Follysophy

Dominique Hecq

Poetic form is the innocence of the grandiose.

ALAIN BADIOU

Today I feel altogether unbuttoned.

I rejoice in these vast barrens of white

And, you will understand, transform them

In the expansive tracts of my genius.

If you were to try to flatter me

With bardic vocables and sepia verse,

I should object.

I think I shall sing,

In a variety of forms, of light,

Of sincerity, and of love, of course.

Oh, please. I don’t give a shit for love.

Fashion for me a desolate confection.

I feel the need of a substantial torte,

Lightly powdered with desperation.

Crooked gums under snow? The light falling

All afternoon? My large and tragic face

In the glass?

I am no longer young.

My soul unravels to infinity as I contemplate

The woman I loved in the naked presence

Of a handsome fellow, come upon

In silence and with joy.

As in the dark

We are afraid. As we wake. Opening,

Again and again, our soft and empty hands.

I cannot move. For the moment I am draped

In glacial distress. I can see the grand,

Groundless abyss under the dispassionate eye

Of vacant heaven. I can smell the nape

Of the neck of despair. It is coming to fasten me

In a tender embrace.

How the banded lapwing

Whistles, fatherless, from the plain?

You know,

Love seemed the grandest plan of them all.

Perhaps the heart is simply too small.

It may be. Tough I can’t tell for real.

I find it hard to imagine the stark

Language of a large and foundering body.

What I see is an array of banks and streamers,

Patches of light, and hanging draperies.

I will expand, I think, at the last, through the sadness.

See these slender rivers of ionospheric grief,

The noctilucent clouds and the vast desolation.