Two Poems

 

 

by Louis Armand

 

 

 

 

The Divers: La Quebrada

 

 

In the cinema we lived half-asleep, trying to provoke a final

vertigo. Dreamt of nights in Acapulco. the narrow chasm

and wavefall and the fall of the clavadistas, effortlessly

swerving from that inevitable point set down in Time

where opposites annihilate and cruelty repossesses

the broken shell of ourselves. We woke up beneath an

appearance, an ironic tremor running through a flat

landscape comprising all the elements of a reflection.

How fast can a world turn to overtake them? the sea

handing back its mirror to the flawed and unstable nature

of a psychology in love with virtù or providence …

And those unreal divers, poised again on their high ledge,

arms outstretched to receive our invocation to flight—

as one after another leans out across the divide. not

to clasp us to them, but to gain a vantage from which to observe

our thin shadows plummeting.

 

 

 

 

Use for Places Left Over After Planning and Construction

 

 

repudiate the old sorrows. laughter, rebuke. a cath-

arsis of ratios, situations, pitfall of

holding onto words-without-fault as though

you were an ear. tensing the un-

certain august daylight: a brick building coursed by

time-lapse shadows where the crowd reads

the image of its situation. what difference

is one more walker in the city?

all the world’s a stage: store-front reflections—the

rush of pedestrian silhouettes, asphalt curbs, inter-

sections—dry goods hung

from awnings limned against the

sky: these and other signs to be “in accord with the

time” accepting obstruction. nine o’clock

faces out of the station. something they are late for and

already rain, already abiding

in the dark place where you take off the

covering. and the ingenuity of what it does not hide.