“The poem holds its ground on its own margin … The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it.”
—Paul Celan, Meridian speech
—Paul Celan, Meridian speech
1.
17 May 1986.
Or whenever “now” is.
Enough to look at here
For the rest of a lifetime.
Even the simplest things,
Their provenance—
a shoe, a prosthetic
post-war leg
reminding you of
silent doubles
unfinished, imperfect,
imperfect, shadowy.
Slowly the particulars
get scattered to the wind
and one is left
with what is under the surface
trying to come to light
what has not yet
been found nor
been found
out.
“For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.”
2.
Things are very bright tonight—
the city reflects against the clouds.
Shiny talismanic buildings
push objects back into their
specificity, yet the misty
low weather ceiling makes
what we see paradoxically
“less interpretable.”
Though I had saved the headlines.
3.
Emotions wash up and across
us. But mainly impotence.
Orphaned realism.
Instant knowledge, all news all the time,
that’s one slogan,
and immobility. Were there other times like this—
over and beyond the bearable?
The question is callow. But heartfelt.
It surely seems a bloody time—where
someone is murdered down South 23rd St.,
a rough place, disgrace of,
shame of
drugs, deals, rage, and guns,
and then
(today being the Night of the day
war started again),
the shame of War, the one begun as a “slam dunk,”
cabal of manipulation and
devious complicity.
And with no more Time, the vagueness
from which the now vague dead imaginarily
“watch” this
from the outside.
From the other side.
We no longer encounter them
in good conscience.
As for monuments—
see ambivalence.
What is the point of pure revulsion? I am beginning
to be very simple, to have very simple thoughts, no
complicated language, therefore; nothing
too subtle.
4.
It’s a question of “among” or some
shatter of the reflection
“to see them”
and “to know ourselves.”
The distortion and elongation,
the stupor.
Which is one way or another
we seem to be assassins.
To refuse this “we”—
in one sense easy, and already done,
in another sense
seems almost impossible,
us held hostage to ourselves.
Lie-adept trappings,
Viscous excuses
Snarled-up alibis
bind us to the damage,
And I was
desolate
at this.
5.
You and I had crossed that bridge,
the Brooklyn Bridge,
“my” bridge,
together. Then
I said “I want that danger.”
Now I am frightened.
Walking through those streets or these. Watching
the marks: trying to penetrate the enormous
sadness. The armoring. The cost. The woe.
Registers of the squandered.
Weakness. Scale. The scale of it all,
and its claims of totality.
Watchers hunch
under the keystone of that story.
Then there is the sudden burst of joy
that it is. That it is. Not as such, not as this
(and it is hard to see without shame),
but that
“being”
remains fluid, dazzling, in play.
The poem alternates among
these states. Is annunciation of them,
these desires indignant for a name.
6.
Civitas uncanny,
darkened, stippled, riven
with confusion and contradiction.
The dark being both obscurity and incipience,
it’s light that becomes
perfectly unnerving.
The problem is to articulate
any promise of the civic,
without this glint of the apocalyptic.
7.
Bewildering what happened.
The profligate rip of earth, of persons,
of the sharers—plants & mites & languages—
down to the very bit of fleck along the crack.
Is it “your dead” or “you’re dead”?
One in the news, or not,
one in some myth, or not—
who no longer finds
credible the humane part
of human nature.
Yet knows in the gut
that something large was thereby lost:
and wants to find it, choose it again,
affirm it as possible.
Open the door
says a weeper
to a stone room,
do not take the path
of the indifferent.
8.
It is astonishing
how much time has passed—
almost forty years, a round figure—
though as time goes, not particularly long.
Just the working day of a lifetime.
To accept that things did happen
the way they did
seems to accept too much.
Perhaps I haven’t grasped the necessity
of an amor fati argument.
Though what choice is there?
Some fascists will be buried with their Legion of Honor medals.
Some coups and juntas masquerade with “free and fair” elections.
Perhaps this amor fati produces what here is called joy.
But still it is riven
with revulsion.
9.
And in this space a birth of enigma
to which one owes one’s own enigma.
It is just what implacably happened,
and closer up, grief after grief,
error after error, profit after profit, scarification
and burning. Sharpened on the altar,
the knife, its whetted majesty, is readied
for another human sacrifice.
What art to make anyway?
what art for this recurrence?
“The intensity of seeing”
would be an improvement
(citing out of context),
as if the sheer clarity of pointing
the dialectical oscillate of meditation
could ever illuminate this time and place.
Yet flawless analysis and a temperate
framing of the stakes
cannot assuage an other part, one flailing
Being, dazed
with this particular mood and air—
with the cold rags of carnage.
10.
The watchers are struggling.
They’re over their heads, have only subjunctive
qualifications, get stunned
in whirlpools of historical sentence,
battered by broken beams and rogue barrels,
as if after a shipwreck.
They are struggling.
And sorry pieces of matter
(children,
children; just
an example)
explore this site.
A sense of desperate outrage
anneals the onlookers
onto the very page
on which these words are put
as fetish substitute for the directness
of rubble.
“Shortly after the Tuesday bombing, young boys
with black plastic bags moved among the wreckage,
collecting pieces of flesh
scattered around the site of the blast …”
Then closed in the shadows. The world
made sick
when children have to pick
up
the pieces.
And it’s just boys, teasing, or scheming, or
pretending nonchalance, or competitive.
Perhaps sometimes laughing.
For it must be impossible to
weep or rage the whole time through the terrible.
Here are your trash bags. Go forth and fill them.
But is it impossible not to become inhuman?
11.
So—what is the normal?
Speaking to several people at once. Teasing to
some, earnest, flirting, honest, self-conscious.
Speaking as several people at once,
pastoral, neo-classic, professional, sleepless—
the lot.
Well, it’s a warm spot here or there.
One street coming round the little square,
the spaces of home perched
variously, with amiable
neighborliness.
In the city. Waverly, right at the corner of 24th.
These pinholes, these spots of light,
as if keys,
open actual houses.
Or the moon, whose warm gold is
actually a street light on the corner
but looking as if it had just risen,
low in the sky, and living
right down the end of our block.
12.
Any consolation that the only typo was in “the father”?
That must have been “the feather”
fallen to the ground
saturnine and angry
from the calling, cawing bird.
And finally I remembered the little villages,
and my long-ago images of great desire,
beautiful city,
multicolored buildings overlooking water,
many entrances, many windows,
but couldn’t remember how to get there
and was crying
right in the dream,
weeping and crying
in that dream.
13.
A postwar lasts far longer than they think.
You, for one, will not be surprised.
Torn hope’s interconnected-
ness and fallout has become a large and
unyieldy topic.
Being occupied, we try only
to be preoccupied.
Stuff stuff stuff stuff
This is a pretty pickle.
Perhaps the game will
go to extra innings.
It was a Pitcher’s duel, turns out.
The enormous fastballs
hit people in the stands.
“Wild pitch, wild pitch,”
They say. “Accident.” No penalty.
Too bad. Too bad again.
A diplomatic letter will be sent.
Truce will be declared when
Enough territory has been taken.
Which hardly compensates
for the impact of,
for the depredations of
rancid power
eating away like acid at the walls of possibility.
There is some distance from this to be negotiated.
But only if you’re fairly lucky.
14.
She had asked for photocopies
of essays by Edith Sitwell and a few books on H. D.—
and they reached their destination—in Iraq!
I could afford the postage
I could afford the books
And wrote carefully collegial letters into distances
I could hardly conceive of, though
the university, understudied/female writers,
a doctoral candidate, her thesis topic, then her degree
were familiar territory enough—
all lodged or wedged in another world
thereupon become toxic, dangerous.
And so the correspondence stopped.
Is she still alive?
She was very earnest—her letters, pious.
How speak about any of this.
Her opinions about the newest-coming war
were, on paper, not at all like mine.
To the degree, that is, that it had been possible
to speak openly.
15.
I want polyphony
I want excess
I want no art object
No product, no saleables, no
administrative specs, no oversight
of bureaucracies.
I want the wayward and unpredictable
caused by anything
equally stressed, stubborn or obtuse,
companionably destabilized or destabilizing.
I want to make the gesture comes through me
I want to be touched
I want fullness
I want rapture
the erotics of writing
the pleasures of the daze
the over-reach of structure
and the desire for exactness
all sweet together
exfoliating, rolling, roiling through
this “felt-and-fat-and-dirt-and-muslin-maze.”
16.
I won’t quote a word,
but that notable double-crossing chess game
reveals trouble in the desert,
trouble in the lineage, trouble in the choices,
trouble in the allegory.
What more to say about the Father of everything
from the inevitable, suspicious, atheist
daughter
watching the claim made around the one—
the beautiful, longed-for, pensive son.
They are all male singletons:
one A, one I and one One
(undercounting various brothers
who do not matter in the tally;
nor enumerating most sisters,
though they certainly existed).
Single, except for the One who sent an
androgyne messenger
who rammed the ram into the thicket,
who filled the curly ewe,
who took her mewling newborn sheep.
Thereupon the regime of human sacrifice
was declared theologically finished.
But not politically and ideologically finished.
Clear enough?
17.
Who registers deep lakes of darkness;
Who receives the streak of light upon water?
Who is aroused by the saturated ripples at dusk?
As if all processes could be palpable:
As if this were the beginning
As if nothing had been written
As if there were no tradition
As if there were no traction.
We know this is impossible
But if this were the beginning
What would one want of words?
18.
Stet atrocity
Stet astonishing events fast come ordinary
Stet particular Presidents
Stet plume of smoke
Stet people burn
With an increase of allusions and referents.
19.
Or another answer.
Of words?
Adequate complexity.
People are transformed by the blood on their hands.
Underneath the skin
Self-justifying minor monsters
Harden
Backed by the monsters to whom
Monuments are built.
What one-dimensional sense of Strategy
What Willingness to squander the fodder
What worship of callous outcomes?
What avid and implacable Calculation
What single Illumination
What mono-Ocular blind-sided Vision?
20.
If we destabilized, if
we assassinated, if we bought off,
if we lied about matters of record,
if we set up, undermined, corrupted,
provoked, if we tampered with
ballots, if we used victuals
to twist the convictions of
the starving—if.
What then? Then what?
Then
what will prevent this happening
to us?
Chickens come Home.
And Us Chickens.
Two old sayings.
High crimes and low cunning,
One must refuse. Easy, so far.
Yet a clutch of events
hatches in the world at large
leaving a rash, a stain, an infection, a pandemic.
The haze of power, lures of cheap stuff
freeze the heart and desiccate ethics.
So here is failure. Here is shame.
And the nice life? The poetic vista?
Coziness and connection?
There is no elsewhere.
Even the poem is not elsewhere.
21.
If one began: it.
It was. It happened. Once upon.
Here. Where nothing
Particular is “happening.”
Either here or “nearby.”
Each stone turns inside out
To manifest atomic openness
As it shows its coordinates,
Thus. To be so. In is.
That stone has more empathy than power.
It does not seek geopolitical advantage
But is simply here, in this, with us.
22.
Some topographies and folds
Cannot be fathomed by the ascription
Of only three dimensions.
This is intended as consolation.
If I were to say all this, all at the same time
The way it’s felt,
The page would go black from overprinting,
An unreadable un-negotiable plenitude.
A self-canceling copia.
And at the same time with webby, resonant strings,
The sound would be everything touched, and pulsing
sexually.
23.
Snow blowing from the north plasters the route signs.
What road to take, given
indiscernible numbers and destinations, forks
into little places on “the” way.
And later, still driving blind
sky curdling
with sleet
before I dropped.
There is at once too much
and too little
for getting the force of it, the rebuff
cup of die, cup of day, freeze and thaw.
Such glitter of ice; how did I get here?
This road is so dangerous.
24.
To resuscitate
The covenants that are
Available
To fabricate them as
Humane and secular
And thereby to address
Wrongs of the world, ruthlessness,
Despoiling and injustices:
Is the agenda in front of us.
25.
Walking up and down in it
walking to and fro in it
the ordinary and normal
is the tragic and joyous
is the compromised and the small;
cramped and compassionate
are suffering
and strangeness.
We live in cosmic coincidence
involutedly psalmic
where
“at the climactic moment
the extraordinary place in the second movement
at the very peak of a monumental
orchestral crescendo, the double basses
are suddenly left alone,
impossibly high,
impossibly exposed,
impossibly mournful,
with only a trembling, pulsating quiver beneath them”—
26.
Feeling that pulsation as if in vigil,
Echoing “the cry of human entanglement,”
We want to contribute to the discussion.
We saw the sullying and the malfeasance.
We tried to speak simply
The name of common sense
But were dismissed
As inadequate, discountable, marginal.
Treated, perhaps, as dead.
Now that the moment continues
Can there be new generation?
Is there a beginning? It is an up-swelling
So far not totally plausible. But palpable.
This is tentative; this is qualified.
But the level of crisis is more than we know.
And the alternative?
27.
It’s hard for me to talk about poetry. Of its particularity. My sense, against consumable reason, that it matters. So much is at stake. So many abandoned worksites. The yes and the no simultaneous. The struggle to repair, even simply to state what is, how it is, and why it is so overwhelming, with permanent and never answered questions.
When I meet the professionals whose job is to evaluate development, aid, impact on health, functioning infrastructures, and literacy education, who will study the uneven global distribution of illness, who want delivery of services, social accountability, changes of policy, who insist upon small articulations of new outcomes that modulate from the despoiling outcomes, who want to identify where an alteration is possible, who want to assess, by firm input-output criteria, the work that is done …
I fall back on admiration and questions. How to make the confrontation spoken by poetry offer the force of an intervention—so that one feels the whole
differently. Beyond one, but inside one.
How to talk about the level of art as grounding and arousing. As compassion, empathy, resistance. As respect for the unknown, even the unknowable. As entrance into the intricacy of languages and structures, into the mesh of musical grammars. How move beyond the “technology of solutions” by making analysis itself a verbal saturate. How to produce resonance.
So I began writing into the poems
I put words deep into the poems
As into a tunnel
to speak point black.
28.
The antics of the waning moon at dawn
touching its juicy crescent to the hill
a sudden flare, a sign, a light
upon the nations—
thereupon immediately
changes. Volta! volta!
One sees the earth turning,
one sees time enacted, pivoting.
29.
So she stole her father’s teraphim.
What, in the name of monotheism,
was that about?
Those rare black stones.
Sacred knick-knacks, idols,
symbolic lion grabbed at that got chipped,
cover them with the ass of female claim,
settle in for the duration, and refuse
(“being in the way of women”)
to rise.
Say you are neither disloyal nor pilferer.
And sit tight on the icons and rocks of meaning
gathered from the paternal household,
the talismanic counterfoils, even
the fewest and smallest
from the fierce storehouses of articulation
and defensiveness.
You will remake these goods in your own blood.
“I didn’t take enough.”
“So go get more.”
Tokens from the broken labyrinth.
30.
The distant water
spins the tiny-moon inside whose
shadow was thinly outlined, whose light flickered
like a fizzling bulb, like a spray-of-mist,
like a simile, like an eclipse.
The moon to come
lies dark inside its narrow needle tide.
Textures of incipience and mystery.
Vibration and call.
The light strikes; we read the shine.
Struck like a clear bell,
Again and Again.
Struck words with
Their patchy shapes in the light
Of time, in reflections
Upon day, in the specific
Wake occurring here tonight,
Dark in the garden, debating stars.
31.
There is a space beyond; it has been
called “utopian space” and
we scrabble toward it, struggling
with a twisted goal that presents itself
oddly, like a knot in which
we’re knotted.
Is it inside or outside?
Are we both in and out from it?
Are we both made of it and helping to tighten it,
So clotted, so intransigent, so graceless?
Yes. Were I to cry out
full as a symphony, but in a littler space,
this intensity of conviction, this witnessing,
would emphatically signal
unfinished business.
32.
What is important and what is not
in a real place filled with signs?
Night-shadowy floaters, the cloaked allure
of an insomniac mother
checking quiet beds
in dreamy rooms of night,
care and cura
quick foot snuffling thru the house
like a mouse, thru the room
like a worm,
short music
this called vers
long music, symphonic,
the erotics of connection
the longing of zone.
And later, Day-low-violet color, checked out curiously,
for periwinkle or hepatica is the tiniest question—
not socially useful, nor of general interest
simply the name of one small thing
hands on something coming
lips on something other
the yearning to enter
to be entered
and to leap with
desire—
33.
That dazzling blue teardrop
with its swirl of clouds known from here
yet imagined as if seen from above is
imprinted inside us, like a mystery.
We—inundated with a flood of light.
We—“glad to the brink of fear.”
34.
To mothers who cannot
protect their young?
They probably know
impotent despairs,
expressed as resignation
but surfacing in little sleights of hand,
candy, or sugar sprinkled
on packaged bright-white bread
spread thin with marge.
To girls asked to filter the universe
by the poets who evoke their beneficence?
What will protect them
from the enormities
that they might suffer in their skirts and veils
while staged on the buffer zone they
are imagined to constitute?
To the little dolly dressed, undressed
in her tiny clothes. Always the word tiny
or little
calls something forth, calls
the all that’s never known
into a small detail,
a much-loved ribbon shirred to fraying;
blue and white yarn, the doll frill
kept in that tin trunk made for tea
then taken as a treasure;
the chip, o broken thing! a person able to wiggle
her ears and wink her eyes—surprise! oink!
a little air wherever we are, a
tiny, sweetish song.
35.
The terrible political moment, after the demo,
Though next to nothing was yet accomplished,
When “everyone went home, and no one came back.”
36.
Rain cloud caught in the valley
rain falling fast from all directions,
pulses of light intermittent and vibrant.
Despite everything, the instruction
to pull green from yourself.
37.
“A little breath, a bird
she sits on the edge of the bathtub,
the silence
where she breathes in and out”
with “another morning
looks out of the morning”
both may be thought of as defining
an incipience
in tender scale and proportion.
It was what could then be written.
One nano-second later and
a snarl of light that crashed to the floor binds one
to the terrors of historical time.
That’s what awe is, that’s what fear.
Demanding an intransigent response
To the knife and to its addictive power.
The necessity here still,
Still here.
Of the world’s puff and elegance,
Of the world’s implacable substance,
Solidity billowing …
But trying to act
on this murky path,
overcast wet air, headlines thrown
keeps on demanding other knowledge:
other—unknown, strengths
for negotiating heavier elements:
collateral wreckage
unintended consequences
disordered order—
38.
The sofa holds a wrinkled nude
Shivering in her blue mood,
Wrapped in a blanket.
A hospice houses someone crying.
Her skin so thin with dying,
It’s swaddle-wrapped so it won’t split.
39.
Once again a sense of occurrence,
witnessing
one distressed moth,
mottled fluttering
violent, heaving across
the room,
this little life and heart
one street one sign one sight one
desire.
These feelings
of everything
opening straight out into
nothing.
40.
Can only write hungry
and luminous as phthalo blue
such astringency and tension.
Color as deep as the dream
as incomprehensible
as writing into such time
the work of this time
of making it bear
the nervy weight
of almost unmaking itself.
Lack of a door labeled “door.”
And then the lack was a door.
The poem
being archive of feelings to come—
And of what else we don’t know.
It is really “quite curious …”
February–May 2007