by Chris Van Buren
The hill road’s garrulous tongue is picaresque
(gravel-voiced from too many cigarettes),
wanting to entertain these deathly stoic cypresses,
ablative, they stand about the place, build a whole
gestalt, the postcard intuitively real
-nonplussed by thrash of air.
*
Then, our motorcycle-
ant crawling up, lion-ant snarling
up the bare leg of the road, gold in our winded thoughts:
heading to Certaldo, dove Bocaccio fu nato,
and what is arc and narrative in asphalt? do roads know
they are-more than molecules-
making a middle-
*
It is easy to draw up a road like a coarse rope
and tie it into knots we like, but passage over…
I am thinking again, laying down thoughts along
the length of the road. (Can you feel then
the topographer’s pencil? his borders, delimited &
neatly colored, now of city, village, country, Space-
the markers to declare to God and others-
the syntax of these cities.)
Instead I am almost and then overlapping in the wind: particular but immense
spreading my vision over what is-spreading myself over the
meadows, like a bleeding perfume-(oil, sweat and thought)
digressive-disinterested (like the wind? asks the wind)
I do not tell when we have missed a sign.
I know there is a greater purpose (the stars, Dante?)
which we fill in-with ourselves about to be-and moved
from the center by His axis-love:
spinning the creation spokes into harmonic hymns and chords
so wheels follow the road in bars and bars of treble clef:
rhythmic and inevitable.
*
So my knuckles curl around the seat, afraid to buckle free
They have passed from peach flesh
to red flare and now whitish, burning steel-
the smithy of speed: 90km/hr, the dial shouts,
waving its limbs, saying beware, limits
break: I could lurch from the tangent,
breaking from the curving like a sudden fork
in the road-inertia carrying my thoughts beyond myself-
until the heart folds up like a twisted piece of metal
wrapped around a cypress tree, disiecti membra poetae.
*
I cannot translate myself further here.
I am stopped in my tracks.
but let it seep over you, reader, like wind on a motorcycle
sappho said eros is like wind on a mountain
but mountains do not move into
a sheet of wind, (it moves around them)
so reader, throw your body into this thought’s curve
as we pour around it, the centrifugal truth,
and do not fall off, but hold me tighter by the ribs, you
ride behind me, I am only
writing this afterward…
NOTES
moto: It., “motorcycle”
dove Bocaccio fu nato: “where Bocaccio was born”
disiecti membra poetae: Horace, in Satire 1.4.62, discusses the “scattered limbs of the poet” Orpheus after he is torn apart by the Thracian maenads
“eros is like wind on a mountain”: Sappho, fragment 42
Also published in The Harvard Advocate, Fall Issue, 2007
