you slam it to me with farms that you dark on and off numb hideous strong friend... les amants du pont neuf & the powerline incarnation

When I ran to snatch the wires off our roof
hands bloomed teeth shouted I was almost seized
held back from this life
                                       O flumes     O chariot reins
you cover me with lurids deck me with gaudies feed
my coronal    a scream sings in the air
above our dance    you slam it to me with farms
that you dark on and off numb hideous strong friend
Tooma and Geehi freak and burr through me
rocks fire-trails damwalls mountain-ash trees slew
to darkness threw me    I zap them underfoot
with the swords of my shoes
                                               I am receiving mountains
piloting around me Crackenback    Anembo
the Fiery Walls    I make a hit in towns
I’ve never visited: smoke curls lightbulbs pop grey
discs hitch and slow    I plough the face of Mozart
and Johnny Cash    I bury and smooth their song
I crack it for copper links and fusebox spiders
I call my Friend from the circuitry of mixers
whipping cream for a birthday    I distract the immortal
Inhuman from hospitals
                                       to sustain my jazz
and here is Rigel in a glove of flesh
my starry hand discloses smoke, cold Angel.

Vehicles that run on death come howling into
our street with lights a thousandth of my blue
arms keep my wife from my beauty    from my species
the jewels in my tips
                                  I would accept her in
blind white remarriage    cover her with wealth
to arrest the heart    we’d share Apache leaps
crying out Disyzygy!
                                  shield her from me, humans
from this happiness I burn to share    this touch
sheet car    live ladder    wildfire garden shrub—
away off I hear the bombshell breakers thrown
diminishing me    a meaninglessness coming
over the circuits
                           the god’s deserting me
but I have dived in the mainstream    jumped the graphs
I have transited the dreams of crew-cut boys named Buzz
and the hardening music
                                         to the big bare place
where the strapped-down seekers, staining white clothes, come

to be shown the Zeitgeist
                                          passion and death my skin
my heart all logic    I am starring there
and must soon flame out
                                         having seen the present god
It who feels nothing    It who answers prayers.

to render, say, out of sight out of mind as invisible lunatic

excerpt from Employment for the Castes in Abeyance

I was a translator at the Institute:
fair pay, clean work, and a bowerbird's delight
of theory and fact to keep the forebrain supple.

I was Western Europe. Beiträge, reviste,
dissertaties, rapports turned English under my
one-fingered touch. Teacup-and-Remington days.

//

The trade was uneasy about computers, back then:
if they could be taught not to render, say, out of sight
out of mind as invisible lunatic

they might supersede us - not
because they'd be better. More on principle.
Not that our researchers were unkindly folk:

one man on exchange from Akademgorod
told me about Earth's crustal plates, their ponderous
inevitable motion, collisions that raised mountain chains,

the continents rode on these Marxian turtles, it seemed;
another had brought slow death to a billion rabbits,
a third team had bottled the essence of rain on dry ground.

They were translators, too, our scientists:
they were translating the universe into science,
believing that otherwise it had no meaning.

//

Les Murray's Employment for the Castes in Abeyance and Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, featuring a Piero della Francesca in the chapel where the Italian cult of the Virgin is ritualised; miraculous birds fly out of the Madonna as a woman prays for a child. The Madonna is a protector of women and symbol of childbirth, and although she doesn't feature heavily in the bible, over time, especially over the late middle ages and early Renaissance, she has become an equal figure to Christ himself, and most prominently in Italy. The film is about a writer who is as unsure about the modern age as the poet in Employment; he befriends a mad man convinced that 1 + 1 does not equal 2 but a more comprehensive 1, and that he must wade through a steam pool with a lit candle in order to save the world. Gorchakov begins to dissolve into a transferred madness, exacerbating his alienation from the modern world; fusing his wife, the Madonna, and his interpretor; and attempting to fulfil the madman's vital task.