Autumn of 1965. San Rapha\u00ebl. I had taken the train down for a few days on the C\u00f4te-d’azur before returning up to\u00a0Grenoble for my immersion. Perhaps because I had just spent my first ten days in Paris and roamed its museums ravenously as much in quest of a woman as out of appreciation of art, the poems I can date to this period are pictorial, static, masturbatory. When I cast myself back into the state of my mind then, more adolescent than fully adult and deeply marked by not so much the poetry as my received image of Rimbaud, I recall a drop cloth of pervasive sadness illuminated by convulsive shifts of mood, much more expressionist than the scene here. The havoc of my emotions was indeed a pose — in fact, it\u00a0was posed\u00a0behind some psychic proscenium, as if I were my own audience. This poem reveals me to have been much more Apollonian than the Dionysian I imagined myself to be.<\/p>\n
***<\/p>\n
Open wide the window<\/em> in a foreign tongue.<\/em> Clocks interfer.<\/em> <\/p>\n Autumn of 1965. San Rapha\u00ebl. I had taken the train down for a few days on the C\u00f4te-d’azur before returning up to\u00a0Grenoble for my immersion. Perhaps because I had just spent my first ten days in Paris and roamed its museums ravenously as much in quest of a woman as out of appreciation of art, … <\/p>\n
\n which gives to the sun.<\/em>
\n Rock on the rhythms<\/em>
\n of a passing phrase<\/em><\/p>\n
\n Such is the air, seen<\/em>
\n to be unseen, that we<\/em>
\n can measure and mime<\/em>
\n the sun’s slow time.<\/em><\/p>\n
\n Compare the beat as<\/em>
\n shadows slice off glare<\/em>
\n and a Degas bather,<\/em>
\n in some cool room,<\/em>
\n brushes her hair.<\/em><\/p>\n