Maria Damon & Alan Sondheim

Collaborative poems

Arraign

A fall calls to account

there is no account

hails to call to account

the calls are dead, out in halls and bulwarks

to hold accountable

glass melts skin, bones charred enough

to count the blood-drops

i reply to your language i can hardly speak

to rule the ruse

blood-read russing ruse coming for us

streaming down hemos-

fears devouring the littoral scatter of the brain

fear down orbsides

fear disappears curb enters skull

the wail of a wall, a whaling reign

always by others, always others for others

a wallop of grand assizes a fall

a woman blinded her face smashed in, a fall

fall from grasslands, boy I saw your hand

fall from grasslands, boy I saw your hand

in the grasslands streaming

pull that trigger, she cannot think you

cannot thank you enough

water down the sphere-sides

cannot think anything, water no water

wet moss sogs the rain further

later stragglers saw out of their eye

the blunders of war the fog of rain

the latest stragglers the last of 'em

the unreined hounds of horror on the rain’s

tall tail

mosques mentioned, cathederals,

synagogues, bodies, Babi Yar,

mist, fog, reign of rain of death

Flaubert

Flaubert, I do not know you

I know your temptations

your “attractive phantasmagoria of sentimental realities”

they have me on the run, running ran ranting have me

lost in a violent wilderness war cannot diminish;

boating, on high, a refuge in your phantasmagoria

that any holocaust sinters into cannonades and absence

refuge, euphoria, inebriate vertebrake that shook up

a backbone of mountain ranges and bombardments,

archons and archangels wingless, drooling

bombs and pompadours, slipped on even ground

and that ravine of Babi Yar w/ its television tower 

broken into nothing silent and bones

attractions and repulsions, between the fusillades

between the bombardments and sequelae, the

multitudes not fancy like a wilderness

of phantasms O we are the dead we scream

Because they can't because they

ran into the rain

with mists and arrows and sad pets and poor blankets

quivered shivering

on the way past armageddon, Flaubert, something

inconceivable to you and your bloody wars as well

even with J. the Baptist's head on an armoire

something unimaginable, dire, inchoate

that not even Rilke's Angel could imagine