Sign Language The Apprentice Song & Other Early Poems
Pierre Ouellet
A Liferworld Text E-Publication - 2019
Then
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The Apprentice Song Sudden dirge of colour the heart of this eye remembers the heat of oily moons, the darkgreen skins of forests, nothing more… fading voices and unclaimed appetites clawing at the hollow chest of Earth: August: noisy cafés. The lady sits with a moon at her feet. I asked for beer and thought of future greatness just loud enough for the waitress to overhear and smile... “parlez-vous francais?“ Oui, in deed. Yesterday creation was. Now, alone the strangeness of this life-bearing word atones for the cruelty of death‘s face. These mysteries of suffering have spun another year of wrinkles around these skyblue eyes; the body, overgrown, is now suspicious of its many parts; the hand, alone, fills the page with thought; see! the delicate woof, bony fingers slim and brown with nicotine wander, stretch, chained to a last flutter of intuition struggling towards thought 2
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and the alcoholic smell of rain spreads its own disorder around the will of creation; absent ones return and claim places Once denied them, filling the void behind the steelgray currents of life; and a blank voice mounts from the heel and settles in the groin, coiled and ready to ejaculate the denial of all and everything. Ah! long-uninhabited bodies that are the soil and the roots; is it still true that, where the forest breaks the mist, birds forever wear melody as living amulets?
The faces marching down endless avenues trouble my simplest imaginings; softmelting like silver, malleable like copper, one-third animate, a second removed from some tangible reality; and for this gathering as only I know it an apprentice song: many truths are destined to be discarded by the eternally random dance of change.
Their songs—now repressed into primal screams— shiver—incandescent—between two breaths; can there be no silence so deep as to release the atoms of pain from these orbits of solitude which for this witness have long been the hush of creation itself? The ear stops on the object, emptiness like a heavy hollow nothingness contradicts the moment’s balance, even noise would be a welcome escape here absence—void.
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Sign Language Here is a new language and a landscape that frees itself from the bondage of words: a refreshed domain where an electronic conscience touches and preserves everything faithfully. Establishing at last a truth that all can share; a common vocabulary of photoshopped images and recombinant impulses and emotions; transcending the geographic ear the pulse and frequency of the new occulocentric manifesto of our now branded existence. Its skin is not artificial although indifferent to human touch yet responsive to other digits. The intuition of its youth created the skeletons of oceans and the wound that does not close; flesh hardened and gave itself under its omen.
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Now we discover scars on the necks of hanged men, each different from the other and stillborn babies still clutched to their mothers’ breasts; I say no law is good that breaks a man; no law is good. It is too late to expose our moist and intimate parts and beg for mercy; too late to negotiate a truce with our daily sufferings. It is too late to glorify the fight for bread and shelter or the brave struggle of all endings because we have arrived too late to understand the past imperative to imagined community as the unconditional surrender in the face of the other.
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It is a strange turn of events the city streets: our new wilderness where hunters and hunted look alike. I have learned to shut my mouth and I now work hard at discerning counterfeit emotions; even my eyes have learned to lie. Sometimes, late at night, I stand inside the front door at street level, behind a little window, and I get a close look at people rush-walking home with dread and panic etched on their features, headlines of rape and mutilation flashing before their eyes ‘till, like some reality hunger game in which they are the contestants, every shadow and presence is hostile. Tonight I am attracted to the outside by the voices of a man and a woman‌
She stops; Turns To answer
There
talking to each other from opposite sides of the street, their voices raised slightly as a roaming cab passes between them, a vulnerable distance between all of us.
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Something afar (in the lower lands): see: the delicate gestures of the wind and this numb slice of freedom that we call moon; hear: coiled footsteps lazily climbing paths of hardened air on acres of orange sky; feel: webs of spirits ever slowly chain silence to the voice, entering the eye to limit all memory;
Corkscrew belly of time surrender the wizard line I trace; find the abscess final and the hangnail of eternity unwrinkled; magnetize the flesh's void: a sea perhaps or yet a continent of stones of bones; for in this hollow shape lies shorn, a heart like a mountain and arteries rushing, madly riddled by private light.
something.
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In the hollow of the wing’s silver circle flight a storm gathers strength; leaning with perfect respect on the Drawing that precedes all life: the emptiness of creation. I believe in thin roads of blood at the root of mystery where creatures of absence wear the colours of closed eyelids; and somewhere far from birth itself, there is still a human here, a god there, and the night green like a light.
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Soft and quiet falling in the yard, the wind is full of night. I am no longer the thin young man who believed in the importance of a first talent; and I think that you would love me now in this other city where I am master of nothing and show no need rare and unique; and we would walk the streets silent and drunk, into the fresh early morning rumble of the city, taking our place, at last, in the jealous heart of our untold story.
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When I consider the space between each word, certain absences would prefer service elsewhere, far from the thought/word trade; others, still, consult the stars and encouraged by yearly horoscopes, daily haruspications and the casting of runes (one can never be too sure) predict an eventful future; certain silences send me back to Quebec counting the hours since I left whilst others identify the once-loved stillwarm bodies warning that it is still too early to return; but most of this nothingness is pre-occupied by those who do not and never will mean anything to me nor I to them.
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Is it only the faint odor of need tossed from loin to loin and the proximity of mid-night that make you dear to me? We can no longer please death by initiating ceremony or tenderness nor can we, on the first of somenew, rave as we might, story forget but for a turn in the socket of this eye-like world, the imminence of changingthings hurled in our direction; we can no longer ride the delusive flutter of anyhour for we no longer belong to each other‌ and most likely never did.
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Cityscape The street pours meaningless noise in my ear: the bus passes me with a snort around men and women who dance to the clanging rhythms of appetite or chance; cars have a contract with the steel-blue asphalt: evening, night, the luminous beat of headlights, taillights, stoplights, neonlights; passersby, tuning their nerves to the sticky, tactless dreams of storefronts and reciprocated expressions of indifference;
When
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laughter corroded by comfort, eyelids twitch from makeup or smoke; on the metaphysical edge of everyday life, moments are created and we fall into them.
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The party A few wordsoundsnoises; (flutes are silver machineguns!) and ringing exclamation points to whatorwhen? This gentleman does not chew his quotation marks: when he talks my room/space/time is full of voice; and the slanted roof is a giant scrub board to the rain and the rain sounds like heat - - - - hiss- - - hissssss--Questions I know nothing of or... at this time will be answered all the same; people are here tonight but somehow or when (now... ?) they seem different: indifferent suits me fine.
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Enough! I want stories, tales: I want fabulous myths that I can unfurl all night, or drop on cities, or plant deep in the forest with the garroted ambitions of so many unknown artists. I want stories that I can no longer trust, carrying their part of life and death and resting like glossy rust on so many well-behaved smiles. It was you who stripped love of its traditions and formalities so that you might watch it unravel like skeins of rain in a tsunami of untamed vegetation. Must I now repay you for a century of solitude with an eternity of loneliness; as you finally propose reconciliation and the analgesia of faith and hope?
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I was sitting here directing my thoughts at you but you were not home.
Oh! never mind! One should always wear one’s skin under one’s raincoat
So I let myself in and calmly, deliberately, urged on by unforetold pathologies, went through your apartment, noticing things that I had never considered before: old photographs smudged with the fingerprints and mannerisms of lovers with whom, for me, your body was the only bond. I read your diary locked in the drawer beneath silk underthings and reflected on how your mirror always shimmered in the morning but went dark at night; I admired your taste in books and thought you might have listened to me read at one time. Everywhere there were piles of unsorted documents some of them from or about me; everywhere except in the bedroom, where all was neat: my fetishes hung on a bedpost, someone else’s most certainly tucked out of sight in a closet still at the ready; I may still be here when you return. 50
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In a paint-stained studio facing south with an occluded view of the bridge, a window full of eastern skylight; the painter assembles small memories and dreams from objects lost and found, discarded accidents deployed to activate the space of our private fear and longing. I tell her that I have chosen her for the rightness of her vision and the truth of her beauty and the eternal sadness of her spirit. When I call on her she asks me how many worlds I have conquered since we last met, her fingers, after her eyes, following the lines she traced in order to reveal a destiny deftly drawn to the point of its own obliteration.
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And when I feel her leave as she will and must, on private journeys to trace/chart/map her inexorable vision, I know that she does not fear the blank canvas but rather the moment when she has revealed too much (as I am now) and must overpaint the experience of memory so that the world might reclaim her balance. And I ask myself, Who else understands such things And why must one live alone with this knowledge?
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Do you still detect an attempt at music when I whisper ? It is no longer a question of pleasing; I do not want to use this voice to create something new. I know I will never change the world, I have been given a FINAL warning ordered ONE LAST TIME to behave like you behave.
When my song came to you, was it already a rumor or still , simply, this whisper ?
When I whisper I cannot be accused of helping anything or anyone; still, I hear the world grow like rust or a wrinkle on the taut membrane of being; all my days of speech I screamed meeting places and shouted common grounds; I never touched any one person by accident or mistake. So how could you have taken my voice for someone else's ? 54
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We no longer have names or races, or official languages. Expectation and attitude no longer clutter our stories nor inscribe our narratives with the corrosive ambitions of fame and prosperity; our myths are forgotten and we no longer labour so that you may comfortably notice us unto forgetfulness; here, now we have nothing to justify and proclaim nothing except perhaps l’élan vital of existence itself; and someday, you will understand this freedom and this love. We await you.
All evening and well into the night we talked of violence against people and the long-term effect of suffering and terror, exacted daily, on our spirits and our souls; all the while dispassionately etching, in ever greater detail, the senseless anatomy of a perfect murder. We talked about freedom and how it would feel to wake up dead. And so I thought “ If that’s really what it takes to wake you all up to the horror…” and I killed them lovingly and with the exacting passion of an eternity of solitude; and for fifty years now I have lived in their houses, made tender love to their wives done their work,
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The Terrorist and raised their daughters and sons, waiting for someone else to finally awaken.
Tell me again of the half-democracy of a dream where truth never fell from sometree on a passerby and inanotherway America and the Maddoff/Enron/ buzzards nesting on the WallStreets of Reagonomic trickledown excess and the greening statues of Liberty; and, as at the first hour of my first mission, I have become embrace-proof, slippery and shining, borrowing from beauty only that which glitters and cuts as I slide into your sleep amidst the vague noises of the city with the certainty of a digital alarm clock wired and ready to awaken conscience.
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True Believer Once, you stripped the carcass of the impatient sky with glossy hands, your limbs anointed with sunshine and saltwater. Silent silhouettes passed you by, lost in their quest for redemption; I heard you laugh, sitting on your desecrated Persian rug, cursing and condemning all Others to a life of brightly colored books and incense-smothered offerings. But the spell has been broken. There was a flaw in your chain of objections, a term missing in your formula of disbelief.
As I fumble, slowly reaching for your hands, once more I can feel reality and ecstasy confronting each other; inexorable, inevitable like you and me I guess, sitting here, ignoring the fact that hands lead to arms, and necks, and breasts, and thighs; and I know that pain will come suddenly as I drink my morning coffee, or look out of a rainy window, or walk down a street my mouth open to catch a snowflake or tell you yet another story.
Now that the evening breeze fills the night with the sweet scent of burning wood and melted stone, are those prayers I hear you mumble as you kneel by the window, and are those ashes I see blackening your brow?
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I believe that one can only measure oneself in terms of the failure to be oneself. No—This is not a confession. Someday I will learn to love again with all the habitual devotion of a drunk to his bottle, but now I only seek your body to reach for salvation and truth in your eyes or your smiles, to make me forget all that I mustn’t remember and fear.
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Let me say, gently this time, touching the heart of men made weaker and weaker, as they falter in daily struggle not of their own contrivance, when we finally come face to face, (and I have already chosen the time and the place), I will think only of destroying you.
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A Liferworld Text E-Publication - 2019