CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive
Andrew Mossin
Ode
The child talks outside time for the time when he will finally be able to talk, that is to say, hear his words among those of others.
—Edmond Jabès, The Book of Resemblances
Lair and line.
Canopy and carapace.
There is this running through thought’s torsions:
offer nothing that cannot one day be found among ruins
and restored there lifted back to reveal
“the retuning of children…the returning of bodies”
deposited in loam and pale water.
The well run dry, the woman’s hands
placed on the cistern to break down the separation
between thought & hunger, between thirst & intention.
Hear it—nomad threadbare song
“in poases of charred witness in blank re-
cursive song settle on banks of river”
Movement is worn. Wail of the white
woven tallit, fringed ragged Atarah
say its blessing under breath—
turn fringed matter to dust
for the palms are turned “in lovely
blue” incipient
bolts of vertical light.
A seal—seed—
spread evenly in blotted layers
imprinted across the page.
One is helpless before
“pillars of cedar and laurel support”
“palms of the hands cut by nails”
“sudden entrance of the father ghost”
The face
is faceless. To this day
we can’t recall what it was that drew
us there: hidden, lucent, veiled—
arguably dead. A meeting
inside the room where it was taken
in quick effective movements of the palm
and middle finger, the way
one is allowed to far-flung familiarity
bone & trestle smashed together.
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Affinities of imperfect flesh / incidental mind.
Spring stones, sorrel & jonquils
in yellow haze of sun.
The body affirmed by what it
touches, at once refused and touched by
“a world where accident is rule”
and the hand that passes over its linen
surface, firm inmost space
of Being.
Yet was this its carapace, space
of upheaval, to which now the words
labor inexorably, blind, partitioned, enabled only
by shrifts of grief?
“The face is devoured fruit ready for eating.
This face is a lifeboat journeying out to sea.”
Or proposing its equal, auratic emblem: the square
knot under the jaw, its lariat like a
signature burnt into flesh.
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Salto mortale…“Too exhausted with pain and the lack of language
to notice that something has entered”
The child’s writing hand is suspended—before the goodnight kiss—
in the scaffolding of lines, the giddy-making
wall-bars of the arena…Mouse, hat, house, twig, bear, ice
and egg fill the arena—a pale glacial audience
watches our dangerous tricks.
What is accounted for. Who is present, gifted
at the outset, a chaste figure, unharmed, the speedy
recall that drops hands, seeks the place on the page
where it should be, the threshold
before writing
“angular ancient
having traveled distances”
When no one has entered & no one has gone
Seamless debit, iris opens
its ridged palm again & again to virtual rain
simulacras of experienced shelter.
Under white skies
the child learns to leave itself behind
pared-back & ignoble
draws a head on white paper
a line through it another
line passing over the left pieces of red
paper stapled together to form a book
like the pattern of a shaped text made for
unknowable ends, attributable cloth
blue & grey marble cover.
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And what is laughter
when the abject presents itself
like a small shrine of unattributed value
handed over again and again. All
this you said was worth so little there was
no point in gesturing brushwood
the clouds’ passage could as easily be found
burning against the lower fields
beginning back of them the creased ligature
of one less known than others
still harsh in his assimilated nature.
Death could be in this way
anticipated, sought after even. Below
it was clear the line meant to divide one half of the picture
from the other, the rigid introspection of crayoned
purple that let smears resemble pieces of
a body laid to rest underneath
white leaves blades of grass
nearly fertile then muted. And each blend of red
or blue or brown placed just above
the saturated surface: pockets of imperfect
possible belief:
“so much unsparingly drawn…assimilated & retraced”
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Everything pre-dates.
Everything is in readiness for something about to happen.
“To become old the innocence
of the insulted in the challenged blood
of childhood” as if this too
provided document of their having
existed inside the genetics of a song
that had no force in the present
becoming both limit and breaking point
permanently rendered in child script
as a pairing of white and red trees
separated by a border of grey figures—
“Now we feel surges of the unseen unsaid the glass smashed
against the brick face of the post office wall…”
And one beneath the fended-after sought-before
otherwise deadly voice
a cataract of imperfect phrasing
unspeakably hard literally
unable to pass through
Saying, The heart song rock & ridge revealed
as pity goes wingless tongueless, unwilled & gone
out, the human sign, spoken at the extremes of language—
And the bird has flown out to sea, launched in arias
of surreptitious pleading, denials of pluralist love, dragged
over the sea, into rain & earth…
Who absorbs this brokenness
when it is out of place in this world. There
the face is upended, the boat like
a rapid faltering spray of color
that hits the empty screen—
reflecting coronas of blank empathy.
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The hand brought into light this place
that consumes
—dematerializes—
softens the flesh where it
spreads against linen into which
its faded portrait is just
this:
“all you know all
you are all
that has happened”
Cauterized by a bolt of lightning
Shroud line of the singly marked seam
Laid to rest within
A rising tide: blue jet stream
Errant shower beams of southern light
Impossible to live out
their days without number
their eyes passing back to note
our passing—
“o our elderly daughters…human & remote…”
We have more to
say we have so little to say to one another
under the cypress we have said nothing we can
believe or saying again reveal what came between us
in a garden of shadows.
And the figures pass exactly as drawn.
And what’s drawn forward is drawn away.
If there is no hatred in mind wind can never tear them apart.
—To Robert Kelly
NOTES
“The retuning of children…the returning of bodies” is from Rachel Tzvia Back, On Ruins and Return. Hölderlin is the source for “pillars of cedar and laurel support” and “palms of the hands cut by nails.” “The face is devoured fruit ready for eating” is from Whitman. Walter Benjamin’s “Notes (II),” in Selected Writings (Vol. 2.1, 1927–1930), is the source for the section beginning: “The child’s writing hand is suspended.” The lines, “To become old the innocence / of the insulted in the challenged blood” and “all you know all / you are all / that has happened” are borrowed from George Oppen. The lines “We have more to / say we have so little to say to one another” are adapted from Allen Grossman, “Song of the Constant Nymph.”
The Return
Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images.
—Hawthorne
How dark it is she was
reproducing darkness of the dream its
occult shadow spear-like lancing her side as the
wire could be pulled back from her mouth
labial muted cry when she saw its steel lip
moving into her a tether blackening steel line of its
retracted end. Yesterday I wanted to
speak of it I wanted to tell you I was
not going to make it the train was already
late I was sleeping outside in the pool of city
light when you found me like a dream I was
not able to keep content to keep the facts clear.
What was it led up to the instant
she returned to him in the dream
querulous black night shirt she was high
inside its tent the tether was a black stencil
across her chest when he pulled her back from it
less manhood than child bleakly calling out
to its mother a portal opening she said
time is drifting through my hands the storage
of it love and children sleeping you wrote
moon and love and children sleeping
I can’t sleep here I can’t stay the night is
black crust can I eat it can you break my hand in half
with your face that now turns away end-
lessly turns away the fictive presence of a
father who comes & goes bleak as light that comes
& goes—
“I am just trying to survive today”
when there were so many levels of anger
as if rage had become porous the richness of its
folds around them she was carrying water
back to her bedroom when he stared
into it a longitudinal gaze across the
distance between where he stood where she
felt the edge of its wall & lay down on its
sheets said “Now can you let me can you
let me have some peace I am at the end
of it you are at the end go away”
when no one was conscious who
was awake the stream of days she was
collecting mementos hidden pieces of wire wax
synecdochdotal language scraps she placed
behind the bookcase when he came back and
heard him scraping back the pasteboard notebook
I can’t tell you what it will mean I can’t
say I led you back to it like a source in the cracked
canvas you said it was ruined the pictures
you held in mind of who I was 17 years ago
I was barely awake to it your hands on me pushing
me against the door I said you can stop it’s ok you
can stop—
I am just trying to survive today
yesterday I came back and it was the same
person I was entering the room he was
leaving taking my book with him
in which I’d underlined sentences for you I’ve got
too much, don’t know what I want, you’ve
overwhelmed me and you’ve spoiled me, I keep
asking harder and harder questions, I expect
you to accomplish miracles—against the
baseboard written down in pieces to my
self I am loaded down do you see with
their language & ours can you keep
this between us?
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The sea as she
remembered it she was 6 or 7 the
days without color in her dreams
they had gathered conch shells along the
coast. He was father to her
they were coming back from the shoreline
when the sun darkened midday
his eyes on them on her body she was
aware lithe moving through light
only that he needed to take his
daughters back into the waves
green over green she was standing by their
side waves cresting foam breaking the
space they had once inhabited
now the spires of water jetted out
finding a force for them interior
the emitted sidereal movement of their
bodies twisted from position
relinquishing movement
of arms and hands extended into the shadows
so that when she shouted for him
to return he was with them beneath the last wave
in partial form arising from its green light
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“I can’t remember what you said when you came into the room
summertime my father was dying in his bed I held a weak
light up to his face astonished you were astonished to find
us still there my broken pencil stabbed into the page beneath.”
Can desire be a mistake? If language
fails to clarify its intent—
how do we claim a part of what
was said until another stands by our side
her body noticeably younger at a loss
for words we said we’re at a loss can you help me
our bodies together imaged in shaded
hill and mountain
a renewal of vows
I was dead and you woke me
a vow to renew what was discarded
Now you are gone I am dead
a map of loneliness spread out before us.
I cannot separate nor want a way
out from her spell I am
without defense I tell her
“I am yours there is no other”
graphite pressed between the thumbs
the heartlessness of words
that travel back to claim us
not so much disbelieving
as protective at a remove
from what we can give
I came back to find you when you turned
your back to me fled back to a corner of the room—
“your words shattered me with their
intensity…I cannot forget
the words you used…I cannot allow
you to see me this way…How is
it you see me and no other?”
Am I to blame? What did I
ask that she might not ask
of me the same: in a wave of language cast against her
bodily until she said “you hit me hard…I’m
just barely able to get through christ I’m barely able
to get through”
like a doll figure gathered up thrown down
again & again against the wall she shows me
marks I have made I am so tired
to the core I am not able to say anything more—
Her anguished face
her hands extended to receive
Love.
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When one thinks he has encountered
permanence—the inability to say
anything of consequence
it all falls short the hands at your side
yesterday they were another’s hands
no way to trace back where they
fall are falling again
apoplectic or without purpose
a body is situated just so
it gathers itself up the city day
is black then grey what half do
you consider important
what half do you
need to see again?
“Not so much cruelty it’s not that I felt your meanness & that is what I hold most dear to me now, that you are in some ways without forgiveness—so that if I stand here long enough I too will fall under the spell of your gaze—and lose my person within it.”
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Being dead who can
tell you what it was that came
again not stunned not barren
or bare—the seed of it
steel in mind unable to act.
I made of thee a pact in wood…
Central to the “intersection of the timeless moment”
A woman coming into the scene late
in its action she is perhaps 35
sits at the table
draws it in her notebook a little
bit at a time there is what she says
she has noticed—its creased marble
surface the way it gestures toward some
unremarkable event—walking toward him
in daylight
this was years later she couldn’t have
placed him she couldn’t have said it was
him or another she saw
but the cast of light its impression on her
hands lifted to reach back fold the
pages down where she’d stopped—
…a hotel fifty francs he had sneaked out like
a convict in some veiled act of violence he tore out
the pages when she smiled up at him & he struck
her across her face then turned her away from him
to hear him in the park where they
met again in daylight then its
literal disappearance as if
she were walking into a cell of pure ether
and standing there saw no one
not him not the children he’d fathered
no one
and at once understood
what it meant to live
under the surface
away from that pitched uneven
trail of voices—
at the edge of the bitter river
underneath a sky without stars.
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In ascent
assenting assuaged
I am common with him in marriage
there is no sin no virtue there are only
these acts…
as she saw herself
eased back into it
a sister with eyes
half a lifetime
partly gone to say it was
half a life spent in this
inquiry or was it
injury as she couldn’t say
it spell the wo\rd
back again the vertical
transistent phrasing
I miss the emphasis you placed on nouns
your finger un-ringed finger habit to see it
gone to eat near you again
remarks held back in some captive
dream of them at once
neutralized and prosthetic
I am beyond what you knew of me
I am not her
when she was lured again
by the insistent creation
put before her
a city hollowed underneath
she came to know him
within its walls
like an onslaught of verbal damage
like a truncated message reviled
held in her hands again
as she passed where
he was once standing
the light lifted to receive
who they had become
partly emerged
partly disappeared…
And what you meant to say to me
I gave it back to you again so you could
understand its meaning—in new
light of day you said I am shifting
when the light is what is
shifted & the weight in my
hands of what I have yet
to give you.
—To Lee Charleston
August 11, 2008
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