Gold Watch
The brutality of fact
— Francis Bacon
I can see it,
a lover’s theft and gift.
Death, still seated on the toilet
in our suite at the Hôtel des Saint-Pères.
Painted this way, on a chair,
drunk, of course, and on prescriptions …
It’s been a year. Gambling
in Athens, Monte Carlo, Tangiers.
After an argument at Caves de France
I slipped on a stair, putting my eye out,
popping it back — a fact wetter,
more corporeal than I could handle.
On Librium, Drinamyl, and Surmontil
(nightmare of muscle rigor mortised)
I refused the ambulance. Like a squid
at 63, changing unreality — a mess.
Another burial bag? You couldn’t write this.
A person is a grieving monster,
said Aeschylus, the past
shapeless as muscle and expressed
as a faceless mass, crawling out to eat.
What’s left? A watch in each
self-portrait, pure, brutal, impossible …
An apparent suicide, we closed the door on it.
A figure like a question mark, he slouched
in the dark another two nights.
The staff was kind; he froze. Last rites,
Poor George. The surprise of being here
no surprise at all. This all happened before:
the discovered telegram to a lover — found
the morning of my first retrospective …
(Peter Lacey, the fucking sadist. He threw
me from a window! They stitched
my purpled face up like a bratwurst.)
But this is the Grand Palais, mid-career,
and George, a cat-burglar. We loved each other.
A heart attack, cirrhosis of the liver.
He wanted a threesome; partied — insecure,
on Nembutal, chatting away to no one
to himself, Dyer in the bathroom, still frozen …
The mind’s a meat closet. And melts
like the inside of an opened mouth, silence
screaming like a bidet. The light of its jet,
a Rolex frozen on canvas. I hate it.
About the day, about the hour, nothing,
and on a bender, gleaming like morning
my eye came out. I stuffed it back in like a snail,
my grotesque hors d’oeuvre. Is it possible
pain can be repeated so it blurs
into a single incident? A series —
myself with bruised eye and gouged cheek.
He’s in the freezer now, masochistic
rectangle, a square of sunset ink.
Moving like an ocean, distant music
heard through a large door, or absence.
Intense, non-Euclidean mathematics.
His awful Cockney, Edwardian robes!
Don’t ask. I have an addict’s optimism,
and painted words spill. I can’t see him
seated on a chair, mouthless.
The watch killing time on my wrist is his.
⟐ ⟐ ⟐
Autumn
It’s no use arguing the fact. I put him down.
I held him, watched two injections take hold.
He had a mind, and then his mind was gone.
He isn’t “lost,” he died. And now I am alone,
a dull cliché. “It’s okay,” I told him, “you can go.”
It’s no use arguing the fact. I put him down.
And yellow flowers opened red, and autumn
tears, appearing on the sea, turned autumn gold.
He had a mind, and then his mind was gone.
I make my peace. All breath, all sense withdrawn.
His portrait covered with cloth, the room kept closed.
It’s no use arguing the fact. I put him down.
I replace his bowls with potted figs. I look around.
There’s too much to say; the truth withheld.
He had a mind, and then his mind was gone.
It’s inexcusable, an act of love. Again,
it’s time. His eyes sink fast, reflect the cold.
It’s no use arguing the fact. I put him down.
He had a mind, and now the mind is gone.