Assembled from phrases and images found in Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis in Poetry,”as translated by Rosemary Lloyd.
***
One afternoon after another, in distressing bad weather, I follow the lights of a storm. Even the press needs twenty years to discover the news, and here it is: a crisis at hand, some trembling of the real. When a hero dies, the essence of their power roams after some new form. As the cycle goes, now it gleams and now it fades, waiting.
Here is a code. Watch it, a force like gravity,
best understood by those bent on flight.
Give me pause with deliberate dissonance,
a euphony fragmented with consent;
the languishing gesture of a dream. Here is
the belated eruption of a possibility
––for song,
poetry’s compensation for the failure of language.
Strange mystery, sing. Take the average words. Group them,
beneath the long gaze, then arrange in cushions of silence.
Now what? What is this, breathing? Music rejoins verse to form;
explosion of mystery, the pure work implies the disappearance
of the poet through clash of words against their inequalities.
Come, illumination of reciprocal lights, a trial of fire on precious
stones. To every cry, its echo, and it’s the rhythm of the
white spaces that sing when the poem is silenced, and the
dazzling abundance imposes itself.
Marvel, then at the
disappearance,
the memory
of named objects
washed
new.
