Featured Poem 9/9 – “Ceriserie”
Ceriserie by Joshua Clover
Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out.
Music: Known as the Philosopher’s Stair for the world-weariness which climbing it inspires. One gets nowhere with it.
Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds.
Paris: You’re falling into disrepair, Eiffel Tower this means you! Swathed in gold paint, Enguerrand Quarton whispering come with me under the shadow of this gold leaf.
Music: The unless of a certain series.
Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the opera, counting everything.
Fire: The number between four and five.
Gold leaf: Wedding dress of the verb to have, it reminds you of of.
Music: As the sleep of the just. We pass into it and out again without seeming to move. The false motion of the wave, “frei aber einsam.”
Steve Evans: I saw your skull! It was between your thought and your face.
Melisse: How I saw her naked in Brooklyn but was not in Brooklyn at the time.
Art: That’s the problem with art.
Paris: I was in Paris at the time! St-Sulpice in shrouds “like Katharine Hepburn.”
Katharine Hepburn: Oh America! But then, writing from Paris in the thirties, it was to you Benjamin compared Adorno’s wife. Ghost citizens of the century, sexual misery is wearing you out.
Misreading: You are entering the City of Praise, population two million three hundred thousand . . .
Hausmann’s Paris: The daughter of Midas in the moment just after. The first silence of the century then the king weeping.
Music: As something to be inside of, as inside thinking one feels thought of, fly in the ointment of the mind!
Sign at Jardin des Plantes: games are forbidden in the labyrinth .
Paris: Museum city, gold lettering the windows of the wedding-dress shops in the Jewish Quarter. “Nothing has been changed,” sez Michael, “except for the removal of twenty-seven thousand Jews.”
Paris 1968: The antimuseum museum.
The Institute for Temporary Design: Scaffolding, traffic jam, barricade, police car on fire, flies in the ointment of the city.
Gilles Ivain: In your tiny room behind the clock, your bent sleep, your Mythomania.
Gilles Ivain: Our hero, our Anti-Hausmann.
To say about Flemish painting: “Money-colored light.”
Music: “Boys on the Radio.”
Boys of the Marais: In your leather pants and sexual pose, arcaded shadows of the Place des Vosges.
Mathematics: And all that motion you supposed was drift, courtyard with the grotesque head of Apollinaire, Norma on the bridge, proved nothing but a triangle fixed by the museum and the opera and St-Sulpice in shrouds.
The Louvre: A couple necking in an alcove, in their brief bodies entwined near the Super-Radiance Hall visible as speech.
Speech: The bird that bursts from the mouth shall not return.
Pop song: We got your pretty girls they’re talking on mobile phones la la la.
Enguerrand Quarton: In your dream gold leaf was the sun, salve on the kingdom of the visible.
Gold leaf: The mind makes itself a Midas, it cannot hold and not have.
Thus: I came to the city of possession.
Sleeping: Behind the clock, in the diagon, in your endless summer night, in the city remaking itself like a wave in which people live or are said to live, it comes down to the same thing, an exaggerated sense of things getting done.
Paris: The train station’s a museum, opera in the place of the prison.
Later: The music lacquered with listen.
