The Slates of La Borne

Painting by Mary Abbott


THE SLATES OF LA BORNE


Closets

Napoleon’s ghost stands in every closet, that’s who you listen to when the wind walks sipping shadow in the nursery or attic, the mad small man from yet a stranger island.

Stay in the closet and do it to me she said, because the fox fur tickled and the old shearling coat was warm and no one missed her, but her absence fell as a dark spell like the morning mail… Touched them gently, using for once only their own fingers. A piece of slate. A snail crossing a national frontier.

Sel Fin

Fine salt is something different. It sings. It is determined to be grocer and garden. It is deer. Sometimes I wonder where the animals are going. They’re always on the move. Or the sea even worse.

The salt seems to be everywhere, yet valuable. Yet it would not cost much nowadays though it does. To pay a woman’s weight in salt for example would not be all that costly even with fine salt. Even a large woman. Nowadays salt seems to be for some strange reason cheap, relatively, though it is the most precious of all minerals I think. And it is just as useful and needed as before.

Sometimes what we really need is right there. Ground fine, easy to absorb. Sparrows are chirping outside eating bread and cereal given. Salt everywhere. Wagtails, magpies, jays are common local birds. Birds are the salt of the sky. As you are the salt of the earth. You know who you are.

Amber

Amber. Something it says. Forgive me a lot. Not scrimshaw, jigsaw. Scallop cut. Dovetail. Rabbet. Such auguries amaze that blue flag of a strange country we call the sky. A vanished country. Tree. Be me a while and then you’ll see. Ungenerously clothed and hid. Tree sap stump a shallow bisque. Opal. Murmuring beast. Listen.
Amber becomes earwax in mortals. Words become amber when they fall. Let words fall into muck. Into mouth, always wet, always messy, a mouth. Nice muck outside of water and leaf mulch and bark and dead stuff and ordure and time, mostly time. Fall words into muck and let. Let time take time. Let time talk.

A boy and a girl walk down the word talking. His shirt is loose her pants are snug it is Friday feeling in the rainy air. This is amber of them. This is amber. They are in white. White is the meaning of amber. Red is the meaning of white.

Cordon.

Cordon. A wild man or a bear. Some particulars left from the war. Surplus plus an anarchist. So many things repeat and keep from knowing. Knowing is a kind of wolf, knowing has yellow eyes. In the middle of anything thick, knowing waits. It can walk on grass but it can’t protect particulars from sudden. Rain or rockfall. Spelt. Lawn mowers and hedge thinners are useful but not interior. Police armed with nutcrackers because of how dancers decide. Police means city. City means a pile of earth to lift house or houses over marsh or plain. What happens. Protection. I put my arms around you. Put arms around something. Later they go away. The arms stay. The arm that lingers makes the sound of something staying. Moving but staying. Simple, like a soup inside its bowl. Or a plate waiting.

Scales

How far will numbers take him. He’s always asking with his hands lifting and lifting. What time is it he’d say or what’s the temperature tell me in Fahrenheit. So many w-words or as the Romans would say so many q’s. Numbers are never a road. Numbers are never anywhere.

Never anywhere to begin with so where could they go? Numbers have no somewhere else. That is why people weigh things, to learn the numbers of the hereness of each thing.
Numbers are never somewhere else, numbers have no else.
Numbers are more like a mustache. A mustache itself is like a dog on the lawn. And a lawn is always a kind of remembering, isn’t it. Answer me. Let the stupid barbell fall.

Line

A beeline from the terrace of “Les Mouflons” past the steeple of the little church in La Moussière leads to the left or eastern corner of La Frasse, elevation 1220 meters, simple as a chess pawn in shape, that lifts south of us and hides the hamlet of Essert-Romand where many years ago a girl in a red dress leaped over a stone fence on her way to bring us all our portions of la tartiflette, the cherished casserole of the region.

The Mortal Factor

There is an astrological calculation to reveal the native’s death date. Method: examine by computer ten thousand charts of people dead of ‘natural’ causes late in life. List all common elements: aspects, angles, relationships of any kind, between birth chart and chart of moment of death. Test for such elements in all the charts. Use a hundred thousand. The resulting common element(s) will be called the mortal factor, and you will be able to plot it, predict it, in every chart. Apply it to one’s own chart.

At the end of these calculations, one’s own death date will appear to be tomorrow morning, early, when everyone is asleep, much too soon for you to announce the newly discovered mortal factor to the world. You sit there, trying to take it in, the bitter irony of going to all that trouble to discover the date when the date is just about to announce itself. There is a knock at the door. A man is there when you open it, someone you have never seen before but you guess his business.

“We always stop them just before they give the simple mathematical solution away. There is another, more complicated, set of relations which yields an easy calculation that reveals the time of death for those who die suddenly, by catastrophe or mischance. And that one too we will inhibit you from disclosing. Be happy for a night that you, Columbus of death, have found what you were looking for, and that you have discovered the key of mortality with which, tomorrow, while your wife and cat are still asleep, Death will unlock your door, and lock it again after you set forth.”

Wood.

Wood. When pale is just behind you. Takes you by the naked elbow and wood has not much by way of hand. At night wood is stars. Trees leave. They go to another place and leave their shadows behind. Sudden woodmen take these shadows and cut them into uniform lengths and burn them. No heat comes from such fires, or not much. In the afternoon people wear hats and observe races of horses or other swift animals. They think they see trees through which the dogs or foxes run. They say: that grey (or even silver) horse over there with a girl on its back that is standing by a large old linden tree, that one. But no one sees what they’re pointing to. The tree is not back yet and the girl not born. There was a man with a hornbeam leaf in his pocket. But even that gave him no right to talk about wood. Or decide where it went or goes or will, or when it will come back, will it?


Robert Kelly

Posted over on Charlotte Mandell

from MAY DAY: Poems 2003-2005