poetry Archives

Sounds and Silence

To the rhythm of empty spaces, singing.

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.

Opposite the Eternal

On fleeting wonders.

An abundance of parachutes glow nightly in the dark waters

before the volcano. Open, close, open. Like the petals of a cherry blossom,

someone says, an invitation to remember

what is fleeting, the blooming magnificence of wild renewal,

before breeze fells them like blankets of snow.

***

Inspired by this article about the recent influx of luminescent jellyfish in Japan’s Yojirougahama waterway.

Flesh of the Empire

Listening in the wake of colonization by noise.

When they came for the silence of our sacred, the colonizers hid their weapons behind badges of efficiency. Speed! They said, by way of greeting, planting flags in the flesh of our flesh. Waking from sedation, we took them in, saying, Mine! rather than Out!

After that, movement meant aggravating wounds. A body learns to stay, shouting, Here I am! Forget the still, small voice. We thought at first of walking to one another with the stories we wove, but the invaders caught our song on the wind, and blocked that, too––for a time, anyway. Trespass of the mind became a punishable offense.

Consider concrete and a moving substance, how it alters the path. The shape of a river changes. You get wind tunnels. The dammed river becomes a reservoir, its former trajectory a wasteland. Then what?

The living will move. What this does to memory remains, as the saying goes, to be seen.

We looked and listened. Hands reached and bones breathed. There was a whisper beneath the gale, saying, Rise. No one was watching, and we heard.

The Elephant Listener

Sounds like throbbing.

Strange years: two zoos, one circus, five nations,

and these notebooks wrapped in towels when I left.

Back home, their presence recollected: through the

rafters, the doorways, in bed. There are no indifferent

observers here, for water tastes always of the pipes.

Only a fool attempts to read their minds, and there

is no one here who has not tried.

***

With phrases from the preface of Katy Payne’s Silent Thunder.

Histories

Elegy for the erased.

Sure, it all seems impossible today, but remember. Once in our wandering we moved in search of a strange beast, something misplaced while we played in and out of schoolyards, a chimera of childhood heroes and the nightmares they would slay––next time, and again. And again.

Remember, forget. Here is the mystery, unsolved, and there, the legend, the remains buried beneath the statues of famous men. Once an ancient voyage, and the albatross, too. Imagine. What’s this one now, here? A gossamer dream, true fictions among make-believe facts. Look, we are looking.

Here, the old mine shaft. Who put that mirror there?

About Face

Veiling and unveiling.

Notice a center in the chaos, a face gathered in the netted folds.

You need a frame to hold it. To find the frame, first be hollow.

Wait in emptiness, then select materials. From? Where you are.

Notice the changing light: solid fluid, transparent form,

shapes like clouds, like smoke. Face them.

Notes:

Inspired by the artist Benjamin Shine’s series of face sculptures in tulle fabric, as described in this MyModernMet article I found this morning.

Soul at Night

Considering the architecture of passage.

If, in the middle of these days, it’s time to leave,

if we consider time a mid-point, holding histories,

here is genesis, here an afterlife, and here

a map on fire.

Mineshaft, funnel, honeycombed monolith

buried in earth, nine rings of illuminated

heralds, the light blinds.

Next, a big freeze: saws, tridents, snakes.

Now the ghost-bodied eagle, the rule of

law, what recompense can follow?

Grip the talons, fingers in the sockets

of an ancient skull, soar. Hold it, this

reverence to bear other rays.

Words for Unknowing

Head in these clouds.

You menace, you specter, you shadow, you––

bear? No, airplane! That one’s an elephant.

You vapor, you veil, you gloom, you mist,

I see you, dragon! Your tail, like this!

Muddle, obscure, puzzle the lot. We name you anyway,

cataloging images like suspects’ mugshots: cirrostratus,

arcus, shelf, roll; towers of cumulonimbus plotting hail.

We can’t resist forecast’s temptation to fate; foretell

this foreboding, foreswear it true.

Shapeshifter of heaven, where are you? Count me

in, you said, and left when we reached nine.

Our heads followed where we kept losing them. You

were the nightmare horizon, wandering lonely;

hold my unknowing and sing a feather canyon.

We’ll cross ages like you do these skies.

Melancholy idyll, romantic torrent, ominous calm.

You annihilate language, and still, we can’t keep

from naming, even if nothing holds beyond the

first sound you inspire: Ah! Oh, what is this

but the beginnings of awe, and here in this

open field we fall silent, planting alleluias

and waiting for rain.

Inheritance

Seen through a glass, darkly.

Giant wheel, the unpronounceable name at its face,

and here is a version of law: mercury, sulfur, water,

salt. Let there be life. Two serpents surround it.

One descends, another rises. Welcome, souls,

a watching sphinx greets. Now the four corners:

angel, eagle, lion, bull. Look, they are leaving.

It’s turning now, and now come the signs, and

now wonder, the magic behind you.

Now darkness. Know this

watching wait, the terror

a praise song, too.

The Art of Perplexity

On the virtue of resisting the easy answer.

Rabbi Moses Maimonides (1131-1205), is a good person to meet if you’re looking for some antidote to the excesses of a mode of thought (typically Greek in origin) that tends to value “the universal, the general, and the unequivocal” over modes more typical of Hebraic scholarship, namely an openness toward “ambiguity, contradiction, and plurality of meaning” (from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism). The title of Maimonides’ “Guide of the Perplexed” was enough to pull me into his orbit. The following is inspired by this treatise, as translated by Shlomo Pines.

***

Consider this: the meaning of a sacred text can only be glimpsed. It is best accessed by those prone to being perplexed. Consider also how contradictions, so often maligned, may be embraced instead of being shunned as flaws.

I am moved toward those terms that may sometimes have one meaning, and sometimes many.

When it comes to some subjects, a sensible reader will know better than to demand a complete exposition and will not expect any given meaning to be exhaustive. A sensible reader would never consider the possibility of removing all difficulties, ever, from the interpretive challenge. The most valuable truths may at best be glimpsed, and then concealed again.

Sometimes, in a long, dark night, a flash of lightning will illuminate the landscape. It’s like that, and yet––

Many a fool has so hungered for certainty that he refers to pretend the flash continual, pretending night is day,

––hence the parable, the riddle, the poem, the allegory. Let me show you a deep well. Would you drink? No, you cannot reach it, except by attaching the pail to one, and the next, and the next of each of these, in succession and with humility of mind. You will find no rope long enough, but the vulgar won’t bear this truth. They’ll keep insisting, tell it straight and in a single breath, and when you can’t they will call you a liar and when you won’t you are nothing.

My goal: to guide a single, virtuous reader to rest. Most will be highly displeased. Here is no answer, no show. What may be told to mortals of their own beginnings, except obscurely?