18 April 2010

Noelle Kocot

[2 sestinas from Noelle Kocot's The Raving Fortune, Four Way Books, 2004]

Why We Go to Couple's Counseling

In spite of all common sense, I make my home in the rotisserie
Of your teeth. This was all prewritten on the gravity
Of a giant planet, and those slightly corrupted
Particles of light that formed the stars.
You say the Eternal. The eternal is not mine but has a Big Mission.
Despite our differences, we manage to create a hoax

Of nice weather, an unresolved moment. But the hoax
Is that I search for warmth within the cave of you, a dry rotisserie
Chicken with a mission.
I eat myself and plunge my bones into the gravity
Of crop circles filling with stars.
Our love has been corrupted.

But not corrupted
As one might deem a warped roll of flim, a hoax
Of UFO pictures submerged in an ocean of fireflied stars,
But love that hangs on a rotisserie
In a Chinese restaurant, where the waiter brings our check with a
     gravity
Whose mission

Is known only to us, who won't be missionary
Later that same night amid readings of Trakl's autumn and black
      corruption.
Gravity.
What a weighty word! And what if Newton's apple were a hoax,
Nothing more than the stuff in a pig's mouth on a rotisserie
Casting itself up into the stars

To forge a new constellation? I admit, I'm starry-
Eyed when I look at you, every moment seems a mission
Where I am the pig on the rotisserie,
Every oink I oink to you corrupted.
Surely I'm a hoax
And a half laid out in resourceful capsules, but I am in grave

Error if I believe the gravity
Of our rhetoric reaches beyond a drawing of a house with cut-out stars
Above it, some stick figures of cats and children. A hoax
It may be but my mission
Is not complete until I corrupt
All that's been said and search for warmth within my own private
      rotisserie,

And remember that in the last horizontal hoax of my mission's
Superfluous event, the gravity of my lion paws stretch across the ruins
      of the stars
And lie corrupted in your teeth's rotisserie.


Rushing through the House I Behold the Numinous Dark
of Forks, the Light-Bearing Phenomenology of Sunrise

They say the wind was born, bearing its beautiful teeth of light.
They say it is impossible to mingle with a Snuffelufagus
Because nobody else can see it. Nobody could see the prophet
In the man I met, the wandering Christ in long Franciscan robes.
I invited him in and he advised me on semiotics
And the nuances of pop music.

The fact that he stunk to high heaven did not detract from the music
Of his speech, or should I say speech acts? It was all in the way the
      light
Hit the room, bounced off his hair in a just-so way, to invite the
      semiotics
Of this newest mania into my brain, he was a Snuffelufagus
Having fun with my hell-mind, enrobed
With the fateful words of prophets

Gone awry. In his vision I, too, would be a prophet
Someday, drinking in the reckless breath of music
Like a tray of tiny baritones in oversized robes
Singing "We're in treble now." See, it was all wrong, the light
Was not light at all, it was another bloody sunset where
      Snuffelufagus
Got sent to the abbatoir in an acrostic made of arrows, drooling the
      semiotics

Of a Rimbaud poem while I did not sleep off the semiotics
Of my newest fancies. Now I have all but forgotten the man, his
      prophesies
Might as well be oatmeal, O pretty Snuffelufagus,
Take this and eat it, this is my body . . . You see, I'm on the
      sentimental fringe of musical
Daydreams, I have dumbed down my brief renaissance into particles of
      light,
Into doo-wop promises that trickle in among the stars. My robes

Fly open at the slightest suggestion that I've got my lute in hand,
      and while I know disrobing
Is the right thing to do, I feel unsure of the semiotics
Of the horse-flavored cheesecake I ordered once in a restaurant, how
      to step lightly
Or to have fun with my new mind, flapping up and down its
      non-prophesies
Like a toupee in well-water. Somebody help. I know that music
Won't, the Snuffelufagus

Might, but even the Snuffelufagus
Is making horrible crying noises to go home, wherever home is. My
      robe
Sweeps the floor of grains of bitterness, a wrecking ball sans music.
I know that if I start to take the semiotics
Of my newly-sibilant esses too seriously, I will get varicose zones
      of speech, I will fall asleep in prophesies
Swinging from vainglorious vines, and my mind will not resound into
      lute-filled light.

Music is magnificent, splendiferous, whereas the discussion of the
      semiotics
Of my illness is boring. Snuffelufagus, you wear my robes obliquely
As an invitation to the prophets, bearing their beautiful teeth of
      light.

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