Photo of Louis Armand by Cait Regan 1996 ________ For more Poetry ________ Louis is an editor at Prague Review and Rhizomes ________ webpage [email protected] ________ “TENDANCES MORBIDES” previously appeared in Prague Review

Louis Armand TENDANCES MORBIDES (for alfred schnittke) 1. “we knew nothing of thresholds & distance,” or that ice forms downwards from the surface—the nights reeling out their glib predicaments, each one a protagonist the first days of the year are always the worst: an intention, almost an act—the unhinged light that falls through a half- open doorway, inviting error, on account of? the chill air that binds up the senses—the blanking of thought, the voice shrinking to emptiness & the room at that moment described exactly as it was, a precise replica crowded with all its abandoned machinery—broken, just as the body is broken, locked away in flesh & blood the space around them neither increased nor diminished with time—although an end was imminent, dawn too conveyed a sense of being pre-deceased 2. afterwards, pieced together, the scraps of each day— pulling out names from a hat like straws (but the circle must be joined at the nape of a man’s or a woman’s neck) a succession of affects—the fragments that you harboured like placenta or foreskin, awaiting restitution—“to touch the cold air with its whole body” lying in an open field to be harvested—a hand parting the sex, carefully, like a surgeon operating without anæsthesia—the inrush of breath, a cry newly formed & ripe in its first throat—representing what? something disparaged in the future conditional tense, that goes on regardless? an outgrowth of unintention choreographed in lapsed time—rehearsing its technique of sudden disappearance 3. tomorrow there will be fewer dead-of-winter eyes the extreme slowness of walls, the waking & de- parting—an empty surface that absorbs each of our gestures like a track leading out into a snowdrift which must be “overcome” even as the lights go off & leave the compartment in frigid agitation—a scene reminiscent of something arbitrarily constructed in the mind, where each object assumes an alarming disobedience (in your exemplary dream the train could go on derailing itself forever, with a clear conscience)—or everything runs backwards from an horizon drawn in contradictory perspective, in the full light of day, that takes on the appearance of something un-finished, or in retreat 4. concentrating on these details only—a shadow cast in the rock & seawards, identifying the acquired genius of water “stranger than death” which becomes an interlocutor, post partum (an elegy in black or white, born of intervention)—at a liquid height it approaches, flexed & multiple, like a photographic negative (not as modulus but as measurement) an impetus to denial of what can no longer be seen—the waves shifting under carried detritus a cortex, depressed in the fluent signage “endless & boundless”—at that point, for example where the sea is made blue by chemical waste, a captive aura 5. returning to mark this down: a “body of water” approaching the edge of the stage—in the immediate distance, something dispersed or distorted that is trying to re-surface (here the performance takes a curious turn—the lights go out & the stage is covered by a white proscenium screen)—she asks not what it symbolises, but what it hides & en- crypts, “a form of trompe-l’œil introduced as counterpoint to the figure’s seemingly naturalistic pose”: it lifts its leg, displaying the hole where scissors have exercised censorship in yet another past—reading the edges of that mouth (ironically) the omission itself seemed to become clearer & to serve a more specific purpose 6. a city in europe, after one war & before another— in which she would write “archæology in a place known to be fictitious”—the room slopes upwards at first imperceptibly, but is it a location? as though, holding a camera up to art—what if the dis- appearance went unrelated? or some condition, caught through the skin (to lose blood to be kept in doubt)—at such a late hour left alone with your alphabets carried across so many borders—a preservative, a souvenir trailing behind in their paper shadows, to retrace those first cautious steps—a “recursus of night” that renders an account to no-one, but in closing appears corrected 7. the last days of october, after the wine & departures narrowing headlong towards a secret immobility— the sky opens & the sheet slips away—one blue line that trails across wakefulness like an asymptote of “missed encounters”—in the apple orchard the trees resemble assiduous actors, their gestures withering in air & born again silently the fruit of what labour? transposed from elsewhere, a figure moves outwards from obscurity into borrowed light, or the artifice of intelligence renders each scene plausible & then un- ravels it like rain in peripheral vision—the motionless eye of a streetlight casting its gaze in dark boredom on the small clandestine pleasures of the witness— a sleeping dog grins, but fools no-one 8. a specific, intense clarity in which the aversion is enacted—its “justifications,” enumerated in the margin as pictorial detail, heightened realism— “he doesn’t know why he should have such patience” to say clearly what no longer matters— the hands of a clock running out of time (but what does that prove?)—a drama of inessentials re- iterating its single purpose in planned obsolescence (what else could be done in such a confined space?) the prosodist stumbling off into the night, a random walk from a to b & from b to a—something that could still be enunciated, at the end of a long struggle, to disclaim the personality: “i am not here & regret nothing” 9. conversion of another sort—some with wings, others crawling through the food-chain in a primitive & upwards movement (an axiom or a post-mortem? viz. demand for the first unit of a good is more than demand for the last)—persisting in that demarcation of tragic parodic kitsch—the depressive archetype babbling in its dark night of the soul—a functional æsthesia, addressed to the species & not the individual? or an engine rigid on its tracks, that seems to portend strange limbs anchored in sand or water like an inexplicable colossus, staring into the torsion of its own face, solid in refusal that something dies in memory as it dies in the world—the improbable regress to first principles: a fraction too early, or still too late 10. to have begun with the image of a wreck—washed up not far from here, some figure-in-the-landscape beyond it, dusk & a kind of extraction, the bleached- out shadows like perished glass—but there are other voices, other rooms & tonight you have danced your last step, backwards in time, like a motif or a contra- diction, with nothing left to exonerate you but the crime “itself,” unspeakable, waiting to be committed the scenography moves inexorably towards some inessential moment, kept below the surface— inertia or narcosis—a drama of reproach played out sub- cutaneously—& what “comes after” in the huge & unrenewable night, lies there, open-mouthed—its words fall back upon the shore