louis_armand@yahoo.com 

Louis Armand has lived and worked in Prague since 1994, and currently  teaches at the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University. His work has appeared in various journals, including Sulfur, Poetry Review, Prism and Stand. His books include Seances (Prague: Twisted Spoon, 1998), Erosions  (Sydney: Vagabond, 1999) and Inexorable Weather (London: Arc, 2000). He is poetry editor of The Prague Revue.

ORBIS SENSUALIUM PICTIS
(i.m. Lukas Tomin, 1963-1995)

slowly the leaves are calling winter into them
& on the sidewalks
they are becoming more beautiful
& grotesque those cadavers

(how we love
everything that assists us
in our pantomime!)

the entelechy of streets
waiting to unfold themselves
like proverbs--
naked beneath the tongue
beneath the wounded feet--:

"we die because we have known them & do not
remember them"

stealing from life-post to life-post
crossing the river
to jan palach square--& beyond it the tantalus
that had disappeared
& the other names, that had also disappeared ...

"you do not know my history & will not write it"

two hands in bondage together supplicant--
i cannot be alone i have not slept
for three nights

many whispers, voices, deep inside the ear

how long did it take to answer them, in sickness
in premeditation?

a vitrine
placed upside down in the sky
is spilling its human contents
in the sun's mute flare

A RENDEZVOUS

in a grey light it follows with silent steps
the silence of the body in its organs--

& anywhere outside the world you are
waiting (but what are you waiting for?)

the short reels of imagery are inexorably
broken, but also overlooked, projected--

an entrail, like the shore a sea presumes,
vainly reborn in a radiation of innocence

the road the fields the river--a lyrical
reverie of obscure intuitions ...

hertzian waves propagating themselves
in the night, mingled in a grimacing chaos

this false world bearing witness (but who
does it bears witness for?) hypocrite

an ensemble of diversions, like the crow
behind the tree, like the impenetrable glass

of factory windows--in every metaphor
there slumbers a catachresis, you say

(did you say that?) never mind, i won't
go on, not for much longer, the fugitive

(but what is he a fugitive from?) tired
of living in that substitute place, tired of it

the autism, the sleepless fugues of
hyperbole--enough--time leads back again

to itself, like a solid body in perspective
the receding line of its surfaces--an instant

separates the one from its empty consonance
in the other, entitled, by antiphrasis

the nonentity--boredom of such long
suffering, mal du siecle--the stench of it

the carcass, that it clings to, the ghost--&
anywhere outside you are waiting (but what

are you waiting for?) where a public clock
is no longer keeping track of anything

OMITTING THE WEATHER

approximately, false eyelashes--such a difficult
cohabitation ... other clues, the almost
ventriloquism of eyes, "mere window dressing"
luscious as a polaroid ...
& when the snow began to fall that year
it wasn't so unexpected, the gradual onset
& wearing off like anesthetic ("it's cold," "i can't
feel anything")--hoping for redemptive significance
in borrowed pseudonyms, a vague
re-enactment--the erroneous confessions we kept
poised in antique bedrooms, & restless
homunculi stooped behind curtains, under sheets
whenever the light outside became
too inspired, intimate, for what had always been
considered the stranger--a chorus
of unspeakable words bitten hard between the teeth,
to purchase a few requisites of authorship
past lives, more than cheap lustre--masking
the aggressiveness & banality of epidermic
contact: the last scene in that drama, when such fictional
personae as we are lie in the afterglow
of performed sentiments (though they too exist
& are real) & the backdrops fading
against the fatuous applause of decembers--
it's becoming harder to make amends, & only hope
that next time, in the spring ...
but who would be left, then, to recount it?

© Copyright, Louis Armand.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By Permission.