MTC Cronin
The Poet Vallejo, Announcer of Movement
New Poems From Australia
 
 
Remember the source of Vallejo’s manied confidence
his unbreakable elbow
He knew the slight heaviness of debts
(they sink
they float
they travel midway)
The splosh in the cabinet was his water poem
in the sky, windy June, his sky poem
the whole earth… his overcoat
The moon creeping around looking for its fatness
sniffing at Vallejo’s wordy footprints
was his unfound metaphor
and one blue and two blues his non-identical twin colours
for colouring with a tinge the annoying little tongue
of the girl who would seal his poems
with her lips
He counted me
before following his soul onto the hopscotch squares
of the solids
I said with his left pages
Listen with all 70 deluded Peruvian eardrums
and when finding the final dynamite poem of acts
and corporeal stupefaction
Do you believe his body?!
And now
remember Vallejo’s gods hanging
from the lifted foot, sole black and cracked
his unsounded fizz and splutter:
By cutting a star the day saves its eyebrows
The hieroglyphs, by night
set free the new movements