In the morning I saw the lilies
nothing but brittle, tattered, colorless leaf scaffolding,
and I was relatively filled with hatred
for weather, season, and earth.
- A. F. Moritz [Manifestation]
Act I
My hoe searches for you, Antonin Artaud,
in the middle
of the night, and I can almost hear the fatigue of your bones,
your vertebrae cracking as you strain to listen.
I want to know why you brutalized me
with your tortured body and soul, the lilies sprouting
from your misunderstood genius, petrifying me.
Your lifetime spent trying to comprehend the chatter of
beggar’s teeth didn’t make a difference in this culture of fatigue,
and failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair.
I tire myself more than necessary as I toil day in and day out,
seasons passing like loved ones, and all I have left
is to think of you and take care of my garden,
and to dance to the obscene precession of the equinoxes.
Act II
By rooting up my garden I am hacking at
your body,
breaking off your fingernails, fingertips pouring blood.
I carve up your personal anatomy so I can package it for
special occasions, sending parcels of your ears, nose,
or neatly detached nostrils through the mail to ex-lovers.
My cabbages are the talk of the company, and they live
off your rotting flesh, embalming itself beneath the stage.
The globe is our theater and we are not free in it, and the sky
can still fall on our heads. As I cut your throat
my hatred grows for nature, the weather, seasons,
and the manure beneath my bare feet, and I finally know –
where there is a stink of shit there is a smell of being.
Act III
Since the time of Ulysses men have tried
to cleanse
themselves of despair, only to find the race of prophets extinct,
and they knew nothing, anyway, and they will never know
anything of the true mysteries of the body.
As my hoe breaks the surface and leaves ageless tracts
of shining petroglyphs, there is no prophet to decipher
their meanings. Our struggles on earth end in earth.
All I know, as I pull on a stem with all my power,
the flowers’ resistance bending me double,
is a root is only a root if it stays underground, and,
I shall, for the first time, give things the shape of my will.
Act IV
In the depth of certain authentic waking
nightmare states
I dream I am in my garden again, chewing on the wet mud.
I am a newborn, a child, and I put broken glass, brick fragments,
pennies, old marbles, centipedes and worms in my mouth,
and I say let the dead poets make way for others!
As I tend my garden, prop in hand, I feel that I am prevented
from uttering certain intolerable truths. But I speak, anyway,
putting my mouth near the ground where you lie,
and I say to you, in my actor’s voice:
"As the night turns into day and forgets, I will not be ignored.
I am the sum of all my parts, strewn throughout this garden
since childhood, and by returning here I can put myself back
together by violently reconquering myself, by ending my despair."
I put my ear to the ground and I hear your skeleton hands
clapping, demanding a curtain call, venerating me, feeding me,
and pulling me down by formidable suction; and this, my final act,
will be to reintroduce my design in nature, and in the morning
I will find a resting place next to you, in the lilies of the valley,
and my hatred for weather, season, and earth will diffuse as
I anticipate the unpredictable approaches of God.
[Italicized quotes are from Antonin Artaud, as well as other phrases,
and there are phrases from the Moritz poem cited in the epigraph.]
by David Clink
from: His name was
Gord, and he used to run with the bulls, ©2001
Published by Junction
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