Enueg: In Memory of Samuel Beckett

“The enuig,enueg or enuech (Old Occitan: “complaint, vexation”) is a  genre of lyric poetry practised by the troubadours. Somewhat similar to the sirventes, the enuig was generally a litany of complaints, few of them connect topically to the others.” (from Wikipedia)

 

 

1.

 

In the quad

where the robed & hooded

figures weave their

algorithms – coming

going wiping down spoilage

 

Death by misadventure

assurance-lack

will you complete the triad?

 

He could not equal Dante

nor challenge Michelangelo’s

apex – vast stretch of time

like a hernia of gargantuan

proportion: lanced, palpitating

 

Disjecta cloying the durable

oeuvre-abscess or tumescence

Duomo invites the last temptation

Malacoda stares from the

campanile: albino peeping-tom

 

Rockaby Billie Whitelaw’s visage

let me hear your footfalls

in the turn of the stairwell

fumbling for a greasier key:

mystery tramp in green velvet jacket

hardly inscrutable Buster Keaton

 

Giotto &/or Duccio? Fresco

after medieval-cached fresco

burning – sack of Paris final hide-

out – your teeth carious outposts

unredeemable the beau jours

the hallelujah recitals

 

In the quad

intellect-dance defaults

into le sacre du printemps

syncopate strident vortices

fin de partie

 

Crypto-designed

for those born to

an intricate illogical

station the fail-mercy

milieu lock-stepped gnomes

coming & going

wiping down discharge

 

In the quaquaqua . . .

 

ah, god-blast

the quadrivium!

 

 

2.

 

No cure for that:

reprobate time gyres

through spatial inferno

 

So you clutch your sack

crawl through the mud

check for cans & opener

Assume the inscrutable

victim-torturer profile

Wrapped in hessian

sacramental cloak

for your transactions

in this fin de partie

 

You come & go

talking of Sordello

Belacqua’s heavy shade

splices through your guts:

subcutaneous & spectral

A ventriloquist who

masters immobility

No cure for that

 

Charismatic anonymity

wowing with opacity

Invisible poet withdraws

from all that’s quotidian

paring yellow fingernails

over stillborn creation

 

You’re last man standing

who were ‘last year’s man’

Old Scarlett in maculate

trousers digging immaculate

graves for the departed

 

Company is solitude

meeting-house become

the world’s end hermitage

lost in the oily corner

of a tempera-spread board

Italian master squeezing

out haemorrhoids banished

from the guilds: Unnamable

 

Yet no cure for the fact

you’re an inhabitant

on Planet Earth 

 

 

3.

 

Nothing to be done

You must be going

I’ll be leaving you then

Why are you so immobile?

 

Splayed across the chaise-

longue bought at auction

stained mildew-urinous

 

Trying to wake up from

whiff of nightmare centuries

Must have passed on

whilst rocking into night

 

A state of transition

mesmerised by chiasmus

variations on the motif

 

All these compositions

attain to the state of music

embody the diminuendo

 

No-how dispatched to

the dustbin of senility

along with post-war Pound

 

Why are you so immobile?

We will wait again

tomorrow same time same place

 

Let’s exchange hats

& maybe neckerchiefs

Make it a celestial skit

ham up the tragi-comedy

 

Won’t you embrace me

one last fraternal time

before you deliberate

which branch will best

 

take your weight & measure 

 

 

4.

 

Complaint is plaintive confiture:

jarred, distilled, posterity-sealed.

 

Have exhumed a stinking horde.

Tres riche heures spent in cemeteries

mousing around weathered memorials.

 

A flâneur, an out-of-hire elegist

fishing for sound, a compositor-mooch.

 

Ennui has to be sifted for.

Each nuance has the exactitude

of a well-performed autopsy.

 

Hand me your neckerchief to wipe

down blood-sweat accruing on

both our high foreheads, for you’ve

 

brought out the best in me. And

on what must be a beau jour, let me

 

sniff the myrrh of our tart love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mark Wilson

 

 

 

Mark Wilson has published four poetry collections: Quartet For the End of Time (Editions du Zaporogue, 2011), Passio (Editions du Zaporogue, 2013), The Angel of History (Leaky Boot Press, 2013) and Illuminations (Leaky Boot Press, 2016). He is the author of a verse-drama, One Eucalyptus Seed, about the arrest and incarceration of Ezra Pound after World War Two, as well as a tragi-comedy, Arden. His poems and articles have appeared in: The Black Herald, The Shop, 3:AM Magazine, International Times, The Fiend, Epignosis Quarterly, Dodging the Rain, The Ekphrastic Review, Rasputin and Le Zaporogue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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