II.

Order of the Dragon.

The father before, defend all

that is Christian, Western

Indo-European, keep the story

alive.

As you kept yourself, alive

in death, defended

against blood

of life by blood

of death, you are your own

struggle. Tia-

mat, matriarchy thrown

into the world

of father

always coming

before.

(Son of

the thief protected

from the plague

of others’ houses, your blood

kept pure of

blood, your keeping yourself

in line

up to a point.)

Dracula, you

are alive & know it,

& so do I:

am your enemy, now

Hunyadi, again

the bane of your peace

in Earth, Earth is your enemy

or where you live, return.

You are different there, garlic knows that,

blood is pure

by tincture of the soul

& of the breath.

Dracula, you are alive, & I

am after you, pursuit is too USURA, you

whale of a prince, impale is implore, I am

again:

THE DRACULA POEMS. Copyright ©1976, 1978 by Bruce McClelland.

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Sixpack Press, 67 Murray Street, New York, NY 10007.

Thanks are hereby given to Richard Minsky and The Center for Book Arts for advice, instruction and guidance to the author concerning all phases of production from ms. to finished book; and to Julie Reichert for her assistance in printing.

A special devotion goes to Lori Chips, who gave me the beautiful bat skeleton for the cover; and to Cindy, Deborah, Joe, Paul & Prescott for their various helps & encouragements from the inception of the poems through the process of production. & always, of course, to Kelly, without whom.

Acknowledgement is also made to Jed Rasula, who printed these poems in Wch Way, and to William Prescott and Pierre Joris, who printed a section in Sixpack.

ISBN 0-931542-01-4

Preface to

The poet is monster. His life is wielded with vast and terrible disproportion. Of a face he makes a journey or a Paradiso. He embeds himself in his text.Here monsters are brought to life. The claims we make on other people, the grip of love: in all ordinariness, these make us the monsters of their quiet lives, dreams, insistences, disclosures, prophecies: all the texts of terror a Blake calls "Vision."

Reflect upon the drawing where he says it.)

Here, in this cycle of Investigative Recording, a monster is preserved, its deep identity probed, its yearnings —pothoi— compelled to speak.

Yearnings of a monster! They become narration.

The Odyssey is the meditation of Polyphemus, a dream-dazzled recital meant both to explain the discomfort of his sensory deprivation, and to distract his all-too-single mind from dwelling on that absence.

Dracula, that Centralian noble, dreams of the cachets of true availing prestige: a Swiss accountant, an English tailor, a Swedish mistress, an American poet to herald his reclaim.

Now what particular monster is here? It must be particular, to socket its teeth in something sure. We are brought to meet it via McNally and Florescu, who publicize Vlad Tepes the Historical. But of all monsters, none is less scary than one comfortably ambered in time past, safely sealed off behind death dates A.D.

So Dracula must be liberated from the bloody calm of Transylvanian history. He must be coopted by that Committee of Desire we call the living. Only here, among us, does Fear abound, enough to get our thoughts fixed on the notion: this godly animal can suck our blood.

And more. And worse. The poet (that monster) sometimes understands itself as making a raid on language. If it sucks language, what bleeds?

Is silence the secret blood of language? Juncture, pause, boundary: why are these lines so short, so broken? Is breath the blood an octave up? These lines do not imitate the suavity of the Lugosi they speak so kindly of. No snowy shirtfronts or diamond tiaras. Only the formal gown of language, razor-slitted here with cunning vacancies, to show.

Show what? A frightened sleek body, longing the caress a perfect-tongued lover might supply, timid that the cost of such induced ecstasy might be ec/stasy.

This deadly love that settles from the skies.

The problem is that Dracula, as mytheme, got mixed up with Nineteenth Century English pain fantasies, le vice anglais and other algolunacies. The story, at heart, is not about suction, exsanguination, parasites, victims, or even the broad Hungarian steppe stretching towards China.

Nor is that pipistrelle Baron a mere dope-slick spike. Drac no drug. No biting people. No allegory for the pain that answers itself in little drops.

The specific monstrosity of the poet lies in its caring too much. Too much about the means (offending Christians), and too much about the ends (offending Buddhists).

Poetry, then, is biting language in the throat, drawing out what is mortal, drossy, stale? Another well-con- nected metaphor is at hand.

But be at the throat. If the source of life is not the blood, it must be the syntax. (Not an organ but a system. Not a node but a net. Not a brain but a mind. Not a what but a when.) It must be the movement, I mean it must move. The capillary jump.

Here McClelland is of use to us as Bataille was, to focus on the dread: is life in the life of things? Bring the knife to the skin to learn the lives of each. Living one another’s death. Old philosophies renewed in the moist body’s clefts. Then he takes the knife away.

The wonderful prose section, of the transparent, the diaphane she. Bare allegory (I could think) of Language as he would fondle her below the organdy. To rescue Her from Her transparency? Words, we non- linguists know (and linguists dare not entirely forget), are substances enough to shock or grieve or make erect. The names of the body!

Nomina substantia.

The Dracula Poems comprise at once the presentation of a complex ideograph, and the simultaneous self-commentary glossed out around it, expounding it, deriding it with straightfaced pedantry, resorbing it into the tight complexity of its first form.

“An explanation enriches without diluting.” The text shares the virtue of its hero: thoroughness. It explores the image cluster, casts off the horrors and the movies and the casual sadisms.

A thorough poem.

From its dream I recover an image of what primarily Dracula must have been. He was the winged dragon that Miss Psyche’s parents dreaded, who lived in the castle on the haunted mountain it was death for vapid pretty wicked sisters to visit; he was the one who moved unseen in the awful convulsions of the marriage bed, whose kiss soothed his beloved into sleeps that issued in the unpeopled daylight. Nervous waking, rich comforts of attention, unseen energies. The house itself is alert. Psyche asked at last: whence comes the life of this castle (this poem), this love-knot we tie every night in the dark? She guessed it was a body, lit her candle and painted a handsome one in hot wax. It rose and spoke to her: I am not he. Or, I am he no longer. And he went, Her guess was wrong. The life was not in the image but in the movement. This ur-Dracula then, as we always somehow knew in the movies, turns out to be Desire. Who moves.

Ultimately the monster is alone.

For all the gaiety of this work, a poet who talks Dracula tends to slink home at almost dawn, his bat-cape draggled over the shoulder of some latest friend, met in the Blood Hour between the closing of the bars & the moment when Blakean angels crank dawn up over the Atlantic. He is almost alone.

Gaiety is language risked. The poem lives where people take risks. Taking risks is saying what you mean. And what means you.

Lonely silences between lines. Why do I really feel that silence is aloneness? Is it really the difficult?

"These are not easy poems." They are haunted by the language they annihilated to assume their present skeletal form.

Dracula his fang. Fleshless victim: the air around them bleeds. Is it that music bleeds?

Yearnings of a monster. Oedipus in the horse-haunted grove, Frankenstein’s new Prometheus adrift on the ice-floes, preserved and isolated at once, the Poor Bat who cannot say his mind.

The touch. That Dracula is the saddest lover, who seeks in the holiest way to become the other, but in the basest way only absorbs her. Digestion (a voice creaks from his slim belly, unfattened by all his suckings), digestion is a sort of transformation. But only as killing is a sort of loving.

So I see the psychological brunt of these poems as the epiphanies of a man afraid of the other, as well he might be, afraid to the blood and tremble of him, who writes these spells, these knobby, pungent ropes of garlic, to guide such love to him and past him. And this out of a decent human disinclination to hurt or destroy.

Poetics of compunction.

The loneliness of art’s decisions makes artists boozers for relief. The writing that goes on in these poems becomes writhing, angel-wrassling in interspace, wit & sinewiness & such all hungry to be sure. It is not in place. It is between places, I think, always a sentence of problematic intention, amphibolous. Amphisemous.

When this poem feels depressed, it reads a history book or tells some puns. But at its strength it offers no easy salient. Unseductive, it reserves itself for the haughty Syntactic Reader it has in mind.

As with so many tender important things our days, if it isn't magic it isnt anything.

Magic works by renewing our confrontation with the monstrous.

The monster is the man of one meaning. (The poem cures him by separation and division. Its weapon is the sword of Ali.) She brings all her skills to one focus, spends her time bent over the table. On which words take form. The form they take is hers, or his, till the only form left is theirs. Art is the casting out of pronouns.

I am that sentence whose prepositions are everywhere and whose pronouns are nowhere. Thus saith the Lady. In the light of those fructifying confusions I read this work. Naturally at times I confound writer with written, girl with boy, biter with bitten.

III.

I am again:

the Enemy. Nemesis,

& so are you. I hang

to your left, your eyes

to me, Gregor Baxi, my eye

impaled thru to the back

of my skull & lived a year.

The plank unplucked, what

forgiveness is there

in my other eye?

(What reason,

what tears?) Gonsalvus,

also at Ambras, man of

wolf & his two

impure children, also hairy

of face, did no recorded wrong.

And yet Barabbas or

Dismas by virtue

of dexterity, presumed guilt

by that right-handedness,

are both the thief:

the soul stolen,

from you, & you mistake

the blood.

(or woman, Harker’s

Mina, menstrual woman

who knew the sun

from the moon.) Your method’s

madness, my bloody eye

sees you looking at me

from its corner, right

angled, coagulation

in the sun, the dry

wit, the inwit, my feelings

against you, I am

again:

Baxi.

IV.

“I know the span of my life. God help me!”
—J. Harker, 19 May

Help us all,

help ourselves, this way comes

our devil, our impalement

for our poverty, property of

the Church,

‘thruffsteans’ or ‘throughstones’ as they

call them in Whitby vernacular,”

empty graves

mark the lies of the family,

say good

of the dead.

*

& Vlad rid his realm

of poverty, do-gooder he was,

fed them & fed them

to the flames. Help us,

crucifix, keep

from being poor, by here

came that evil

or was it a cold wind ?

(What matter.

We need our meat

to stay strong & fight

who would need our blood.

Renfield,

the lunatic, knew

the largeness of life,

destruction of women

is not perverse, but natural

succession of form.

(Whose content

is blood,

to carry the breath,

let us face our needs.)

Let nothing stand in the way

of this religion, dominance

is lordliness,

Dracula robs from the quick, we

rise up against

the mention of the dead.

*

It is by definition

that we see ourselves

in mirrors or see ourselves at all. Nervous

systems, “Fools, fools!

What devil or witch was ever so great

as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?”

Dracula

was of a time further from the end,

blood meant blood,

no type ‘O-positive’ or negative,

no mirrors:

no tricks, be

what you eat, the poor

are poor

because they eat so little.

‘It is better to be dead’—

the request was granted,

we call this: tyranny.

Of death over life depends how

you look at it.

If we do at all,

face to face, never

behind us where

we invented mirrors to see.

(Renfield fed flies to spiders

& spiders to sparrows

& was not given the chance

to give sparrows to cats.)

but dealt with blood

head-on, the

lunatic, knew his needs

& his Master.

His personal

poverty: knew Dracula

was alive & was not

believed.

VII.

DRAKULYA: I am

the murdered, the father & brother

of your soul, buried alive

as seed. & you are not the earth,

I find no death in you

was not in me, cruelty

in having to live,

our tales be told

of blood of others follows

the way of it. The land

plenished by the pink milk

flowed from her breast, her child’s head

thereon

impaled, ‘lest no form of cruelty be missing,’

did I teach you that?

The judgment:

to go unjudged, go on

killing, we cannot rape

the weak, the unclever,

who die in our place. The poor

lunatic Renfield

could not find his way

to die in sleep, his mind weak

but strong.

And you, Berserker,

fall for it:

you undead

allowed the blood to dry,

the brain to rot,

where is the use?

(& the stories of us

are stained.

VIII.: THE RING

Bela,

my son. Have I

forgotten you, born

not made, begotten

by whose wedding? No, I

remember you, now,

an actor you were.

You poor sucker, whose life

was it you

led ? Does adam die

in his own costume

in the end? I have your life

before me, see now: addiction

was obvious. Somehow,

to stay alive is all we want

until we die. to stay alive

until we die

is all we want. Somehow.

is obvious. Put yourself

in my place, see

how it feels,

blood running thru

my bones, is that not

weird? At least

it’s blood. Five wives &

no children equals six

private deaths, the chances were

there. The Master himself

has lived so long,

outlived us all

he couldn’t care less

the way we do about

affinities.

(his name goes

unsaid, here, can we

bring ourselves to...

Blame you, Bela.

Or your father the baker

become banker, who led you

to your life? Was it there,

in Lugos, were you weak

as a child? I remember you:

you wanted to be Him

& couldn’t find his name

among

yourself.

& when you got here or

where you were going couldn’t speak.

I quote you often, as I would

Shakespeare, without

knowing

I do. & speak for you:

“There are far worse things than death

awaiting man.” That line

is loaded, Bela, everything

is in it. Don’t touch it,

what you know:

What is in the ring, what is in what

you took with you. Amuletic,

eye on the hand, I see this death

before me, you are not in it,

can I be sure? What hero

would not balk at this?

The finding out, in daylight·

opening this box is

foolish,

isn’t it? The audience

wants to know, I must do it

for them, for

you. That ring

seals our fate, puts me

after you.

tired of this pursuit.

the both of us:

I want that ring, that ring

on whatever finger

you have it on,

what’s left of it. The one

that went with you,

thought you could keep

but can’t,

we need it

Bela. I will give you anything

but life, anything

you want.

IX.

Béta mein, Báthory,

bath in blood at four

I understand:

what you were doing

was youth.

I understand, pleasure in

whose death? Meine Béta

is not

the life. “Dorka did

the pricking & slashing.” Did Ilona Jo

heat the goffering irons? So it’s said,

& what are so many

dead but blood, to drink, spill over

such youth. A sympathy:

ones so young

as worth it, beauty is as beauty

ought to be, краснота, red is

beautiful, isn’t it, cut the tit

off. Кровавая баня,кровавая заря

blood before blood

light of dawn

is youth! What age

is this, asleep, dreams

yr youth, or I see

mercury still in the gold,

have you failed? Ah, no,

not virgin in

itself, is

quality, blue,

who have made you is

what to drink:

is it! drink yourself down

to your youth, find

the room, warm bath drawn

by who is to die

by that confession.

(Nothing is known,

Elizabéta, but that

you are Báthory. You & I

know that,

& understand.

X.: ETYMONA

Essentially, for George Quasha

Listen to them: true words, children

of the night:

Take first the word

for see: sharpen it: the serpent’s

tooth, no vowel

yet: add fire to it, wood=

oak: now:

you have wood, fire

in the eyes. Serpent becomes

(serpens)

becomes: the root:

drk & from that,

in my eyes, drs

= now, wood + sight, what

do we see?

Expand, adding

vowels:

drk>derk/drak

drk>drs>drus

becomes: fire in the eyes

of drakon, fed by oak, to tend

the fire:

druis, begin to get it:

tended: Dragon breath,

the kiln. temper

the oak/ash

spear, δορυ δοΰρα, Moses

threw wood or serpent down

in front of him & one

turned to other:

& somewhere in Transylvania,

3 tablets, trk = turk

(getting it? civilization comes

from one word

branching into wood

& snake, evil = good,

the stake thru heart

says one word

above another,

& you begin to wake

as blood enters the sky,

serpens in arborem vitæ,

death as:

where he lives.

The magick is in this,

knowing when

to stop to dream, nail it down

to word

you know.

XI.: THE SYMBOLOGY: Identities

The pole is a phallos.

So is the stake.

The woman is the mother

Or the daughter.

Mina is the moon.

Renfield is the psyche.

Van Helsing is the ego, e.g., ‘I am, again’

Gonsalvus is no one, everyone, no recorded wrong.

Baxi is missing.

The blood, of course, is the life.

The crucifixion is the birth.

The birth is the crucifixion.

Adam is the protagonist, the hero.

The ring is the vulva, or womb.

Bela is the son.

The words are reality.

Elizabeth in her blood is birth, the process.

Ilona Jo & Dorka did the pricking & slashing.

Hunyadi is God, or the gods.

The flesh is the flesh.

The bat is the devil.

The devil is a bat. The bat in flight is fucking the devil.

J. Harker is a real estate salesman.

The story is the truth.

Vlad is just another symbol.

His father is the cause.

His brother is the effect.

The Turks & Germans are men.

Nosferatu has not yet been introduced. (Will he be?)

Youth is the dream.

The poet is the dream

The blood is the life.

XII.: LILITH, et al.

(for Deborah, for Susan Sherman)

No wonder Im afraid:

the time the place the sex

is changed:

I should have known it:

herself as any beast,

herself as man.

L i l i t h.L a m i a. daughter of

B e l i l i, the moon is always full.

negotium perambulans

in tenebris,

the darkness

of the soul

is what we’re after:

to see in the night, the owl,

the bat, is part of this:

obviousness, that Bela played his

part, direct descendant

of his Lord, & from the east.

Kadmos is adam + his ending,

& first woman

is his dream: blood & earth

are made from him, from her,

Mara roams his nights

in search of fresh water

& a full moon

‘on each flank.’

This is sex, vampire,

isn’t it? The youthful male

figure

attacked at night, usually,

by changes in form.

[& she can take her eyes

out, sins of

the father/ l i l i t h, you are

a bad mother, the gullet filled

with blood of the earth,

the serpent’s teeth =

the bones. ]

(the youthful female

figure

attacked at night, usually,

& we know who, or I do)

the form is changed

by looking thru its

self, onto the stories

behind it. Onto anyone

who may have been there,

snakes for hair,

Medusa: Odysseus

erect to the mast, reflects

only his own

assertion:

that this is dream

he is coming to, drowsed

& seduced, believing

he is woman.

& it is all

these women

who are behind this, as if

the taking of life

were

(somehow) incorrect, life as

given.

Who misses blood

the most, she fights her battles

at night, gave her birth

to death, related to Libyan

N e i t h, & change of form:

to Athene, athana, the blood

is the night, the veins

the dream. & I am afraid of this?

of my becoming, of l i l i t h ’ s

pursuit only of her

lover, who comes as a star,

Lidérc, [lil-/drac-],

the woman after the lost part

of her, the blood, as man

after his bone,

can this be dream?

Is it saying

the water is in

the lake?

(I am, again )

XIII.

Midnight. She comes tonight. This time, the moon makes no difference. She has been coming at night every day & the moon but only the sun has made no difference. This business of being alone in the castle makes no difference, as long as she comes. Tonight. & her consorts, perhaps them too. Lately not so often but the moon makes no difference, it seems. So lovely disgusting word as they come diaphanous, see-thru, nightie, as they come lately nightly night after night & has the moon made a difference. It used to, didn’t it, when it was a man & got all hairy or when it was a man. I can’t help that anymore, it’s not my fault. I have little or nothing to do but transformation, just sitting here, alone in the castle with the moon making little difference. Or none at all, just sitting here & making the whole thing up or at least sitting here and not. & I was just sitting here, waiting for the moon to become itself, ever so accidentally, when it did & she came, adverbially, into my chamber which is locked, by the way from the outside to the in by a lock & thru which she actually moved much as the moon & as I’ve said there we were, her whom I’d never expected in a million years in my room alone after I’d been expecting him, him after all these years, alone, midnight with the moon accounting for at least some difference, hairy of face & at least there I was. So there we were in my room, she somehow diaphanous, I could see right thru her or how she ever got in could. Couldn’t it? No difference. Thereness. Diaphanousness. & I desired it, didn’t I? I wanted at that level just to look thru, see what she had on underneath & boy was I surprised nothing. That’s right absolutely nothing & the light from the moon had no chance of making any difference. & she moved as she did thru the room literally & the chances of her were small in comparison to making any difference. Was she alive I sort of asked myself reaffirming I could see thru her much as the moon, but what difference could that make? & then the obvious absolutely struck me about her diaphanousness that is that if I could see thru her clothes on one level & she wasn’t wearing any on another was she wearing any and if she was was there any difference? Well it’s not every day a diaphanous woman enters your chamber while you think you’re alone in the castle somehow wearing no clothes & or is but you think you can see thru them & then she fools you by not wearing anything underneath so then what do you do? Stare? It was you see impossible to avert the eyes, alluring as they were, & the moon making a difference. You see, this diaphanousness was somehow caught by the moon if one could ever imagine diaphanousness being reflected which it can’t but there it was a reflection of the word itself: diaphanous, see-thru nightie, nighty-night & me thinking something was underneath & it all was but somehow she had gotten in here, when it used to have something to do with the moon or at least made a difference & I of course was alone in the castle. Was I afraid ? Heck no! Here was this diaphanous little number in my room & the door was locked. What was I to do? It was midnight. The obvious.

Slipping off her diaphanous nightie, which had allowed, it seems, her to enter, we were alone, with nothing or very little underneath. I slowly removed her diaphanous nightie, which was almost invisible. I slipped my trembling hand under her diaphanous nightie, to determine what was there. Meanwhile her fangs, throbbing at the gums, extended, in anticipation of the blood red juices that would flow into her waiting soul. I looked quietly for a moment at her waiting fangs, waiting & then rejecting the possibility that they too were diaphanous, & let them, ultimately & after this realization I had that the moon ultimately makes no difference in my neck & then was forced, ultimately, to ask myself & I didn’t write it, who wants to get bitten by a man?

XVII.: The World of the Vampires

So they’ve come

to suck me off, is that

it, & it’s not even that

late, tonight, but somehow,

prophecy was there, as I am

here, in front of my

future. (& this (or that)

is my attraction:

that as I wait, all other ghosts

are being driven off

with my sword.

& I was told

to do that, & nothing else,

passive acceptance

of what something means.

of what what means?

Could she have known

I want to ask I wanted her

alone, if only

tonight, hence

see myself

disappointed. Have I only so much

blood, or is there some

future

in my body

that could be drunk?

These are all the questions

there are, the answers

in them. The many

quiet voices

within me

hesitate, these quiet women

I can almost see thru I

see thru &

they are there

or here: future becomes

a present

to those of us

(our lives

anticipation

our swords

filling

prophecy.)

So this is a world

of the vampires, or

the world, & we

“cannot speak fully

to us,” I guess, until we understand

us, & what they mean. They

get us

(mythologically)

in the jugular

& our throats

is meant

the quickest way to go.

& if we knew where,

going’d be as easy as rising up

from the bed,

& being called

to her, as beautiful as she is,

undead, yet

in the heart.

The stake

(our stake)

seems or is

unnecessary

to this ONE

become MORE who really

WANTS me. & never

having minded

being wanted, I fulfill

all prophecies that concern me,

that is, I live my life

& expectation becomes

the way.

Yet all this is

thought, & has taken place

in her

immediate presence,

she who is they who have come

somehow to me

as if I had come to them

(her) & the time

is now.

XVIII.: nympholeptopoesis

(a word, from GQ)

large bat at the window,

bronze, & she is

there. what silver I could ·

could I ·

have used for a cross

was just on my left, opposite

me, opposed

to what I believed

of her reflection, & what

was real? certainly not

the cross, she was there,

I saw it, in me,

writing hand, & had I

something to say? she

had been told

to me, & I

had been told,

desire

was what

it wanted

of itself & I

was it. So I

became my

self, or else

I became what I wanted

of myself & saw

no difference. & had written,

on the same night,

“heart felt: a texture”

& meant it. As if

She was there: a real

way of looking at things &

that was desire. a real

desire. & finally was

reflection, I saw myself

coming to her, as I had come to her,

& as before. My left hand

held it all, I felt,

a texture

of how,

a texture of how.

& it was a hand that held

the metal it believed, silver-

ing of the mirror

is the glass we see.

I saw it. & it was her,

I was here, between

the meaning of the sun

& its moon + what it means to be

on that horizon.

(& the way

the bat flies is thru

that horizontal way

of not looking at things the way

we never see them.)

& so

the he/she became

whoever, the horizontal,

became a way.

& the heartfelt, for HER,

became its texture, I touched it

with a hand. & I felt it,

flit away, the bat

cannot see

from where

it flies.

XIX.: ANOREXIA

for Sally Y

It happens, it says, predominantly to young women, this lack of appetite, and one of its effects is amenorrhea, or inability to menstruate. This makes sense. & the word itself, or the term, is privative + oregein, ‘to reach after, desire.’ This too makes sense in light of how she is seen after her death. I have been told by various medical sources & authorities that these young women come to this state by either a strange obsession with their imagined obesity or else after great disappointment in love, if there is a difference. & I am also told that before they die, they will go to great lengths to hide their unwillingness to consume, & should they be forced by extraneous circumstances to eat, they will invariably & quite surreptitiously go vomit; & as op- posed to victims of starvation, they will appear to be healthy & energetic, thus fooling their acquaintances into believing that they are merely losing weight, or that their life is not seriously imperiled.

but it is.

& so is her death, the symptoms

are all there: desire

to not desire

death, to not try

to survive

but survive: classic

symptoms. vampirism, un—

dead/ness, to

wake up & come

after me

or you, to wake up, she

walks

in some endless ocean,

& keeps on walking:

a form of life

given up, the exchange

is in no longer believing

what she believed

about. She had given up

blood, could

no longer produce it, & wanted it

that way.

(& walks forever, her death

& she can’t find it

wherever

it is

she’s walking.)

Stalks now

the life she imagines

IN us, “a trade accepted in the name

of darkness,” she now

walks

where she wants.

I learned this

accidentally: talking,

I heard

of what is called

disease &

recognised it

for what it was: pure

(& simple)

vampirism, she had, it seems

given up the life (her reasons

were NOT clear) & had walked

but only

into what she once believed

of death, to die

is to starve,

be glorious.

But the blood was only there

that she could not produce it,

no blood, no milk, no

death. The equation was

made, the variables she never

understood. What is it,

I would often hear her

ask, to no longer be

in pursuit? I said

nothing, but walked along

with her, as if I

were her

blood,

my life became

her or hers, & wondered

how she had come

to be. Her answers

were my answers

to walk (oregein)

into death

is to long for what it is

to be alive.

XX.: THE BLEEDING

(for myself)

I have lost too much blood,

tonight, & it is now

about me. from my left ear

issued more

infected blood than I have ever

squeezed, come into my own

hands. (She wasn’t (or isn’t)

here, tonight, she is there, yet

I must be drained. & the blood

gathered with the antibodies

that had come to protect me from my own

poisoning, became a poison, rot

in the left ear.

(As we are most open to suggestion

in the right, to acts of love, ask me

if I love you. I will say,

tonight only, whoever you are,

yes, I might

as well,

whoever you are.) & my left ear

gives up its infection, that today,

of all todays, I felt something

draining, my blood, my poison,

or else the life

(was one or other)

flowing out of my left ear

& onto, into my left hand,

disgusting pus, but there, visible, obscene

color of anything

we vomit out. Give up

is real, acknowledge as

what we choose but have not chosen

to give

to ourselves.

& so the decision was (tonight only,

I tell myself) to do it to myself

& into myself, & make something

of it: serum, semen, poisoned blood

become its healer, drink it

back upon itself, tonight is the night.

of the left ear. Wish she was here,

internal rhyme is

obvious. She became me, or

I did, tonight

only, the blood itself

building

to this internal

pressure, & ploding.

(or ‘plessure’: the confusion between

fusion & fission, or that between the act

& its preparation.)

& the left ear

does not hear the suggestion

offered in the right, I am coming

to you, wait for me &

can’t wait.

Printed at the Center for Book Arts in New York, 1976 - 1978, by the poet, with help from Julie Reichert and Cindy Kolbrener. All Design and Calligraphy by the poet.

The text is 12-point Caslon Old Style linotype, set by Harvey Wiener and Unbekant Typo, Inc., and printed on 70 lb. Warren 66 Antique paper.

This edition is limited to 200 copies, many of which contain a page v which has offset. All copies are archivally flex-bound. The cover paper is Arches Black.

There are twenty-seven copies lettered and signed by the poet.