WRITTEN UNDER GERMAN

In brackets Husserl eats in Louvain cafes, thinking of the altarboy with head
like Guatemala. A bank of angled flickering candles in glass pots stuck in iron leaves
announces, in the old way, intention. It recedes, the word from Matthew Arnold, tied in bundles by gnomic utterance,
a done thing, on the notional beach phantast philistines, makers of toy huts which are cookstoves
and spade men call war, script no part of Um, as lately the bow connecting
Bonnard’s glasses raised comment. A venture is Idea, the
camel as chess piece not to be shown, like Italian shoes, on sand. Fashion
attends to red leather thin as paper, soup in a wineglass, matching
the spike heel swelling for over the ankle September 1984, the pastern as jewel.
Elizabethans thinking of Brut put a lion over the lawcourt, affecting a heritage by way
of emblem, heraldic thing with a crown like Captain Hook’s hat or something cooked in a boot.
Rosicrucianism in Bartlemew Fair is as if the puppets are imagined to be speaking German, Ursula as Rhine
the am after Frankfurt.
Masonjarred blackeyed peas confront one knurled edge brass screen top.
I want to know (thinking of hands on barbed wire) if J.M. Swan entered Peter
Graham’s crossed pig’s feet in the 1863 Salon as a joke. Anything in a helmet
provokes derision. We want (again) pig tusks on the gorget polished to a nickel
finish like a wyvern muzzle or beak spitting tomato soup onto a bloodcolored plate, the
breakfast room untenanted but for a gray light through lozenges
de (we say in this language) picting animals.

9.2.84