Pierrot Le Fou
1.
Suppose you stood facing
a wall
from your unlived life
as you stand looking at these
stills from the unseen film?
Yourself against a wall
curiously stuccoed
Yourself in the doorway
of a kind of watchman’s hut
Yourself at a window
signalling to people
you haven’t met yet
Yourself in unfamiliar clothes
with the same eyes
2.
On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles.
I speak the French language like a schoolgirl of the ‘forties.
Those roads remind me of Beauce and the motorcycle.
We rode from Paris to Chartres in the March wind.
He said we should go to Spain but the wind defeated me.
France of the superhighways, I never knew you.
How much the body took in those days, and could take!
A naked lightbulb still simmers in my eyeballs.
In every hotel, I lived on the top floor.
3.
Suppose we had time
and no money
living by our wits
which stories would you tell?
I would tell the story
of Pierrot Le Fou
who trusted
till his head blew off
not quite intentionally
I would tell all the stories I knew
in which people went wrong
but the nervous system
was right all along
4.
The island blistered at our feet.
At first we mispronounced each others’ names.
All the leaves of the tree were scribbled with words.
There was a language there but no-one to speak it.
Sometimes each of us was alone.
At noon on the beach our shadows left us.
The net we twisted from memory kept on breaking.
The damaged canoe lay on the beach like a dead animal.
You started keeping a journal on a coconut shell.
5.
When I close my eyes
other films
a market shot:
bins of turnips, feet
of dead chickens
close-up: a black old woman
buying voodoo medicines
a figure of terrible faith
and I know her needs
Another film:
I am kneeling on the floor
it is getting dark
and I still haven’t found you
Scanning reel after reel
tundras in negative
the Bowery
but the light is failing
from the footage of the march
the railway disaster
the snowbound village
even the shots of the island
miss you
6
To record
in order to see
To record
in order to forget
To record
in order to control
To record
for that is what one does