First Love

First Love

We laid ourselves down together
Wrenched into one beast by our nature
‘Twist it around the other way’ she said
I thought she was singing with that throat
The love in her eyes had me skewered
She battered me sideways with one look
My younger self sang in her arms, ‘Mieti il grano’
And my cockroach between her legs
Together we sang our little canzoni

She was Beatrice, virginal and proud
-The eyes of her
I wanted to blood her, she was empty
But the blood sang in me instead
Rose from beneath the bottle
So I clubbed her haughty pride
With my farmer’s voice tamed by the town
She laughed when I stumbled
Proud Hibernian mumbler
Her lips inflamed me with their medical zeal
The anatomical exactitude of her words-
And I was the wandering white Guelf
Afraid of her words, afraid to speak
I ruined every perfect moment with my tongue
This heavy meat is like any other
Supplied with blood and spittle
My dreams remain in the sweat of love
Before they burst into form with the other sweat

And though her words were irreproachable
She snicked my cockroach with her teeth
In her cat-like smile
With her magnificent equine indifference
How could I but love her heaving flanks
Her lathered beams and striping muscles?
Then I bit into her haunch,
Sank my teeth into giving flesh
Until I found my boreen in her eyes
My words then were gifts for her
From one part to another
I didn’t notice that her face was changed
The lost glow of nubile mystery
Honeyed words to fill some vessel
And we sang the night together
As she shuffled away through the dust

The dawn rumoured love,
The large birds whinnied
Those jug-jug syllables
So praised by naturalists
And the sweat was not done yet
It ran still from me in gouts
That morning I painted all the world
I suffered the messianic agonies
Having recourse to a familiar bottle
And the judgement of her words

We are all judged by beauty at the end
Though even the beautiful are lacking-
They are deficient with words and symbols
Having no need for masks and stratagems-
They have hearts but only the physical-
The tragedy of the logos is hermeticism
Love shielded from the dripping hand
It’s all etiquette and urine-logic

She showed me love that night and was gone
For whatever place women go
When the old anger subsides-
I can see now that this beauty is singular
I do not think that it was meant for me
Or, as it were, unconditionally
When my mood is taken under
In all things Aurora pre-empts me
Bush-whacked by that sopping bitch
She poured out all of her grief once
I believe that she had no other recourse
She had smoked the celestial cigar
So to speak
Shifted the load, that heavy world
Wincing it’s fibre cheekily
Her image dancing in her water

‘What pit of foul excrement’
I wooed her with these and other fancies
These cyclopean cities, their Colónic irritations
-I browsed her thoughts like a cataloguer-
I wonder how they seat themselves,
They see madness burning everywhere-
When I fall off the edge they will say
‘We saw it in his execrations’
That Babylonian whore bestrode me
Waving the ten-gallon like an oriflamme,
We picked away the hairs one by one
Each one concealing a moist secret-
Damp secretions are a continual source
Of unalloyed joy
When is alone (and the meal is over)
Picking stray thoughts from the air

The madness of love subsided-
Within a few moments, the mutual loathing
Equilibrium came swinging back
Is Adam so different that he mocks my frenzy?
The show-off whoreson
Faggot-concealing sun-worshipper
I beached my ship upon your proud rump
Beholding the marbled flesh with a critical eye
All youths are the same in the moment
When they turn away in tears
Contracting into skeletal coiling-
Eventually the darkness weaves away
It pines like dust for it’s enemies
What did you say?- ‘Abhors a vacuum’
I like the earthiness
Nature is always personified
The white coats give her
A human face with human hatred

She was still in that moment
Caught in my rough embrace
Gibbering in her light latin tongue
‘Más, más- no, no- pára ya coño’
With a yo-ho-ho and a fist to be sure

Sliding along the night sky
I tested the northern waters with my tongue
Refreshingly- cold and salty
Brought me back to beauty and love
(Funny what smelling salt can do)
I found her radial symmetry disturbing
Her perfect horizontal proportions-
Then I began to taste colours on my tongue
Love was jaundice-yellow
The logos was green as pea
Beauty was the naked blue of heaven
Aurora was an almost translucent grey
Everything in that moment tasted
Fear for example was a serrated frigid silver

Meanwhile the people tramped by
All nations all creeds
To see us rutting like quadruped carnivores
-I wont specify further-
Lost in the intoxication of the flesh
The Rubenesque acres beneath sol invictus
In the silence pressing upon us
Sweat mixed with suntan oil
Her every orifice was munificent
Diana and Venus Multimammia
Smiled down upon us
With that curt condescension that
Deities reserve for mere flesh-daimons

‘Her arse was glorious’
Remarked the old man at my elbow
The pub could have been Delphi
-Tobacco smoke of prophecy,
The sweat of drink congealing on the floor,
The stink of peculiarly human filth.-
‘Brent in twain’
Exclaimed the poet beside me
Manichaeans, Gnostics and Neo-Platonists
Atheist ravers and wave-shy sailors
All talking the sweat from their lips
The murmured blasphemies kept us afloat
Above the humans and their fickle charms
That whoreson Yeats and his united Irishmen
The grizzled stragglers, thirsty poets on the shore
Thomas with a bible and one hand up his arse
Wizened Beckett and over-fed Neruda
Pretentious and terrified- Kafka talks to Hesse
The new solution suggests itself -
From the froth of our words
The creeping darkness hunts us-
This abstraction must end.
The poet beside me mumbles into his pint-
Some romantic notion-
Love’s eternal summer- while
The dangling boys of the abyss
Rail and snort the daylight
That over time did for
Sophia’s beautiful features-
Eliot and Camus beckon shakily
And Brel sings of bourgeois revolution
Until we all slip away
To whatever place men go
When the anger has burned too low

The vapours fog my mind
Petty truth and sweaty love
Back in her arms awakened from prostrations
I wonder how Christ felt
When he bought Magdalene that first drink
(Transubstantiated by his hand)
The pleading in his eyes
In his feminine Roman features
His sex ripe and blasphemous
Under his sheet-
And did she reject him the first time
With a nervous girlish smile?