monoprints by Douglas Kinsey
This book is dedicated to Matthew &
Rachel
The
Marranos (the swine) was the name given to the converted Jews
in Spain, the “New Christians,” more specifically those who converted from the
mid-fourteenth century onward, usually under great duress. This class suffered greatly under the
Inquisition, especially those who converted as a response to the Edict of
Expulsion of Jews of 1492. In A History of the Jews, Abram Sachar writes: “Tens of thousands of the new
Christians conformed outwardly, went mechanically to church, mumbled prayers,
performed rites, and observed customs.
There was a suspicion that converts did not baptize their children or
that they immediately wiped the stain of baptism from their heads. It was believed that they secretly observed
the Jewish holidays, ate Jewish food, retained Jewish friendships, and studied
the ancient Jewish lore. The reports of
numerous spies tended to confirm every suspicion.”
“My pious forebears called
this world the world of lies, and the graveyard they called the world of
truth. I was preparing to be a writer in
that world of lies, eager to add my portion of falsehood.”
-I.B.
Singer
“If dreams are the teachers
of the waking-ego . . . duplicity is the essential instruction they impart.”
-James
Hillman
“An unbeliever once expounded
to the rabbi of Berditchev that even the great old masters had erred gravely,
that Rabbi Akiba, for instance, had taken Bar Kochba, the rebel, for the
Messiah and honored him accordingly. The Rabbi of Berditchev replied: “. . .
When God saw that the soul of Israel had sickened, he wrapped it in the acrid
linen of the Exile, and that the soul might bear it, he swathed it in a numbing
sleep. But lest this destroy it, he
wakes it from time to time with hope in the false Messiah, and then lulls it to
rest again until the night is passed and the true Messiah appears. And for the sake of this, even the eyes of
the sages are sometimes blinded.”
-Martin
Buber, Tales ot the Hasidim, The Early
Masters
- The
Marrano
- Family
Plot
- The
Religion of Art: 1 FEB 58
- UPROOTED
- TARZAN & CO.
- TIRED WITH THE HUNT AND COLD
- TO PROSPERO
- KNOW
THYSELF
- TIME-BINDING
- CONTRA BOTTICELLI
- THE TOY
- LULU
- MISALLIANCE COMMIITEE REPORT
- AFTER THE REVOLUTION
- ORPHEUS DOWNTOWN
- MAP OF THE WORLD, Martin Frobisher, 1578
- BOMB SQUAD
- SIMON'S DREAM
- GREAT HORNED OWL
- LOVE AND WORK: Apple Picking
- THE GHOST MOTHER
- NO WORD
- WITNESS
- ANOTHER FALL
- U.S. SIGNAL CORPS FOOTAGE
- DURING THE TIME OF THE EXECUTIONS
- THE GARROTTED MAN
- GERMAN PRIMITIVE CRUCIFIXION
- THE DRAWING OF THOMAS WYATT BY HOLBEIN
- HOME
- MARGARET ROPER
- MY CONTACT
- TO THE COLONIZED BODY
- PUPPET THEATER
- LAST ACT: DON GIOVANNI
- DE PROFUNDIS CLAMAVI
- REVISION
- VISIONARY GIFTS
- EMILY DICKINSON'S ROOM
- THE VIA NEGATIVA, OJAI, CALIFORNIA
- LES MAUDITS
- IN FLIGHT
- CONEY ISLAND ROLLER COASTER
- MIDSUMMER NIGHTS MARRIAGE
- REHEARSAL
- HER HUSBAND SPEAKS AFTER HER DEATH
- POST MORTEM AS ANGELS
- GARDEN SCULPTURE
- TO HOLLIS FRAMPTON
- POEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE BY HOLLIS FRAMPTON
- THE STRING QUARTET
- A LIBRARIAN OF ALEXANDRIA
- TO ALL THE GODS AT ONCE: A Prayer for Mercy
I have an indoor mind: a
small room,
a focused light, many books
and one window, shoulder
height.
The only parts of nature
known to me
are my wrists, hands and
fingers:
they move, are warm, and
change
too slowly for serious study.
From window, a large world
full of rows of things:
bushes,
trees, rivers, cows in line.
Is a boring text, this flat
grid.
On my shelves, even the
meanest book
retreats in depth and joins
with all my books,
petals moving toward the
fertile center,
and can place me back and
back behind myself
reading the book behind the
book, until
the blossom opens and we form
one text,
one complete mind, the one
order.
“Art is the remedy for the worst diseases of the
mind, the
corruption of consciousness.” Collingwood
God wants the souls of the
faithful,
not their corpses. He has carrion enough.
In The Golem it explains
from the moments of the
highest danger
he saves us, always in the
form of wonders,
like making a new man. For this truth
we struggle in disguise.
I moved to Hamburg or
Seville, bought
a bakery or clothing store, a
new name,
and lived openly, spoke like
a native. I was
a kind of native, the most
internal exile.
I could not change my name
because I was committed to
disguise,
from Weiss to Scheiss,
Hermano to Marrano.
I am His pig. To hide Him I
renounce Him.
My teacher cared for me, a
prize student.
To spare my feelings he asked
me to leave the class
during his diatribes against
the Jews.
I listened from the hallway,
grateful
for this lesson in
accommodation.
Modesty and secrecy are
virtues of the chosen.
Study the pig for
modesty. The cat
buries the emblem of the
world. We learn
in secret, through closed
doors, all love.
I welcome the need to convert,
create
an adequate corruption of the
mind
fit for understanding, for
the sacred,
the one text, the one
ungainly text,
saying Alles in Ordnung ist,
meaning another, unimaginable
order.
The Gnostics were right, the
world is made of shit.
I made my life a work of art
expressing this.
This is a cheap hotel and I
am I
despite the wavering mirror
that lowers my brow,
lengthens my Jewish nose and
buckles the left
side of my head (in fact the
right) like forceps.
When I sway an entire cast
bulges back:
Laughton as Quasimodo, the
Elephant Man,
long-faced joking Joyce,
Sailor Nan
doing the shimmy-nautical but
nice.
I know I'm from mirrors and
unlit windows
where the unprepared, unsober
lit self
leaps with horrid
gestures. I do not look back
and myself through my own
eyes: a drunk tourist
who killed a fifth of Carlos Tres-a regicide-
and deicide by birth-in the
old resistance
afoot in Burgos. My other
American self,
my bright little Escort, my
machine,
efficient, snappy - all its
latent power
lies locked in the
underground garage
beneath the plaza. I'm in the sacred place
to honor fiction. This is Mio Cid’s
monument city, here's where
he tricked the Jews
with a locked casket of sand
he said was gold
to pay for his pure service
of King and God,
drove back the tolerant,
learned Moor and earned
exile for love. His home in the Cathedral
is more sacred than the
Leonardo
(doubtful) Virgin or the
Jesus standing
on an ostrich egg who raises
his elephant hide
arms to curse the Loyalists
or bless
behind their fans dry-eyed
girls in white.
We all serve by resistance and
deceit.
In hammering summer sun, in
paralyzed air,
I fished a small brook that
fell between
two moss-slick boulders, so
cool it seemed
a great cave of trees, the
water clear
and absolute: each minnow,
each pebble
hung in that green generous
light
as if the water were a
current of air,
a perfect clarity to see the
trout
laws, then rise to my fly in
a flash of trust,
bolt and stop in that
blessing of sight.
And after, on the deck in
full sun,
the seven mountains that I
built it for
standing guard against the
worst our rough
continent beyond could roll
at us,
I sat naked and alert in that
heat.
And the iced coffee in my
hand stopped, the hand
no longer mine as it raised
the class
forever to some mouth, the
ice in it
an iceberg and a spot of
light crossing
the dark North Atlantic,
steady in storms,
down to the warm seas. I could see
it gain and lose again its
yearly flocks
of migratory birds, each bird
ragged and raucous, fishing in
that sea
the plankton that surrounded
it in passage
as it shrank in the
omnivorous bleak green
and touched the lip at last,
the cool throat,
where the reel stopped and
the single frame
in perfect clarity froze,
fixing me
in my own sight in that unmoving
air.
The glass rested the durable
teeth
in that skull and I entered
the air and water
that penetrated through its
rigid smile,
and was the eye that saw
everything suspend
there with no mouth to shout
or arms to strike
out and fear. My daughter called. I answered.
A stray leaf continued its
flutter down to the deck
and I regained my mouth, my
hand, my own
nearsighted eyes, to
recompose
into steady measures the
world that stopped.
for Rimbaud
His face fills with tormented
red
as he fumbles the unknown
language, words and sounds,
and in him swells the panic
of the child
among staring strangers who
refuse to understand.
Abandoned by language, her
most complete dependent
who learned his world in her
skirts, found his house,
his street, the body’s smells
and sounds and lines
to feel, to eat-a world
ending loss,
until to rescue him the two
arrive
his wife and daughter, with
deft waving of words
and shaping of sounds with
swift fingers, expressive
precise words, the flood of comfort
of words
in loved mouths, a corner of
tooth, saliva
at lip, the crest and trough
of a wave that carries
closer in flood in a boat
filled with flowers,
him to himself, rising and
falling through mist.
Still with spyglass on shore
he sits between them
and drinks a brandy. His daughter, with his face
on his mother's body, reaches
for his arm
and covers him with her
silver intelligence.
her generous laugh, and leans
across to whisper
a joke to her mother who
joins in chorus with her.
His wife leans against
him-scented air,
rose, linden, white tobacco
flower
and the stranded one returns,
touches her face,
having burned with the
childlike terror of the dead
who hover among us to make
the last revisions
unable to shape the words
that must be said
before, in the grass, they
assume their fixed positions.
RELIGIOUS
INSTRUCTIONS FROM THE SURVIVOR’S MANUAL
My instructor was urbane and
trim in quick-dry
nylon with a cool, bored
confidence.
He demonstrated how I should
anoint my-
self on himself-shark-shit in
every crevice,
heavy in each armpit and
inside each thigh,
and the hard part, Look, it isn't awful,
the mouth. I stared, gagged, and he said,
That's the most important-what’s terrible
Is the idea. The stuff was dark tan and tasted
Bland, like cold oatmeal, and
I followed.
We dove in the bright tank
and saw them sidle
up with their long, cold
invulnerable bodies
and we swam through the
gleaming pool with ease
of sharks moving through the
vast heart of a jewel.
I
You were the ball I was
trained to keep
my eyes on, with your alien
blonde hair
and eyes of the alien blue,
staring at me
hanging over the plate,
myopic, dazed
by the light tent of hair you
loved to spread
over us, your gift for music
and math,
long legs, a careful way with
words:
you said I had “a
semi-recumbent walk.”
I barely knew the difference
between
Gentile and Jew, and wanted
to marry you.
But you knew. Your
lawyer-father knew.
Silver Springs had one or
two. He threatened
to cut you off. The night you
got his call
you stepped out of the dorm
for air, to clear
your head, and when I
followed you were gone,
running down the street, your
yard-long hair
streaming straight back, your
silhouette
flashing to gold at each
distant streetlight.
I chased you four blocks and
when I caught you
you didn’t know who you were,
or me.
I steered you to a small
cafe, you stared
an hour at rings of light in
the black coffee.
I was afraid to breathe and
make them waver,
and when you raised your face
I didn’t know
if you were back. “This is
forbidden,” you said
in a child's voice, and you
sang for another hour
with absolute pitch to the
tune of Là ci darem,
legato, your submission and
consent:
“No, no, no-no, no, no, no.”
II
The Anschluss could not prepare me for this
midnight invasion by the
red-eyed,
white-faced American
children, nor could Vienna
there they posture grandly
for a week,
shrug and console themselves
with the less messy
and preserve the order of
acts in the family romance,
no hurrying so, content with
the pace of la ronde,
diseases and love-wounds in
tolerable doses.
My first exile, in Jerusalem,
with my neighbors Martin
Buber and Max Brod,
the starker ones, prepared me
better for them,
and for my wife, her pure
Quaker service,
for all the unaccommodating
spirits
who scream as they bend, as
they must bend.
Now the tall yellow one,
after her hours tonight
a little hysteria is afraid
she will lose her mind.
She feels in the muscles of
her face
and throat a new and
terrifying looseness.
Nothing is broken in her
American soul
I have watched them from my
windows as they raced
with one another on their
bicycles
to their tutorial on Kafka
with me.
I have heard them chatter
about the Book of Job,
these young who never been
herded against a wall
or awakened and
arrested. So I said to this child:
“In this situation a
gentleman should withdraw.”
And he will, and tonight,
educated out
of the world he's constructed
from innocence into exile,
and learn to love with his
eyes over his shoulder
searching for the handle on
the door.
And she will regress to a
greater loyalty.
Sick with fearing to need you
and my last refusal,
I watched the house across
the way, the late night
scattering of lit
windows-tall stairwells
descending in the fog as
columns of light.
Then all went dark as mine,
power failed,
my radio stopped its
throbbing of Ravel.
I heard a window crank open
wide
into the September chill, and
a rough call
for someone nameless. Then I stood inside
their room. They crowded me,
touched my face:
I saw myself as many, then as
one
trembling before me, cupped
hands raised,
eyes slow, offering-not from
obligation,
but wholly-then the swift
inhabitation.
Then back in my room I
watched the lights return
at window and stairwell, hear
Ravel resume,
and see you toss in bed with
sleep-heat, murmur
something indistinct-my old
name.
Now the shock of double
vision, its perpetual
astonishment being as I sit
beside you and watch you turn
through other eyes
they want what I do not want,
and do it.
Not from over my shoulder,
but from within,
I see myself, and myself
fully replaced,
lift the sheet and drive for
something human,
some spirit that had died
come to live
in me and offer me, that
loved you in the past.
I see myself with honor give
and give.
I was a dutiful son to the
end.
In the smallest lapse of duty
I dream of her frown of pain.
Now it has been 10 years
since I have been to her
grave.
Will I leave 10 stones on her
grave?
Then she can hold up her head
among the dead and we're back
in the old collaboration,
lying to the living,
the dutiful cousins who visit
among those obliterating
fixed waves of stone
lying to the dead.
On a piece of our honeymoon
my Aunt and Uncle lay
(he was a crude-mouthed
clown)
one thickness of sheetrock
away.
I never learned to bear
his bullying idiot humor.
It was no win. If we
roared to our bodies’ content
and let the blooming slats
play ground bass
or eased into love in silence
his jokes would be equally
foul.
But we were good-a slow
grind and discreet gasps
and the next day on the dock
his rancid patter made
my shy wife writhe
and I iced to contempt for
life.
His life, and my own.
My mother was there. For
years
she let me know how shamed
she was by the dirt ingrained
deep in the hollows of my
ankle
on show on the dock before
her idiot brother-in-law.
Again the lawless child
trying hard to be good
and betrayed by his filthy
body
in their spanking boisterous
world
that I fled for the precincts
of art
in sneakers without socks
and a carefully preserved
shredded turtleneck
with my unacceptable wife.
Now nearly everyone's dead
but the wish to be forgiven,
to forgive, to give, to get,
burns in this need to
complete
the broken cycle of debt.
THE RELIGION OF ART: 1 FEB 58
No one more remote than us
at twenty, I seem doll small
in memory: the lens long
focus
a tiny man, a tiny hospital.
When I left you on your high
bed
you were white-a porcelain
flask.
Our new son was bright red
and puckered like a dragon
mask.
For a full day we timed
contradictions,
you dozed, I read aloud to
you
how son kills father, father
son,
in Don Juan by Victor Hugo.
The Don while canonized at
Mass,
wrings off his head in his
high coffin,
flings it and kills the
spiteful priest.
Better a devil of liberation
Than be a saint. You were being natural
until delivery and gas.
It was a simple country
hospital,
no nursery, no wall of glass.
I got to see you, stunned
face
to face, with Matthew in your
arms.
You were so addled with the
nurse
you forgot my name for the
State forms.
I was too dazed, so mastered
by what
I thought I should feel, I
never knew
what I felt-desperate
to kneel, to celebrate with
you.
But I could never really
force my breath
to thank, for the single time
he skipped
us, the child-killing Angel
of Death
who delivered us bathed in
blood from Egypt.
It's what I thought was due,
to buy
my son from death. I had the rite wrong.
I only had to claim him from
the rabbi
(who never had him) for a
song.
A tiny refusal. Your time was full.
My mind stank with the need for
prayer.
In the religion of the Great
Dispersal
my shul was the record player
turning the world on
auto-repeat
eight times, before I could
find
the firmness of Bach's first
Cello Suite.
How adequate the seizure of
my mind.
Each dawn this great bell
is struck for each sin
one hundred eight blows:
the world is gathered in
the circle of its voice
and everywhere within
a great order rung.
It tolls through the school
were sleepy children learn
the ciphers and the rule
to wear inside the face
not rule but sub-rule
that they can never break.
They chant in unison,
breathe in its metal breath,
their cheeks to its brass
skin.
My own careless life
summoned by this bell
with its low resonance,
from dreaming half awake
or dawdling with words in a
room,
would lose the small self,
the small waste of time
in that trembling embrace and
dance
that calls me whole to home.
After a scouring storm in the Coastal Range
something to fix, man's work, fallen trees
fair game, like fallen fruit or gleanings.
turning their leaves to undergrowth. The mirror
Today a Cossack mob, bloody swords
yesterday a trickle, now a flood,
and looked down at a clump of calla lilies
filling with water, until the last roots
I lived in the caress
of the most dangerous
wolves, apes, big cats,
knowing them in my hands,
the thick ruff at the throat,
the soft skin of the belly,
the vulnerable crotch
and their rich Edwardian speech,
taking on their powers
with their fearsome tenderness
like the English nobleman
who turned toward savageness
against the systematic
savage trade from home.
This was after the war,
after the famous photos
of death camps and the entrance
of the new word "genocide"-
our apartment overcrowded
with Jewish rc-fugees
sleeping on the floor.
Growing away from childhood
I turned for my defense
to a sterner animal code,
more instinctive, perilous,
than the mild rational world
of my accommodating home.
Sometimes I would stand
at the corner for an hour
buried in my book
until some thoughtful neighbor
would grab me by the elbow
to steer me across the street
still absent in the dream
of an animal poise of body,
faster, more alert,
enough to seize the cobra
arched and ready to strike,
to save the young, swimming,
with a knife across the belly
of the treacherous crocodile,
and knowing a hidden language
that I had been denied,
the message of the spoor,
the tum of twig and vine.
The stunned, reluctant ones
mannered and civilized-
these demons I defied
with outbursts of secret power-
I would teach them all!
This was the dream of knowledge
I returned from as a beast
to change the world to beasts.
Tired with the hunt and cold
I sat down to read
like a scholarly, mystical Jew,
the traditional text of the stream
crowded with life and fast
between its granite banks
of glacial residue.
The trout and crayfish hid
as if I had designs
but I was already flown,
outward and inward at once
in a constant tumbling race
over the gravel and past
the man on the bank, breathless-
its motion my stillness.
TO PROSPERO
He was pure spirit and kept
I stood waist deep
with an old professor of physics,
recently retired and aimless.
"Oh, a conference
now and then." Oh, his body!
Muscles in faint bands
across his chest and belly
and slack gaps between them.
And he swims like religion.
My son complains witheringly
that I never see
him fully
in the present.
I see him at all ages.
The child peeps out
frightening his cousins
by running across the beams
of our old barn,
blowing up toy trucks
with cherry bombs,
playing under tables,
screaming at eight
"I don't want to die."
As my father sees me
at all ages,
the child he could toss
high in the air and the heavy one
still too much a child
to see him in the present.
Talking to this old man
I see myself at all ages
till now. Now to see
myself as this.
An angel scurries on
an errand-a speaking dove
in tongues of flame
compels him from above:
his childish face is screwed to tight focus,
emptied of the personal, just pious.
The virgin and the one who crowns the virgin
shine in momentary rapture. Each one
bears the face of a child Venus dissatisfied
as always, Mars asleep as if he died
in post coital boyish abandon.
These are the ones who jerk us without mercy
as puppets in the hands of children.
You stare out the window in another city
and the sunlight pours through your blouse
and body making you a faint delicate shadow
in a white flame. Your mind is lined in your face-
you do not see one thing outside the window
and murmur under your breath and re-collect
the inwardness that holds this world in place.
Look
at him circle (his key
unwinding behind his back)
the woman with outstretched arms-
this gentleman in black
who shrinks
when we laugh at his fervent
celebration of life,
bowing at the waist,
his glossy back to his wife,
to-imagine
what you want-
a Minister of State,
a grande dame on her rounds,
the Poet Laureate,
a whore
in a doorway, slouched
and elaborately bored,
or portly kapos and bankers
swaggering abroad.
To all
that appear, he bows
and his hat brushes his feet
with the calamitous respect
he's compelled to repeat and repeat.
Imagine
him falling in love
with one who sings from her window:
unable to stop and smile
he sickens at each bow
as the
central Mother of Sorrows
with a club in her outstretched hands
cries and demands that he stop
and he starts to puke as he bends.
Aristotle says
the comic figures we love
are smaller than life and shrink
as we laugh and loom above.
By now he can barely
be seen,
our laughter has made him so small
he slips through the tight floorboards,
through layers of floors to fall
and fall to where we
no longer
can see him. But still one hears
from deep beneath the foundation
the intimate howl of his gears.
Leering, leaning over
my chair,
he was a bear, uncombed, half dressed,
speaking too loud, too close:
"I'll show you the real beast,"
waving at her, his indmate terror.
Her body like a leopard.
He followed
like a leopard, nothng her guard
to catch it down at the soft moment
or defend her as his own, hard
his teeth against her teeth, sweet blood.
Locked in this. I envied
the courage of desire, swollen so great
tolling through him as he followed
the strong musk, the weight
of sumptuous hair she brushed aside,
the falling and the loose.
As she listened
in her low gown she spread
her body into a moist knowing smile
that grew across the vast bed,
heated the room and glistened.
I, the dispassionate
and calm,
felt that shining hammer in my eyes,
blind them and burn my mind. My teeth
and fingers curled for attack, surprise
and speed in the darkening room.
I was a sleeping dog
curled
among them, dreaming of death.
I know that fall of mind to drift
inward without the world, my teeth
locked in my heart, my mouth glued with blood.
MISALLIANCE
COMMIITEE REPORT
Secretly, we lust for
our creation:
the way her ass doesn't move,
her churchy speech. With her hair tied back
she personifies Severe Adoration.
You can hardly tell she's human.
She inspires love. A boy beside her
sits with sheets of hair below
his shoulders, and his face
full of dreams of his last battle,
on the beach with two after his cash,
and what he sees through his fists
hovers like motes on his eye.
Behind them sits her husband, cool,
designed for her stiff body,
face crumpled in a frown, the mind
of an apologist for desperate acts-
for terrorists against the Abstract Wrong
that overwhelmed the home he fled,
and left him logic and the Word.
She is created to please the boy
alongside. It will be a year
before they act the last scene.
It will be clear why we gave her
a deceptive body, him a frown.
They both held their
breath at separate windows
breathing so softly that the faint
rush of air would not interfere
with the fluting of the thrushes back and forth
across the four corners of the garden,
and savored together the lente, lente,
the darkening room, the bird song
in the middle distance and the crescent moon
rising. Their silence in this vigil
was important. His voice had grown mechanical
and oppressed him with his own spirit's death,
laboring for the cause that changed and changed.
He was once so passionate in battle
and beautiful. Trotsky said his eyes alone
were revolution in the name of more perfect love.
That was the evening he disappeared.
She never knew when he left the room
whether the Security Police arrived
and he went out to meet them, or merely walked
into something unofficial,
a new life or death in the newest order,
the moon behind a cloud, nothing and silence.
I left you in disorder,
set in it,
part of it, it stays with you.
I could never save you from this.
Your sweat stiffening a white blouse,
cups of stagnant coffee, an open jug,
a trapped mouse that dragged itself
back into the wall to rot.
No place to lay down
my books.
No place to write.
In the bedroom window
blinds and no light.
You washed uhe nightlife
from your face
in the bathroom rnirror, the blue shadow
from your eyes, the reds from everywhere.
You froze on uhe pedestal of fallen clothes
into a statue and stepped away
into somenhing natural and mild,
preparing for a new life.
The sadness was always
ready:
I looked at you lying on the couch
by the front window, ice blue
from the streetlights, your breasts
flattened as you lay back, your face
turned away. I turned to the door.
Your coat hung there: hood up,
arms out, a cornic effigy of death.
"I was good enough
for art
but not for life," you said,
refusing che gift of my book
of poems about you.
This departure from your
body
parts me from mine, both betrayed
by my mind's love of design.
I am merely a singing head-
even at the climax always devising.
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MAP OF THE WORLD, Martin Frobisher, 1578
He sailed by this! Across
short seas,
around misshapen continents. The rough
sense is there the way a child might draw
with wax crayons the world it heard of.
Knowing the world as
we do, as we have
come to know her, how crude this is-
a deformation of her features
into loose and simple symmetries:
South America is round!
Between
the Pole and a pancake of our West
he has drawn a broad passage to Cathay
which lay there hungering to be possessed,
the great dome of her
head bowed over
the route in formal welcome. Her body
richens down the map. Under a world
of ice he imagined the open arms of a sea.
He called this dream
of water "Frobussher's Straightes,"
like my conceit when I sailed in, so knowing,
thinking I knew you then, and knew myself.
I need more facts to find you now.
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BOMB
SQUAD
You stood nearby, nervous, looking at your shoes,
then up at me, poking with your toe
at rubble, waiting, turning, raising your brows
to question. Should you stay? Where would you hide
from this one an atom bomb I was assigned
to de fuse, knock off with one blow
its explosive cap. I raised the sledge,
poised it above my head to aim true,
and swung. The bomb went off I tried to lunge
and throw my arms about you that we two
could fuse in that last, late instant.
But it was too late, you were too far.
I tried again, revising my old intent-
and not to explode, dreaming you close, then closer
again, again, but always the white flash
was too fast I always too slow
to speak, to reach, to call out to you.
At the end, just me (this is as far as it would go-
keep this picture) lunging at you.
The road was carved up
the mountain
through live oak and toyon. I could not see out
past the mossy trunks, thick leaves and mistletoe.
An ancient, air encompassing California Laurel
reached over the valley & I climbed
out of the tunnel of trees to be God's spy
to sway over the wall of the mountain, endosed
in many arms and see the valley curve in mist
down to the ocean. Leaves fell away
as my boots cut through moss and orange lichens
but there was no clear view. Patches
of the next mountain and a pair of deer
dawdling in a high pasture, the stag nuzzling
her flanks and sniffing her, patches of valley
twisting in steam beneath me, the smell
of ocean through the crushed bay leaves,
the smell of more that must be seen.
I wanted to throw my mind into the air,
get a hawk's view of the turning land,
or hang there in the tree until the year
strips its leaves away, pulls aside
the curtain, lets me stare with cold abandon
at the fissured body that fills the largest room.
On a dawn walk I startled
a great horned owl, wary,
near, on a low limb
of a tree downhill from me.
Those slow wings opened,
broad as a man, two men,
and he sank fast down
into the hillside in blank
silence, a wall toppling its
whole enormous length
that does not touch a thing.
This is not our real
work. We do it
badly. Lots drop. We begin too late-
tense after coming home from work.
It is nearly dark and the wet October wind
numbs my hands as I grapple the sharp bark
along the boughs to reach after the hard
apples that reflect the last light
longer than anything else green moons,
red moons, swelling with light against the leaves.
Always the impossible twist over my head
and backwards, to the ripest at the top,
the branches' end, my legs wrapped tight
around the tree. You are shivering-
even in this dim light I can see-
as you catch the apples I toss around you,
off balance. I am the Lord of Self Misrule
up here, fumbling the delicate fruit with ill aim,
swollen hands, making a fool of myself,
hating the work. I would rather climb
you stand with skirt lifted, limbs dark,
though your raised face is bright into you.
After I stopped the pursuit
of a permanent bone white calm
with constant implacable hunger
that shone like silver wire,
I began to eat again,
again to hurt like a woman,
and dreamed I walked with my friend
in my black mourning dress
and saw his dead mother
at the low end of the garden
as it dipped toward a stream.
The first evening mist
rose shining, dizzying white,
and there from the heart of it
a young woman strode
to a child that sat in the grass.
Her white dress clung
to her long waist, pearls
hung on her breasts and swayed
as she walked with her dancer's walk.
Bright yellow curls
seemed painted around her face
and she turned and smiled at me.
The sitting child was me-
how I longed for her
to pick me up and hold me
and not disappear
in a cloud whispering no
but come and reclaim my body.
NO WORD ("O word, thou word I lack." Moses and Aaron)
The warden with his armed
guards stalls
in the dull green hall, circles and retreats.
They question us in groups of two and three
and leave us standing about no need now
to return to the old cells. A conviction
settled into place like a glacial boulder
known to everyone at once, all over,
that one of us is God. No one seems to know
if it is him or her that has received the word
or is the word. All think
It might be me, and suffer in ignorance
of their hidden nature, know that all suffer
and that suffering is an old sign.
One man, slack pants, dark stains, white
walrus moustache, says to everyone young,
"If they must kill someone, let it be me."
But there is no threat now. The guards are kind.
They will not be trapped again killing a God.
I cannot write without embarrassment
about myself, and I see this in others.
What is hidden makes us modest. Our hopes
leave us too close to every shameful wish
we have for ourselves and the greed that yells out
our names among the constelladons, yells at us,
makes us clasp our hands on our knees
and speak down into them to hide
our eyes. We have stopped dreaming of release
from this prison. Any quiet thing
might be a sign of something else.
Four women laugh among themselves
at jokes they keep from me. The pregnant one
stays alone and laughs at a private joke.
Her breasts shake. Her laugh a breathless hiss.
I think she's mad. We try to believe
in some coherence, even drunken, wild.
Our questioner, a young lawyer from the city,
now weard her soft suit unbuttoned, and throws
her arms around me in confusion and cries.
Each of us in our cells wants to be loved
for the right reason, and that too is hidden.
WITNESS
His mouth stops. I stare, trapped
as he pushes out his lips to shape words
but nothing follows out of the decent
comfort of silence into speech as if
he stands before a perfect God that does not
need us and does not need to understand us.
At last, a scraping,
an insect noise,
out of his constricted throat,
with which he speaks of what he saw when young
as prisoner and barber at Treblinka:
the wife of, and the
daughter of, and the wife
comforting the child with a nonsense song
to unknot her face and close her eyes
and he with silence for them and no words
and they were almost certain that they knew
what they would find in the next cement room.
The strict Jewish women were unashamed
at their nakedness before him. His silence,
his forced smile, a collaboration
with them and with the whole design, made him
into something not to be considered
as he cut their hair not male, not there.
And their voices in his locust voice rose:
smile, allow us a moment to be calm.
In the garden walled
by the high cypress hedge
two girls play badminton?so young
their small breasts cannot be seen beneath
their stiff cotton blouses. They swing
and freeze with arms raised and wrists cocked
then scamper in the music of their laughter
after the high flying shuttlecock returning.
They play until near dark, after
the sun has set and their young aunt
in a white dress appears and disappears
at the edge of the lawn as if to guard them.
She is a young woman, her fears
of her awakening body make her calculate
every move outside her own window-
she sees how by everyone she's seen!
Soon the irresistable Commando
looms in, their riQes crooked in their arms
sweeping over the whole place. They are so tall!
They shepherd the girls from the late summer garden
into the house, silent through the hall
into lush tapestried roorns, and deeper in
to find the master's room at the hidden center.
The music grows confusing, the strings gasp,
the cousin moans (the drums discontent her-
they have grown so loud), an oboe screams and slips.
It is a new kind of fall, the men are changed.
The conductor's fsts are raised, his baton whips
as they stumble and disentangle, ferret, hound and buck,
and he thunders in the brass. They neigh and canter
as in the disarray of a forced march,
deafened and driven, they approach and enter.
U.S. SIGNAL CORPS FOOTAGE for John Peck
The sun went down for
hours on Silver Lake
through low clouds, and the sun path on the water
stretched over the whole end, catching the red
and spattering it down into the small waves
the breeze made?the wake of motor boats
a broad slash of light that spread and spread.
Suddenly, each light?scattering ripple
became a man, a captured army rose
to the tormented surface, thousands
of prisoners when we weren't taking prisoners
on a beach in the Pacific. Our machine guns
opened on them and they fell in waves
tuming the ocean red and the camera ran and ran.
I could not stop, escape. The Signal Corps
records, insists, hides and protects this film,
forced me through the bone sockets of its theater
for cleared eyes: immerse, it says, bring it back, absorb.
DURING THE TIME OF THE EXECUTIONS
They take us out in pairs
and kill us
within view. We watch ourselves
die-everything remote and slow.
She was taken with her
man-
drab in brown coats and docile.
I kissed them both, him guffly,
she fell against me,
not to retrieve
a love buried too deep and lost,
but to say how thin this courage is.
They shot him as he stood.
Impassive.
She ran a half step and caught
hers in the back and fell hard.
We learn from her courage,
not his:
all she has saved against numbness
in that spasm of care that turned her.
THE
GARROTTED MAN (by Goya)
As if fixed by a long habit of thought
half open, dreamy. Like the posture
I love, seated and leaning back,
legs stretched out when I am most
at ease with myself, my friends.
His is the moment of rest of the passionate man
The collar and the rope are like
insignias of a religious order,
Franciscan, Carmelite. A cross is jammed
in his clasped hands?they are tied
and rest gently on his lap.
His body seems as well accorded
as his soul?the shoulders fallen
in easy repose. Only the feet tell:
this is the terminal scene we struggle
to look at, the diffcult knowledge, intimate
stranglehold, death at home in the body.
His toes are spread, curled, rigid
in a splay of agony?his whole
body's last lashing out for air.
If they could loosen! and loosen here
my clenched mind from its dead stare.
GERMAN PRIMITIVE CRUCIFIXION (15th Cent.)
The vicdm has already
left.
The passionate words to his father
are forming in his mind.
The workmen fll the center-
this labor of serious men
concentrated, severe,
in the eye of the Stuttgart Meister.
He knew they had to tie
the ankles with heavy rope,
that one man had to pull
the rope with all his weight
braced against the cross,
the cords in his thick neck
risen through the fat,
that another had to lean
and flatten down the thighs
to shll the desperate flight
of flesh against the spike.
This is terribly exact
and not in any text.
THE DRAWING OF THOMAS WYATT BY HOLBEIN ("seme as you are..." Wyatt to his son)
I expected something
softer than this stern
wary face?a full mouth, eyes
large and shadowed with a power less
manly. The drooping feathers, bird cries,
the seduction of the
poem-all denied.
The mournful elegance, the songs of pain
were his public mask for real pain, the wounds
worn in translation. Only the scars remain
(that moutht.) to make
the face?hanging beef
to serve a murderous king?witness
to the execution of friends on the blood?slick top.
All the power was wrong. His old mistress
Anne Boleyn had the soft
mouth that betrays.
"Want nothing soft," mutters this face.
1
I walked downhill slowly
to sense the logic
of the town, its three white churches, row of red
storefronts and the Grange Hall on the square. Spread
out from there, the grid of trees shading the brick
cape cods. It was light and reason, as I sank
from the house in the forest that I built to hide
from them. Not to seek dérèglement
de tout les sens, but to loosen my hold on
the need to dope things out, always. I'm afraid
of my town style: tight, little, too moral.
There is a rough?cut waywardness I must
study on this abandoned logging trail
staring at the town. Something past-
a woman that spoke, whose words I almost grasp.
2
From here their speech
is music, it rises
in quavering tones, the words have no coherence,
just what the wind blows, clustered fragments,
impure notes in swirling country morrises
above the sustained drone of trucks in the distance.
I can see the TV s blue light
flicker in their windows as they re?enact
the romances of their parents' youth, their pact
with true feelings in the long northern night,
the old songs that instruct them in the facts
of the only believable life of the heart.
Mandelstam held fiercely to the texture
of his life. It made him easy to arrest.
He walked out in his usual way and the hounds tore him apart.
MARGARET ROPER (after Holbein's drawing)
To be the favorite daughter
of one like More imposes
with serene dangerous love
the curse of its obligations.
The first: be ready for trouble.
She knew her father well-
the peril of his laugh,
his last sticking point.
It made her face a dove
landing on a wire,
its white wings outspread
to drag against the wind,
her mouth the wire-
thin, wary, guarded.
The second obligation:
she broke through the guard to More
on his last trip to the Tower
and kissed him again and again.
No one stopped her. He wrote,
his last niBht in the Tower:
"I cumber you dear Margaret
very much . . . I never
liked your manner better
than when you kissed me last.
For I like when daughterly love
and dear charity hath
no leisure to look
to worldly courtesy."
Double: the gentle and ruthless
demand to protect the thing
he could no longer protect,
his head impaled on a spike
naked on London Bridge
and her last obligation-
to take it down and carry
the drained thing home
enclosed in rich cloths
and rerurn ir at last to his body.
There came and sat down
across from me
a man with dead-white, long buried white skin
who was almost featureless, an eroded
ancient marble votary bearing
his bland face before him with his gifts.
He lifted up a cup of
milky coffee
that made no sound at all, no rattle,
no separating kiss of water
and I could see nothing in that room
but those blunted features staring out.
The spotted, lateral,
gray morning light
wrapped us in one broad prayer shawl,
pressed us dght in a clandestine compact-
this Bardeby, this shredder of dangerous words
in some confidential office of the spirit.
I thought of a slash
of color in that face,
a gash across the forehead, a red, raging
third eye. You would have to cut
deep to reach blood in that face,
he would struggle up and fall, heavy as marble
against my chest and
whisper, "I was your rabbi.
I had kept for you the one intact text-
the sudden rush of love. Now remain
unsteady and unsure." And he wrapped me
in his wings and sang ecstatically.
This clumsy soul, how
it swerves and spills
coffee on the white rug, wine
on the light wool its writhing body wears,
and fills with new stinks the gleaming fur
and smooth muscle straining in the chair.
And the body! made with such finesse
that the soul envies the articulation
of her little finger, her precise chemical tricks,
as he thunders in his crude domination.
-Oh, my dear thing, how
you want
to snap the little spark, the light?switch
and make a dark room, no room, no fire, and release,
decay into your maker and be free
from the soul's voice hammering about itself,
its personal voice, "This is my body." And you strapped down, unable,
unable,
with the blue windows shattered in your pleated face.
Unfolding from his box,
His hollow wooden head
So delicately carved
And loose on its silken thread
Holds one complete idea:
That motion from the soul,
Any inward motion,
Is waste and uncontrol.
Actors work their lines,
Root in themselves to find
Possession, rage, etcetera-
Half understood and blind-
But the hand outspread
above,
With a jerk, twist or nod,
Can sweep the surrendered limbs
To be wild and obscene as a god.
He understood no other
name but death
for the wish to be restrained, and the Stone Guest,
invited in defiance clomped across the room
and the massed silver quivered on the table
at each footfall, the last feast,
to end the comic murderous lust and send
Giovanni and his phallus errant down
cursing through the trap door and stage flames.
He had no inner life?no
check and counter-
an animal attack against the law
without love, with one drive only,
to push into the soft door, either
open in passion or closed and dry in terror.
He was a numbers man: a finite
linear series that comprehends its end.
For his eyes whose rolling
hunger we have guessed,
let them (Amen) close and ears that heard
much squealing in the highest register
of acquiescence, though protest was music too,
hear, after your applause, nothing more (Amen).
It is said he missed much loamy richness
because he kept his nose stopped with wax
though this is an addition to the text
by the fastidious and he was not.
Let it be now stopped (Amen). His mouth,
what it tasted of other mouths, and his lies-
how sweet they must have sounded?how much
like civilized duplicity?on their account
forebear and wish that mouth its dry peace (Amen).
The hands that alone or with others, gave
much pleasure, and received, and agony,
let their bones brown richly among their rings
forever undisturbed (Amen) and feet
that pointed downward for release rest now
not splayed, relaxed, but propped (Amen) upright.
And for the instrument whose instrument he was,
let it decline into perpetual rest, the terror
he dreamed of. He was his own instrument.
Blowing the length of
the street
wrapped in a blue shroud
I drift awake to the clock,
its dull, equal, discreet
divisions of the day
and croaking Josquin Des Pres'
De profundis clamavi
then leisurely, leisurely, ease
into a daylight mind-
but lapse back into the shroud
collapsing and rising in wind
that covers a patch of lawn
then billows out of sight
down a darkening street.
Then I rush to rescue a child
who runs from a burning car
that's already engulfed, destroyed,
I tear off his burning coat
and lay him down on the road,
his shoulder rests on my arm
until the ambulance comes.
"Care for this child," I yell
and someone explains that cold,
the still inhuman cold
that nothing human can move
will put defenses aside
and lift the veil from my eyes,
those watchmen for the morning,
and cold ungrateful, grasping,
come to my daylight mind
and I know I will awaken.
She covers her mouth
when she speaks
She does not like her mouth
Or what comes out of it.
'I should not have filed my teeth.
If I say what I think it will kill."
Her teeth are not filed.
No one around her has died
This is not a mask
to doff with the sweep of her arm
smiling and bowing with flowers.
She writes this poem so often
it is here own frank, undisguised
farm work face,
one note voice,
She needs to plow under her whole
known world to change that.
She is writing a new
poem,
In is she lives in Africa,
captains a packet across
a murderous bay, delivering
medicine, antivenin, vaccine,
to stricken, inaccessible villages
surviving the risks with her skill.
Many owe her their lives.
Her scars are beautiful.
Made rugged by the sun
she cups a brandy on deck,
her many-layered voice
vulnerable, serene,
her battered Wehrmacht that
filled with fruit at her side.
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VISIONARY GIFTS ("The `I' who was in a Gestapo prison was not me." Erich Heller)
I survived by the gift
of seeing
myself as someone else
who, when the guard swung
his ash, leather, steel,
saw another man
through bright watery glass
fall to the ground and howl.
I still, still can see
through bright watery glass
when the car is out of control,
myself as someone else
skidding into a wall
strapped down and howl
his way through the eye in the mirror.
An old man I revered,
musician, Sanskrit scholar,
became not himself
with a bullet through his neck,
became no longer me
who had been for many years
much of what I became.
And cold opened the door
on the normal limits of vision,
my eyes were an icy lake
erasing its chartered shore
in pure transcendency.
The rarest gift of all
is learning to see the present
(the time for this ring of water
from the iced glass on the table
to vanish from the marble,
for your quick eyes to widen
and your smile quiver and fall)
not as the infinitesimal
point of no duration
between the past and future
but the way this will have been-
the arm, shovel, gun,
the taste of flesh in the air
as the far distant past
too long ago to care.
EMILY DICKINSON'S ROOM, Main Street, Amherst
Down
through the cross of her windows
facing the West she saw
her father interpose
his hat, shoulders, shoes,
as he came or went or strolled
under the high?limbed trees;
and later her brother Austin
dally with Mabel Todd
under the same tall trees
her shutters were always open
their silent legible gestures
of intimate conversation,
one face obtruding, pressing
one listening looking down;
and the children crouch on the lawn
to watch the puppy squat;
and the cat brace its legs
into a panting scaffold
to hoist a stubborn mole.
To the South she saw the street
through two uncurtained windows:
the striking fellow in black
ministering to the dead
reel the thread of his rounds;
the fire volunteers
in ceremonious panic
clamor out to the farms;
the farmers ride their wagons
that screech under flax and corn
and roped by the neck behind
the doomed steer low
his way to the abattoir;
but mostly the garden change
from crocus to tulip to rose,
their cohorts dying in ranks
yet coming and coming again
till driven to sleep by snow
and locked into place by ice.
THE
VIA NEGATIVA, OJAI, CALIFORNIA
What could I have found to love in him,
this driving, bright-eyed priest of quietness,
a moonflower, a hanging fritillary,
asway in frail transparency?
And Krishnamurti said, "The truth can not
be repeated." Long pause. A meadowlark
resumed its complex, two-throated cycle of song,
the sound of audience murmur, bustle, breath,
the monotonous squawk of a baby, I in silence
trying to instruct my heart-in purity-
in my tight essential style. It was logic I loved.
I dreamed of the inward order that would rule
with laissezfaire, with an invisible hand
the universal market-state of soul.
And he said again, "The truth cannot be
repeated," and I tried to be free of my heart.
After dusk they disappeared
as mist
started rising from the lake, each
backing from the party on the dock
above the blackening water, splashing their drinks
as they waved goodbye until they left
the circle of light, their voices
calling and echoing among the trees and rocks
and we followed their summer whites and cigarettes
as they turned and stumbled up the night paths
possessed, determined, unsure of foot,
these lost members of the old resistance,
natives of my person. They are not preserved
in photos in the box under the bed,
but disappeared, each in his personal war
and need to be dreamed back, to create
an esoteric history of the spirit,
its secret elite.
First, the barrelly one
riding horsey
sittinng backwards on a chair, "Hup! Hup! Hup!"
between the battle lines of Men and Women
to bring about a terminal peace between them
where each side exterminates itself.
The meaning of his mission is discussed by all
very slowly and they cut him down in crossfire.
The Great Bear paraded
above the barricades,
his beaten gold headdress feathered out
like the tail of the great Andean eagle
to let them know that nature blessed and led them.
He looked down and saw his large bowel,
that intimate, manageable inward thing,
leave through a red flower in his side
and the new order appeared as a rose in an old world.
Another opened a closet
door and found
an idiot child babbling, "ba-ba-ba,"
crawled in with him, held by his rag?doll eyes,
wide, flat, unfocussed, paralyzed,
and closed the door, locked in with primitive speech
that nazzled his neck and sank its snaggle teeth
deep in his heart, beyond where words reach.
One who survived escaped
up the back stairs, broke
through the red door for shelter, then turned
in the doorway to see one dressed in his clothes
and looking like him raise his rifle to shoot him
from the garden, but he spun and shot first
before the rifle was fully raised.
In hospital whites one
waited, impatient
for the autopsy to begin. The body
under the sheet was also him. It was hard
not to peek under the sheet
to check the sexual parts was it a man,
his penis in its final rest, lank, relaxed,
not aroused or shrunk against the cold.
Or a woman, hidden until the tight internal bud
would blossom out under the knife in light
on the fine red centimeter grid
etched into the white enamel table.
The last gathered and
wrote their history,
but conquerors and losers shredded every
document, case study, White Paper, plan.
He used the memory of living men,
the buried poem, confession (heard and overheard),
of how they fought to keep my state intact,
performed alone with their own hands
the daily subversion on which it stands.
The heroes on both sides,
those who reveal,
thse who deny, have carved out the whole
subterranean church in one stone,
prepared us to enter, painted its frescoes of Passion,
set its intricate geometric tiles,
carved its saints, the gargoyles in the nave,
and then build the city on the hill
with white marble colonnades that channel each breeze,
and laid out the curves of the surrounding vineyards.
IN
FLIGHT ("Work kills!")
There are no human markers, no debris
of ships, no bodies or flotation cushions
from jumbo jets dropped on the Irish Sea
to pattern the machine green motion
that quivers in perpetual death below.
Then living green! Farms
squaring the roll
of the land, its body labored over, shallow,
factory, castle, castlelands, cathedral,
radial cities, Roman roads and the line
of a more ancient road defined by cattle
whose effortless curve
is the genius of soil, the sign
of intimate motion, possession and work. To possess
this green bride breaking away (even supine
her need is prolific, anarchic) drives the old man
to crawl dirt-faced ant-like across her surface.
On the Cyclone on a heavy-fleshed,
hot night
we chill ourselves in the wild rush of air-
with stopped heart in falls, and the slow climb to where
the dark ocean holds once, drops then from sight
as the heart stops again. Some ragged kids,
all under fifteen, on cue, at once,
dimb out between the cars and balance
on them-hang on the outsides, each trick a bid
for glory: somersaults, handstands
in seats, leaps from car to car like trout
dimbing white water, and as blind
to danger. Can I stop them? One lands
on me and vaults off.. I'm afraid to reach out-
they are so sure of foot and hand and mind.
A Cretan bull-dance, handstands on gilded horns
with ghostly, flashing discipline.
And I descend with my daughter who with fierce
crimped lips will not be afraid and my son
who screams with serene abandon and loves it and is.
After a brief and tedious
argument
about everything done and not done in thirty years
I stretched out on the deck to let the spin
grind to a stop by staring at the stars.
The wind brushed my face, a quaking aspen
moved by the same breeze whispered aloud
and slapped in rhythm on my burning cheek.
Higher in the wind puffs of cloud,
the gayest things in the sky, carrying on, carrying on,
swished past the moon which steadily
effaced itself behind the righteous trees.
Above, the winking stars reliably
maintained their fxed positions, stable guides
for the imperiled with their bright design,
whose exploded heart we learn about
light years late. Dead, they still can shine.
top
| home
Dreaming of boys from
her childhood
thirty years ago
I hear her moan with that clear
unmistakable fervor.
One wore a duck's ass
and skin tight pants.
He made the neighbors talk.
Another was well launched,
in her private melodrama,
on a grave career of drink.
He picked her up in his father's
antique Rolls Royce
and restored her standing in town.
The lovable one, the victim
of his German Jewish reserve,
reserved himself for greatness,
and found her untimely-before
his terminal greatness arose.
They are all together now,
the crude indelicate rubber
bodies of childhood rolled
into one resilient ball
bouncing down the steps
of the vast amphitheater
over the row of candles
to me in my comic mask
flopping around in my socks
absorbed in my mirroring dance.
HER HUSBAND SPEAKS AFTER HER DEATH
Everywhere she walked
the common fool
twittered, pulled at her sleeves as if she were
a bedlamite on show. It was the stumble
and waver of her walk (her emblem of search),
her uncivil stare, rapt and passionate,
odd in her over-civil face, the hiss
as she talked, saliva at her lip, but most,
the sense of one shivering in armor.
To me entirely beautiful: the mauve
long dress that hinted at the sway
of her mind-that tentative probe-fictions
that flood, recede and flood, take, give back-
a passionate mind astray in a cold body.
I was the black dog that slept at the door.
When we meet then after
death we will merge
easily, witnout the forced reserve
of our betraying bodies, the great routine
or the restraint with which we kept ourselves, alive.
There will be no husband then, or wife.
We will be all truth. Nothing to defend,
not one boundary. We will be one great friend.
No drama of discovery, nothing left to find.
We'll be so bored. Dissolved,
the high theater,
costumes, spooky music, uncovered letters,
devoted love jealous of him or her,
the reassuring masks we tried to wear
flung together in the backstage mirror.
We're buried with open eyes in dreamless order.
You lie in your mind's
erotic sculpture garden
almost alone.
The space is pure light
and two high white walls, exact
and shadowless.
Much bracing cold.
You stare lewdly at yourself
inviting trouble.
You want to be, you want
your lover to be
a stone with eyes.
TO
HOLLIS FRAMPTON (D. 1984)
You were always your own creation, Great Pretender.
How else understand yourself?
Well before you died
you fit together
what you needed to do, and do, and with open hand
threw out the rest. l'm
glad it bored you first
though I was still enchanted
with what you thought
you knew, Polumetis.
I had vague boundaries too.
Two by Kurosawa and two
sixpacks each
and you taught me how to be a Samurai swordsman
swinging your tripod
at King's Highway Station
at dawn without staggering once-sure feet-
one with the virtuosi
against defeat
in a defiantly archaic art.
You made film archaic-Oh
the wonder
of lemon, the motion around it, still, light's
love of its engorged
pores, its lemon color,
and the curl of darkness around it as the camera
turned-before story banished
vision.
What I learned to see, preceptor!
Rachel cried when you
died: "He was so vivid!"
I sank my head on my forearms two nights running
drinking myself down.
Again, but this time
with silence, you drank me flat on the table
and I prayed for the
same house in hell
with you: and after that much work.
POEM
BEGINNING WITH A LINE
BY HOLLIS FRAMPTON
I
Lithic and late as all October dying,
you dying, sharing nothing, Iying
with silence to wall-in
your own fight
against death, stone by stone, your right
to a private death. You
didn't want to waste
the dying year, weeks, days, in "the most
boring conversation in
the world"
and so you chose covert action, curled
in upon yourself with
drugs and work
to finish, and left us with an empty circle
of stunned phone calls
and the obit in
the TImes. I would have made your coffin
with my own hands, covered
myself with dust,
some ritual for your death, something to grasp.
II
Some ritual for your death, something to grasp,
a gathering for farewell of scholiasts
to catalogue your films,
annote, compend,
cover and shade you with a pleach of friends
for the fmale to the
throb and hum
of body and house around us in your ear.
You didn't need to bear
me working on
my problems. You the occasion.
A private death. I wanted
to invade.
We were the same age. I had private ends-
to be free of the fear
that truth blinds and kills.
Let truth have its own prurient way.
I can close my eyes,
shut out obtruding light
and late in the dying year can open them.
The first violinist,
all of him, follows his arm,
his feet fly around him to keep him in balance
as he sways and lunges into the sounds he makes.
This is dance making music of the body.
The face of the second
violinist is Unending Passion.
Such expressiveness, such deep response, would rouse
to sexual frenzy the eroded statues of the female saints.
His is the face of music as romance.
The cellist grinds his
teeth, clenches his face in spasms
of control to keep down the groan, the song the wild
lament he lets his bow alone sound across the strings.
His is the grimace of dignified loss in the tragic agon.
The violist sits and
plays. Staid. In his face
the years in Brussels, tutelage at the old Conservatoire,
grubbing for meals, going back for practice, practice.
This is music itself as it leaves the body behind.
You are not yet asleep,
your breadhing slides
deep into the sound of rain,
its various sounds: the tap on the tin roof,
the slash as it blows across the screen, a swish
that washes across the shingle siding,
it drums against the window,
the heavy gush from the crotch in the roof
then the deep gurgle in the gutter as it falls.
You slide away, more
various than rain,
into the sigh, groan and whisde of farewell
to your civil, orderly mind, and the descent
into the many cities underground
gesturing in the old theaters, masked, uttering
the true manifold speech of the lost plays.
She has the manuscripts
of Sappho in her hand,
the personal body, not a scribe's work
but shining with her mark, Sappho's, actual.
She seals this papyrus in its own urn.
This is before Actium.
She knows
the line of fire of the Roman mind,
learned in her body's long analysis.
Homer's two books, Moses'
five,
their own hand, blotted and corrected,
Aeschylus and Sophocles, not one
play lost, and more Euripides
on the stupidity of Gods, and many voices
wholly lost to us whom the grammarians
did not quote, nor the invaders preserve
as mementos of the Greek defeat.
She has buried them deep
in her own earth:
the Psalms for preservation and Solomon's song.
She sways above them.
The books of the soul
are dreaming underground
at their true depth, waidng to be found.
She has worked long at this, will defy
fire, time as fire, the fire in the mind,
using an Egypdan art. She has saved
all of Heraclitus, to mock him;
Aristophanes to make us sane;
of Archilochos the whole warm body.
In her white dress she
is the one steady light
in the abandoned mine among the smoking lamps.
She preserves last
those that bear the real taste to the mouth
of love of tragedy-
kneels as she buries them-
with her face lowered
in the golden tent of hair
that brushes the floor in a circle around her, she smells
her own spiced oils (that aromatic body
knows how the satyr plays)
-all the Satyr Plays.
TO ALL THE GODS AT ONCE: A Prayer for Mercy
Those immediately around
me, those in range of my voice,
Eleison
Those within line of
sight, within reach, within the vibrating aura of smell,
Eleison
Those who see me stumbling
up the stoop fumbling for my keys,
Eleison
Those with me who are
also stupefied by drink in honor of Dionysus and Jack and Paul and Rosie,
Eleison
Those who see me blind drunk grope through the back door and weave across the yard to puke behind the barn, Eleison
The queen of the incestuous
elite in a small Midwestern Capital who is leaning against the refrigerator,
Eleison
She, the print of whose
dress swirls down to a great cirde on her left buttock, commanding my eyes,
Eleison
The unaccustomed half
nudes on the beach speaking Swedish, Finnish, Japanese, Basque, Dutdh and
Cree,
Eleison
The young sportswoman
smelling ridlly of peach soap and horse shit,
Eleison
You, whose long breath
and light snore carry me down into a child's obliterating sleep,
Eleison
You who believe that "Thought's the slave of life," Eleison
Those who must know everything
and explain everything, the coffee, the iced water,
Eleison
Those who insist on being
understood perfectly, a hallucinadon of
clarity in your sad, steady eyes, Eleison
Those who make the unspeakable chatty, Eleison
The Unmoved Mover, with
her eyes moving in their stillness, and
her mobile mouth, image of terror, who moves me and is
unmoved, Eleison
She who arrived and said
she was God's only daughter come to
redeem the world-I was amused at first but then got angry and
domped out and bought the next morning's N.Y. Times on my
way home, which always feels like cheating, Eleison
You who believe that "Life's the slave of thought," Eleison
The quail who said, when
it stunned itself on the plate glass, "It's
not in nature," Eleison
The wrong kind of fool when foolishness is the best guide, Eleison
The one who said, "I am sensitive to multitudes," Eleison
Those who, when the hundred
fiowers bloomed confessed to the
ten thousand things, suffered and became martyrs and office-
holders of the next regime,
and him, who on a dig
discovered the ancient texts, gradually
became dismayed at their sinister rechtude and destroyed them,
was excommunicated by the Eternal Church and became the
Messiah of the next one, Eleison
You, doubtful yet serene,
suave yet full of majesty, witty yet serious,
who smiles and is vulnerable, Eleison
You who believe that "Nature loves to hide," Eleison
Beatrice the Partisan
who led me from the perilous Upper City
down through the sewers to the safety of an underground cell full
of all the noisy demons, Eleison
You who will build a
gazebo and a bed for lovers above my grave,
Eleison
You whose face and body
are smiling with inwardness,
accomplished in all its lines, painted by Rembrandt with gold and
shit, Eleison
The oboist dozing in
the pit while Cosi glitters above him with its
fervent education of instinct, Eleison
The face on the medallion turned away, Eleison
You who believe that
"Nature hides to love," Eleison
Copyright © 1988, by Barry Goldensohn
All rights reserved
Published by The National Poetry Foundation,
University of Maine, Orono, Maine 04469
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 87-62233
ISBNN 0-943373-00-X paper