Alexander Booth

Disjecta Membra

Postcard Text 2

And then dead I was. And at just such a rate.

The blue of evenings. And that of morning. Not as opposed to. Just other.

Spring’s soft rains. Cross-stitched country. Summer-endless fields of sun. Autumns sewn with smoke. Last embers, guttered winter.

The careless stupidity of people even. The myriad mechanizations of selfishness, of suffering. I loved them too. Even that.

We hurt.

But as to the question of want. That which one has not and. He who can want nothing. And yet. Seasides, wavescapes, heather too. Birch whispers. Morning mist on water, on river. Quince. The calligraphy of swallows. Starling clouds. Rose sunset skies.

Stories still! All the stories told, to tell! The spirit’s. Not to forget. And how. In miniature. A portrait make: the eyes.

One day vision went. Temporarily. Eyes open and everything. Absent. All white. Voice louder. Trapped perhaps. Between two ears. The skull. Let’s say a head. What to become of sound. Reflection. Gradations. Then: a drift to sand. That is: a memory of.

What of the stations.

In the over. Looked. With not much left. And so. One starts. No matter how strong remove(d) the (a) means of re-cognition. With landmarks that is. Souvenirs.

Not to speak of deja-vu.

So how long before a specific required. Person-alization. Proper. It’s said. Noted. This much makes a. This. According to which. System. Traced maps of skin. No idea where. Begin. Inside. Most don’t. Much less, in fact. Look. For want of. Fear of. The last was meant to be a question.

One day I died and just like that. What a shit! Never would have thought. Never had. No cards could have told. Rather, did tell. Me. No beads, no bones, leaves, sticks, crystals, nor stones. And all most certainly consulted. But not for that, no. Most likely the usual. The usual? Love. As to love! And helpful there. There? No. Neither there. So what happened. Life. One was. One lived. All the same.

Haven’t even touched yet on the mistakes.

Postcard Text 3

One can’t lie. What expectations. How could it have been expected. Otherwise.

All the restarts rebeginnings. Never anything other in point of fact.

Cold night = the nights. Bristling stars above stone. The city ambling out to hills. Dim lights; distances.

Waking up and pale. Cloudless. Paled panes and soft. Speech. Snow.

A girl like that. Never alone.

Start over.

Balcony groan. Thin walls. Cold tiles. Surfaces colder.

Wind through girdered valleys.

Tell us about the first. Or the second. A third? No. Okay. But quietly, no room for hyperbole. Nor interest. And none of that about romance, we’d rather you tell us about a beating. A humiliation! That you inflicted, of course. Right now while still some respect. For you, we mean.

Wind whipped these ancient evenings. Or.

Just eternal.

Iced earth; ripped furrows; cheeks. Fingers back and body. Broken down. Left to wind. To bramble. Thorn. Lidless, horizonward. Not yet empty. Last lingerings.

Littered fragments. A country lane with its requisite mutt barks and mud. Chipped marble shards sunk, gone to rot. Trash-heap seasons. Memories. Off the other side.

In the wilted weeds an image a light written disjecta. Two. Hard to place. Smiles. Or smile. Shadow hands wrapped-up in hands and shadow.

A topography of the infinitesimal the atomic and.

A March wind worse than January.

A face frozen in the back there.

What was it really, that which went on.

Alexander Booth lives in Rome. A recipient of a 2012 PEN Heim Translation Fund Grant for translations from the German poetry of Lutz Seiler, poems & translations have most recently appeared with Asymptote, BODY & FreeVerse; others are forthcoming in Massachusetts Review. In addition, he keeps a weblog on (mostly) Rome in literature & Roman literature, Misera e stupenda città. Work can also be found at Wordkunst.