is a gland in the thigh. Tumble and twinkle as on the golf course apparel

lifts. And a door is opened to

an owl. It is snowing, and you are here on the bed with me

and it is raining, and I am as full of frets as a guitar or a curtain

and I am singing, as I sponge up the cat place. You

are heaped. A curtain

of belief keeps me away from the tombs

of imagery. I love you, I'd like to go.

YOU (IV)

The chords knotted together like insane nouns Dante

you are in bed in the dark copula you

of the musical phrase a few star birds sing in the branches

their voices are tangled not high

now all of them are dark and some move you

were a word in the wood of my life

where the leaves are words, some of them fucking

in obscurity their clasping is terrible and brusque

pain birds ache thru them and some

are lighter and seem to suggest less

of death than of a viola da gamba player these

birds sweep past in the forest

of my hands on your chest, as we move

out on the glowing sea of the tropics on an ice pack, you,

YOU (V) (after Hölderlin)

Desert flowers (sunset): Tom Clark

O Earth Mother, who consents to everything, who forgives everything
don’t hide like this                                                        and tell

Her Power is sweetened in these rays, the Earth before her
   conceals the children
of her breast in her cloak, meanwhile we feel her,

and the days to come announce
that much time has passed and often one has felt
          a heart grow for you inside his chest
They have guessed, the Ancients, the old and pious Patriarchs,
          and in the secret they are, without even knowing it,
          blessed
in the twisted chamber, for you, the silent men
but still more, the hearts, and those you have named Amor,
or have given obscure names, Earth, for one is shamed
to name his inmost heart, and from the start however man
when he finds greatness in himself and if the Most High permits,
he names it, this which belongs to him, and by its proper name
and you are it, and it seems
                                              to me I hear the father say
to you honor is granted from now on
and you must receive songs in his name,
and you must, while he is distant and Old Eternity
          becomes more and more hidden every day,
take his place in front of mortals, and since you will bear and raise
       children for him, his wish
is to send anew and direct toward you men’s lives
when you recognize him           but this
directive which he inscribes in me is the rose
Pure sister, where will I get hold, when it is winter, of these
flowers, so as to weave the inhabitants of heaven crowns
                                          It will be
as if the spirit of life passed out of me,
because for the heavenly gods these signs
of love are flowers in a desert       I search for them, you are hidden

Desert flowers (dawn): Tom Clark

TC: YOU (from The Sand Burg, 1966)

Untitled [Cannon Beach, OR]: photo by Vladislav-A-, 14 October 2016

Untitled [Cannon Beach, OR]: photo by Vladislav-A-, 14 October 2016

Untitled [Cannon Beach, OR]: photo by Vladislav-A-, 14 October 2016

underpass [Tokyo]: photo by satoshi inagaki, 8 October 2017

Untitled [Texas and Pacific warehouse, Fort Worth]: photo by Gable White, 21 March 2015

9917: photo by Margot Geisler, 26 October 2017

Portland, Oregon: photo by Jorge Guadalupe Lizárraga, October 2011

sunday morning: photo by Andrea Schuh, 18 September 2017

static [Guilford, CT]: photo by Philip Greene, 18 October 2017

Spray bottle [Guilford, CT]: photo by Philip Greene, 8 November 2017

Barras Market - Raymond | by stuedwards_filmmaker

Barras Market - Raymond [Glasgow]: photo by Stu Edwards, 27 October 2017

For many years, I did not on a swing. | by masamiy21

For many years, I did not own a swing [Osaka]: photo by Masami Yamada, 5 November 2017

Tucumcari, New Mexico: photo by Joseph Vavak, 3 November 2016

15317: photo by Margot Geisler, 17 October 2017

the Farmland [Nara, Japan]: photo by Masami Yamada, 27 October 2017

waiting for the subway/地下鉄を待つ | by s_inagaki

waiting for the subway [Tokyo]: photo by satoshi inagaki, 19 September 2017

Untitled: photo by Hg T, 22 July 2017

Forest gorge: photo by fotoswietokrzyskie, 15 October 2017

coexistence [Tokyo]: photo by satoshi inagaki, 15 September 2017

Coexist: photo by Mirage44, 5 January 2011

Untitled: photo by Stoyan Nikolaev, 14 November 2017

@: photo by Ania Klosek, 28 August 2017

Untitled [Hispanic Day, Nellis AFB, NV]: photo by Andrés Luciano, 12 November 2017

4400 S. Wentworth | by all quiet please proceed

4400 S. Wentworth. Built 1885. [Chicago]: photo by Annie Maus, 9 January 2015

London Road: photo by Andy Feltham, 29 October 2017

Untitled | by Street photographer - http://www.gabibest.com/

Untitled [Tel Aviv]: photo by Gabi Ben avraham, 6 November 2017

Untitled [Shrek, Toledo, Ohio]: photo by joey harrison, 2 February 2005

To The Devil A Donut | by Sergi_Escribano

To the Devil a Donut [Barcelona]: photo by Sergi Escribano, 23 September 2017

Holiday display window, Seattle, 1965 | by MichaelRyerson

holiday display window in Seattle, 1965: photo by Michael Ryerson, 29 September 2017

Bangkok, Citizenship: photo by Miki Takayuki, 11 November 2017

Untitled [Munich]: photo by Ania Vouloudi, 26 October 2017

West Hollywood, October 2017. | by GrownUpBoy

West Hollywood, October 2017: photo by Karl Edwards, 1 November 2017

Untitled [Kasuga Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo]: photo by Miki Takayuki, 15 November 2017

kpp_15_26_5_11p. Berlin-Plänterwald, formerly "Kulturpark": photo by Michael Roggeman, 26 May 2011

6 comments:

TC said...: Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté: Kala Djula

Ali Farka Touré: Sambadia (live from Malian TV c. late 70s/early 80s)

Toumani Diabaté & Salif Keita

"tolon (fun) yelai (laughter) sewa (Joy) Kini (rice) soguo (meat) djegue(fish) mousso (woman) = what made them laugh"; 17 November 2017 at 00:34
TC said...: That's ok, I didn't expect anybody to pip a squeak.

This one is entirely truthful. It's got a lot of nerve. Sometimes it takes 50 years to get over your fears. This one has scared me that long. Which is why I've never exposed it to the killing floor silence of the world wide web. But f__ the world wide web and I'm not afraid of it any more, plus didn't somebody once say The truth shall set you free?

Life's not a niceness contest, despite what the world of creeps may think (the world of creeps = here today gone tomorrow, disposable world, get the money, big deal, die).

The details and scene... action such as it is takes place in a wee dead-end ex-fishing village on the N Sea... The abandoned railway station was a real abandoned railway station, the line stopped running through there when the summer traffic to that part of the coast ebbed, some time in the 11th century or so... the retired pensioners were real retired pensioners etc.

Anyhow blah blah I hope you enjoy and if you don't, well I'm sorry to say, I don't care, because all of a sudden I'm liking it a lot.

And you must try to understand this: if nothing else can be said of it, it's not like anything else.

I was listening to this at the time.

The Kinks: I'm Not Like Everybody Else, 1966

On the other hand, tolon yelai sewa kini soguo djegue mousso sounds pretty good to me, especially when sung by the greatest singer of all time. Sometimes it's the singer not the song, but when that happens it's of course also the song not the singer. As everybody knows.; 18 November 2017 at 07:35
kent said...: May I again repeat the words of my dear friend and writer Bruce Shlain: "What Tom Clark is doing is like nothing else in the world today." I see now Ray Davies would have to agree. Keep the faith, cuz. k; 18 November 2017 at 08:39
Unknown said...: Hey Tom. I'm still behind a few posts -- and drinking each in slowly. Anyway, as I'm reading your poem, You (I-V), right hand to God, I'm saying to myself, 'This actually happened. These are real events, real images.' I even reeled in the visit to search for Holderlin on the WWW to understand more. Just made me more curious. Just so you know!; 25 November 2017 at 13:39
TC said...: Thanks very much Tom. Yes, pretty much real. Enough evidence perhaps to found a... what would it be? Dossier? Charge?; 25 November 2017 at 14:19
TC said...: (Not forgetting in his defense that the protagonist was solitary at the time, suggesting all this to have been a sort of dream, or vision, if it please the Court.); 25 November 2017 at 14:21

TOM CLARK

Thursday, 16 November 2017

YOU / coexistence

6 comments:

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