{"id":61754,"date":"2013-10-21T20:22:22","date_gmt":"2013-10-21T20:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=61754"},"modified":"2013-10-21T21:05:02","modified_gmt":"2013-10-21T21:05:02","slug":"louis-armand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/louis-armand\/","title":{"rendered":"Arcimbaldo Revisited & other poems"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Louis Armand.<\/p>\n

The Picnic<\/strong>
\n(for E.)<\/p>\n

What, at that moment, we resembled. The drunken
\norangutan signifying in its tree \u2013 we groped
\nunder the fabric tacked-up to make a sky,
\nsearching for the lost magical ennui: statues
\nwore hats, history on a shopping spree,
\nstrangers regaled us, the mind’s sorority.
\nNot once did suspense disbelieve itself. The sequel
\nhad all the virtues of a sequel \u2013 in it, you drove
\nhard through every bar in town, closing them down,
\nbeautiful as a piano being disembowelled.
\nPrague in her leopard-print brassier after the sun’s
\ncome up and the world with its dogshit stink.
\nA moment ago is easily forgot, the rest’s eternity \u2013
\nbearing witness to empty coffee cups, the waiters
\nearnest as flies trapped in a room. Someone
\nwill always dream-up new humiliations for us,
\nall we’ve got to do is wait. Sleep tasted of cheep wine
\nand cigarettes and dead leaves while day
\nripened the maggoty sky. The scenery hung in tatters,
\nwhen at last your mouth burst like expired celluloid.<\/p>\n

\fAllgone Shoe<\/strong><\/p>\n

Living in the allgone shoe, the five a.m. dustbin man,
\nthe traffic light, the sermon on the mount, the rain and nothing new.
\nTo you I’ve been that stone in a field you can’t walk around.
\nHow many mothers does it take to make a man?
\nThe ground under the feet and the feet under the ground.
\nListen, something’s trying to tell us something \u2013
\nSwing low, sweet\u2026<\/em> A penny’s too much.
\nAre these the ceremonial customs of an extinct race?
\nBlisters in your ears, sand between your toes,
\nand up all night, and all day, and the weather, and the sides
\nand angles in ratio, and time ain’t kind, time ain’t nothin’.
\nOh my love, the sky trembles yellow. Oh my back, it’s broken.
\nAnd those were the best, the golden, now only mouths unfed.
\nAfter all this, never asking, because already knowing.
\nThere are stranger things than paradise.<\/p>\n

    Who who who<\/em> goes the hoot of the owl
\n    in the house in the allgone shoe.<\/p>\n

\fSotades the Obscene of Maroneia<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nine o’clock and all the worst yet to come \u2013
\nMay Day parades, Saturday morning horrors.
\nBeen living in mirrors as long as you have,
\ndear. What’s life but a stumbling palindrome
\nin a lead-suit aqualung? And you call that a man?
\nAwake to another day’s ego-dissolving bliss,
\nI’ve condensed myself into a fraction
\nbetween matter and no matter. Hours pass
\nlike rotten plumbing \u2013 the untolled village bell,
\nthe ass in its stable braying \u2013 a pair
\nof all-night drunks earnestly at attention
\nbefore the crux of their patriotic God, whistling
\nwhile they urinate. How do you cross a line
\ndrawn in water? Jacques Cousteau
\nof the depthless blank page \u2013 I am the whole
\nof my own autism: the world on its axis,
\nthe poetaster’s wife, the perturbed length of a
\nhuman pratfall as it drowns and breathes again
\nand still drowns.<\/p>\n

\fArcimbaldo Revisited<\/strong><\/p>\n

And why it all became so difficult suddenly to comprehend.
\nThe piano tuner, the wasp in the room.
\nThere are times of life whose only key is denial.
\nWe know this. Every film had the same situation.
\nIs a question necessary at this point
\nto balance out the process?<\/p>\n

For the record, everything. What choices
\nwould a secret agent make?
\nYou cut off, rearrange the furniture, give the words
\na certain roominess. Acoustics for eavesdropping.
\nAmerica is hiding in a bowl of fruit
\non the table everyone talks around. Limes. Nectarines. Mangoes. <\/p>\n

And for the Plat de R \u00e9sistance: an upward come-hither motion.
\nHiving-off into milk bottles, the unbreathable
\natmosphere. Left with the choice of one or both ears
\nto wrap in a handkerchief. Love offerings
\nof the blind or a word mumbled into a telephone, unbelieved
\nbecause unseen. <\/p>\n

\fBroadcast Graffiti<\/strong><\/p>\n

A landscape, spied through the anecdotal keyhole.
\nYou keep it all barely
\nticking over \u2013 a one-eyed strabismus
\nRoman holiday \u2013
\nhow many times must X be said,
\nbefore heard?
\nThe weather’s grey \u2013 realism’s last word
\ncreeping up the drainpipe.
\nAnother emergency
\nripples the fishbowl:
\ndeath to quotation marks!
\nPeople you know don’t always like each other.
\nVague evocations
\nof the mystified quotidian.
\nThe wilderness and foreignness
\nof life de-dramatised? Preferring the counterfeit,
\nthe evening’s amorousness settles in.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong>
\nLouis Armand<\/strong> is a writer, publisher, visual artist and former subtitles technician at Karlovy Vary Film Festival. In 2004 he founded the Prague International Poetry Festival which has continued, since 2009 as the Prague Microfestival. He is the editor of Contemporary Poetics<\/em> (Northwestern UP, 2007) and in 2010 he edited The Return of Kr\u00c3\u00a1l Majales: Prague’s International Literary Renaissance, 1990-2010<\/em>. He is the author of five novels, including the neo-noir Breakfast at Midnight<\/em> (2012), recently published in Czech translation by Argo, and Canicule<\/em> (2013; both from Equus). His most recent collections of poetry are Letters from Ausland<\/em> (Vagabond, 2011) and Synopticon<\/em> (with John Kinsella; LPB, 2012). He is presently an editor of the international magazine VLAK: Contemporary Poetics and the Arts<\/em>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

And for the Plat de R \u00e9sistance: an upward come-hither motion.
\nHiving-off into milk bottles, the unbreathable
\natmosphere. Left with the choice of one or both ears
\nto wrap in a handkerchief. Love offerings
\nof the blind or a word mumbled into a telephone, unbelieved
\nbecause unseen. <\/p>\n

By Louis Armand.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":155,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/155"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61754\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}