Prologue to Our Time

I piped up to say, We need to understand Southerners.
A friend replied, I wouldn’t worry about murderers.
James had lived in Paris. In meetings after May '68,
acedia thick as pollution. Complete destruction!
Let nothing survive in this totalitarian state . . .
Then on TV oceans bleeding oil, baby seals
clubbed to death to sell what they have–market
values, with hemispheres left to be conquered . . .
L’education sentimentale was his favorite Flaubert.
The age out of step with the young demanding love,
and though Edwige loves Michel she goes to Charles
believing she can be all things to every man
who needs, deserves her love to be understood,
and (a la Proust) Alberte, who too loves Charles.
I drowsed off. Someone knocking on sleep's door,
I woke. Charles was paying to be murdered,
the gunshot interrupting him in mid-sentence
of his last words. His friend Valentin, having done
the job, empties the pockets of the dead and runs
to his dealer, presumably, for he has a dire habit.
Debbie comes from Denver to live with James,
who wins an NEA fellowship to write a novel
and loses her after more than a year and nothing
done on the book worth keeping. I know, James.
Charles is in heaven or hell but it can’t be bad,
anyway you know where you stand. Suicide is
one way to learn what goes on on the other side.
I asked Chicago's John Froines about Appalachia.
He said I should go there. If Paula would come with . . .
She went home to live out her dying father’s days.
Because I was gone my father and mother died alone.

(after Bresson’s Le Diable, probablement, 1977)

(30 November 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

The Grail

Le Graal

The heart of another is a dark forest.
–Turgenev

Blood jets from the instantly headless neck.
Skeletons still garbed in mail hang from trees.
Visors up when riding, down when dying.
There’s no Grail brought back. Plunged into the lake
perhaps. Yet once lay within Lancelot’s reach.
He failed. They failed. The heart rots, and the mind.
Waste grasped securely. He kisses her hem,
forswears adultery, vows to abate
his lust. She wants him to want her body. 
Grail enough for any knight, even him.

The horses’ hooves. Endless clank of armor.
Shrill bird cries. Horses also know the paths,
can ignore the reins. There is a forest
in men’s hearts, too many trees to adore.
There is only one Grail, one Guenievre,
one Mordred, one Gauvain, one king, Arthus,
Camelot with its round empty table.
Skulking to the loft, he loves her body,
she receives his, they die only small deaths.
She will die with Arthus. He dies alone.

Even where minstrels play, mail clanks, off-screen
horses whinny shrilly, games played to pass
the time between battles. Now Lancelot
anonymous under his visor wins.
He defeats the lot. Treacherous Mordred
holding the cards, Guenievre puts her hand
on Lancelot’s hand returning her before
riding under the forest’s empty sky,
dark birds plunging, a horse with no rider.
He sighs her name, rolling over to die.

Nothing but death is irrevocable.
–Turgenev

(after Bresson’s Lancelot du lac, 1974)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Nights of a Dreamer

          1

From the country to the city,

hitchhiking, cadging rides,
heels clicking along streets
looking for love,
this beauty and that, they
are too much
for him, he goes to paint
and play the tape
that records his quest,
and scribbles with his brush
absentmindedly.
On the bridge he finds her
before she leaps,
Marthe.

          2

She lives with her mother

who rents to young men.
The daughter hesitates,
it is love she seeks
but goes to one who makes
her love him by loving her.
Then he must go away,
promising to return,
naming the day to expect him.
That day has come and gone.
She has despaired and still
despairs. Marthe
will continue waiting,
searching for sight of him.

          3

The boy goes where she goes.

He tapes the music of pigeons.
He listens to her
bemoan her love
already nesting in eternity.
She talks of the absent love
until she sees herself a fool
for not loving the boy
who listens to her every word
and goes everywhere
she goes.
She knows he listens,
she must surely
love him.

          4

All this continues.

Footfalls wane, love grows
in her. He is already
in love with her beauty.
He has his room
to himself.
The nights continue dark,
their light the city’s.
On glowing tour boats
and dark barges
the young make music.
You find yourself
looking as though
through Marthe’s eyes.

          5

At the end of the night,

the end of the quest:
the boy’s with her,
he sees Marthe see
her love look back to say
her name and she goes
to him, then returns
to the boy, but goes back
to her love and leaves
with him, having chosen.
The boy goes to his room.
He plays the tape.
Love’s dream ends well
unless it is up to you.

(after Quatre nuits d’un reveur, 1972)

(28 November 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Cheri's Marriage [revised]

I tell Cheri she should see Dominique Sanda at seventeen.
She checks out Une Femme Douce from the town library.
She’s six years older than the unnamed woman Sanda is.
Cheri remembers being married, how after three months
her sky broke open. She had known him three years.
Three weeks passed before he beat her the first time.
No wonder she wants to go to London, then the Philippines.
America is too toxic. The smell in the smalltown air, even.
She says to me, "I thought it was a strong film, but why
are the people so wooden? Doesn’t anybody have a soul?"
I try to tell her that Bresson thought soul was what you see
when cool takes over the bodies moving through images
until sound or silence strikes like flint flaring invisibly,
and that is soul. She said she liked best the suicide scene,
loved seeing it at the beginning and at the end. The patio
wreckage, the sound of it first, then the billowing scarf
following her down where she lies in her bright crimson.
In those images were the only grace Bresson made visible.
Her husband could not find the words to spell his feelings.
Cheri said she had wanted to love, "that’s all, I didn’t know."

(after Bresson’s Une Femme Douce)

(27 November 2012)

Cheri's Marriage

I tell Cheri she should see Dominique Sanda at seventeen.
She checks out Une Femme Douce from the town library.
She doesn’t want to tell them she doesn’t know French,
only Spanish, that’s why she needs the one with subtitles.
She’s six years older than the unnamed woman Sanda is.
She remembers being married, but that was only recently.
Her sky fell in after three months. They dated three years,
then he turned into a wife-beater and she cut him loose.
No wonder she wants to go to London, then the Philippines.
America is too toxic. The smell in the smalltown air, even.
She says to me, I thought it was a strong film, but why
are the people so wooden? Doesn’t anybody have a soul?
I try to tell her that Bresson thought soul was what you see
when cool takes over the bodies moving through images
until somehow they strike like flint slowly flaring invisibly,
and that is soul. She said she liked best the suicide scene,
loved seeing it at the beginning and at the end. The patio
wreckage, the sound of it first, then the billowing scarf
following her down where she lies in her bright crimson.

(after Bresson’s Une Femme Douce, 1969)

(27 November 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

Little Fly

Mouchette. She would have been sister
to any boy who treated her as human.
Daughter to any man who nurtured
her into womanhood, talking to her,
teaching her, companioning her.
Or to any mother who would live
that long. Except for the poverty
of God’s grasp she too would have lived.
He could not reach as far as she was.
He did not believe in considering hate
other than as a sin. And sin? To live
with death a roll down the long hill
wrapping yourself as you gain speed
and at the bottom filling the dank water
with all that was never lived in your life.
They did nothing but prey on your life,
those flies who called themselves human.
They did what they wanted as they did
what they knew would help to kill you.
The beatings. The rape. The hollowing

(after Bresson's Mouchette, 1967)
 
(26 November 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander

A Parable

        Mules were worth more than men
        underground. They strained
        to pull coalcars up the tracks
        back into the slagheap light.

–Anonymous

By chance, for example, at random
Au hasard Balthazar,
one of the three wise men
is a donkey watching men in passing
getting lost: father, seducer,
a tightwad albeit redeemed.
This selfishness, hubris, cruelty
is also human, says Bresson.

A woman’s body makes a child
fathers do not have to carry.
When a child dies
its mother dies inside.
One whose firstborn dies before her
will die twice,
her body growing a ghost.
Marie, she says, is not coming back.
Raped, Marie shuddered in the cold,
naked. Some men kill for pleasure.

Spanish light over the French Pyrenees.
Enslaved Balthazar
pays folly with his donkey’s bray,
ready to die when the rains come.
The mother by her daughter’s grave
rebukes the murderer, gruffly
declaring Balthazar a saint,
La Sainte Bible his crown of flowers.

(after Au hasard Balthazar, 1966)

(26 November 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander