For Tristan Tzara

Translated by Clayton Eshleman

Tzara is not dead—only pretends to be, and on This

I will once more erect my eclipse.

Tombs remain the best mail slots for our fugues on

that menstrual flood where Moses drifted

between two buoyed nipples

among the reeds of the Pharaoh,

that embalmer of honeymoons and pickled egos.

The moon repeats its palatial belch

transmitting the old hieroscratched code of heliotropic

priests, sullen lickers of baby scarabs.

Quite a few Dada wars ago

a whole new gang of rich Romans attempting

to surpass the frog, trying to grow larger

than the bull’s-eye bull, suckled

she-wolf udder and deified the milk.

Dali was wrong to identify the Bible as runny

cholesterol cheese, it was in fact

the dairy Latin Empire, the cultured

rennet of the Pax Romana!

Morning returns to the stoned ignovimous doors

with a handleful of Europas out of their potless minds.

They cannot be ransomed by scalping ice caps

camouflaged as Artaud’s

sawtooth buttocks, especially since

his theatrical double was caught red-handed in

Marat’s bath disguised as Charlotte.

putting the last touch to her purist royal pear coulis.

In the two-faced mud of shut eyes

the gold fish of the Rising Sun makes lies glitter

but these lies quickly turn green as withered

angels’ wings. A great wall of unicorns

--Confucian messengers?—

rolls and closes in on the belly

invented with each penetration,

and high noon? Encumbered with flies

and weighed down by mythology’s malefices,

it thrusts forth its polar bear star, snorkeling under

the very black ice that our orbits furrow.

Albino spiders have confessed their fetid sins to

the shrimp and raucous seabass

dangling from Don Juan’s certified neck.

In the Dunhuang caves the homeless broccoli

and the abandoned baby zucchini

have been raked into a Ryoan-ji

strip of tyrannous

genitals, sighing fire, poached in Tzarist vapor.

Tristan is gone, without even leaving an abbess.

A frieze of checkered camels

gnawn by pycnogonidic cenobites,

has been beribboned with blighted tapir prayers.

Dragging along the stucco banks of our resentment,

a horde of bearded captains with spongy

eyes are sodomizing buttered flies.