And There Was Light

In the beginning, God said, “Let there be light.”
Hold it right there.

What is ‘said’?
What is said?
“What is ‘said’?”

So a god, who is also God, comes and says something:
This is the beginning of the story? That the story begins?
This voice that we cannot hear speaks and creates the world which exists in a story about a world that may not exist?

And what does it say? “Let there be light.”
Light! But light is the one thing that could not possibly have been (in the story) and that already was (before we began the story -- before the story began (and did we begin the story?)).

What was there before this light? The “in-beginning” (b’rashit).

So we have a God that speaks (silently) of a light (without light) that makes it light (though it was already light) in the beginning (which began before we began):
It is really a very simple story:
In the beginning, God said, “Let there be light.”

A Feminism

Out of the wings of the arrow (do arrows
Have wings? Then how else coud they
Fly?) comes the absolute flight,
Freed from all 'depends' and pending
On the sullied air. The air is sullied,

Like her body, thinks the German Herr
Klingmeister, who has developed a solid
Philosophy of just these things --
You will find the details
And the details of the details
Underneath the covers (of his book).

But the wife (Das Weib)?
We have been patching her together,
We masters of stethoscopes,
Doctoring her,
And attending the child's birth.

Where is the midwife, says this
'She thinks' (also in quotation marks),
Which peers into the innermost heart
With a word, a hard word, while her body

Like the fruit on the tree,
Whose attendant veins accomplish grace
With all the sugars of the processed soil,
Swells until it bears and dwells
In the infinite seeds of race.

Temoignage

What is there but man in the world (there are not
Women and it breaks my heart to say it,
Because it is the light voice of my sister
That’s traipsing by the willows
And the grave. You think we don’t know
Women, who will always occupy the starting line,
Women who came always before
And will become after?)?

But if there are houses that settle in like a man
With kitchens that touch you like wrinkled hands
And glasses like the doors of tombs turning grass:

I wish there were two suns and two moons,
And between the moon,
A dark, lush place to rest.

Take this to my sister, and with it a key:
She will know what to do.

Three Shorts

From the height I feel the colors of the sky,
Mixed tonalities engaging a purity
Whenever it’s directed,
Burn in the center, stellar as aloft,
While the points reduced to pinpricks
Of location wink the periodicities
Like a detached eye that will not look.

***

Presently life has no juice -- for it is juice that brings
Contortions to the body, inspiring the mind
To bubble over in contact with real things
That are a thousand ravens to whom we attach
Like colored pieces of string and take off
In the encircling collage as far as sight.

***

Mixing bottles could I ever make her mind?
Producing with stains on the white rub,
Over it ingrained eye-shadow and a smudge
Of lipstick? These are femininity’s
Accoutrements: take from them the
Flesh and lace -- my sister is not wrapped up
In blue tiles I desire and I love her
Without pink glasses or champagne
In a way that’s continually empty.

The Disciple

He kneels before the cubby,
Raises cupped hands to the icon
Shining in the slight
Impress of a candle, and he prays:

“Father, in the darkened priory,
Where only the foot-steps echo
Of the monks, pacing the day’s
Declining pace, murmuring words
That, for themselves, are already indistinct,
Obscured by habit and by habit
Obscure, I look for your light,
Even though it seems another sound
Among the sounds: clatter of silverware
On plates, Father Anthony snoring, scribes
Scratching onto the page
The numbers that are our keep.”

The icon is the glow of the candle
In amber coloured glass,
And it articulates a space
That is the shadow of the icon
In the shadows that it lifts
And with the shadows that it makes.

Carousel

One wheel turns and props the other up,
Which, some height above,
Jumps into a cupola of spinning light,
Circling the day‘s square ceiling. Horses
Leap like waves onto the platform,
And always tossing bridles in obedience to gems,
Land where they'd started and begin again.
I watch the shadows of clouds covering it
And the green all around, as if a sparrow
Had flown across the sun. The children are all gone
To rumple beds, but still the thing turns;

I sit down and play with my heart,
Pouring into the crevice of vision
Full faces, tilted and sliced
Skull-like over the canvas
Of the eyes, and ascribe curling print
To fill out a chin, the legend stating
‘Always’ and ‘twilight’,

And in my thought an apartment
To which the park would give obeisance --
Just a little cove beneath the floating towers
Encompassed by canals of cars -- a flower-
Box on the window-sill, clean dishes
By the sink, behind the bedroom a day’s
Stubble nudging up my neck -- in alabaster rears.

Bursts into sight a thundering board:
A boy like a white vase covered in cotton,
Jutting out of denim, twice swings
Round the carousel,
And shoots with centripetal force
Past the park out onto the street
And out of sight.

Spirit, fill me:
You who are beyond the shadows,
Above them or below them
I don't know, since above them
The burning eye,
And below them shattered glass.

If you speak will I hear the trembling
Vocable, the utterance
That somewhere in the mind
Brings the glory of thought
And to the thought?

One thought in God, the thought that is beyond
Man, because it reaches to God,
And beyond God, because it reaches man,
Illuminates me: Spirit,
Am I your shadow? Or are you
The shadow of my shadow?

The house is quiet again. Like dust
Silence settles over every room,
Like the complicit decay of the living.

Marge walks between her chamber and the bathroom,
Uses the bowl and uses the sink
To wash her hands, then goes back
Past the sullen panels
And the flaking paint
And the window where the bright little cars
Zip by the drugstores,
Hotels, into her bedroom
And climbs beneath the sheets.

The wind makes the trees rustle
And it rains.
Like an unwanted lover she can feel the cold
Insinuate himself into the comforter,
Nipping at her shoulders
And kissing her feet. She longs

To sleep. Last night she dreamt
She was sailing in Bermuda, the breeze
Unfurled her hair from end to end like a weaver
Stretching fine thread, and the diamond deep
Blinded her with light, everywhere was light,
And in the darkness she smiled
And continued to sleep.

The Holy Dialectic

Someone comes and says what he says.
The pain of what he said, Francesca!
Help me find the pain:
I don’t know where it is.

What is it you say?
That was what he told me?
The stranger has me in a deep way, then,
Better than I do.
I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Conception

Conception

Come, we are going down, not into the old Hell of the philosophers, but into a world
Of light made parts: see how a transept figure dashes
Into its four problems, and how each quark reveals itself as bridge that arcs the septum,
Dividing, enclosing, illustrating. Each is something I have taken
From myself and with which I replace myself: the world of glistening numbers
That sparkle on the tree, bright as pairs (the transverse order of the cardinals
Proceeds, who minister the New Word, and implore its sides from every angle). Peers:
And one for the infinitive, unmarked by speculations, one for the indicative
(There, see how it points, see the curve of the skin that hangs upon its mark
In loose flaps -- Aristotle’s finger) and one -- that brilliant, sweeping,
Yet always relegated to the world of possibilities, unfolds like a tree
Of generation since its dawning point that shudders on the edge of the horizon,
Scene that sees itself -- subjunctive. This is the splendid universe of song,
This is Nietzsche’s woman, serene bust of Athena, dream of Helen. Is there higher
Vision in this vision, a vision that verily sees, something for which this existence
Merely stands? I only know, my brothers, we are erecting a great city,
We will penetrate the sky: and the clouds, our clouds, drifting always
Into new configurations of water and earth, into new storms and new crops,
Are pregnant with the possibility.

The Luzhin Defense

The victory that is won too late,
Revelation of a rook, the spate
Of life that dissipates,
That roar that speaks
A quiet brook, looks
Of glass that hold the sky,
Victory (the arms that bleed)
In a sealed and bound
Red book, the rite
That crowns a clear
White hand: check
(She lost her) mate.

Side-stroke

Vines where the chimneys were,
Curling across the rooftops like the tide,
And I kissed her lips and drank them long
And deep; it reminded me of the ocean and the stars
In the ocean and the pattern of one great star
On the waves, a wonder: surf that’s thunder-
Struck and lightning-bathed.

Then I heard the voice of an old
Poet staggering away
Drunk
From the ocean
And I stayed
My course
But when I raised
My head to gasp
Looked back.

My Norwegian Sister

She is my Norwegian sister, comes
From a land of hills
And hills over hills,
A home of stark
Cottages
Above the hills.

When she looks at the sky
She sees a bird fly:
The bird’s shadow
Arcs across
The wicker of the roof
Like dreams.

The back of her eyelids are like dreams.
I see her in my sleep, undressing:
Her skin is covered in stars undressing
The sky that is falling like a great
Cloth (or shadow of a bird)
Over my eyes.

Colors

I want colors, I want the world to be filled with
Colors that exist only in thought, colors that are not
Literally there, and I want to feel them, I want
To live in them and breathe them,
Colors of the air.

How seldom it is the mind can fill a thing:
How seldom it expands like a lemon
To the color of a lemon and its fruit;
Only with pressure the bitter juice
Coagulates, which demonstrates
That I am not my own.

I would own a house
Made entirely of colors,
I would live in a kind of blue
Hue spread like paint over white
Canvas, filling what is there
With the illusion of what’s there,
Forever and forever in the open air.

I think this covers everything

There are two things I’d like to know:
How to do things with words
And how to do without them.

The Poem of Despair

The only way out of despair
Is to write
The poem of despair,
Which brings despair
To its readers.

Of No Consequence

If my life consisted in if’s
(If you do the laundry,
If you sweep the floor,
If you read in Proust
To page 1004...)
Where would be the ‘then‘, where
Would I live,
Would I truly live
In the passage of time?

A conflagration of birds

A conflagration of the birds
    I will not say they are the stars flying
Settles on the branches of a tree
    (She supports them with weary limbs
    Like a mother
    Burdened by rollicking boys
    Who frolic up and down her trunk),
And their swiftness
    Shaking wings, shifting
    Weight by hopping on this or that
    Foot
Is like a fire
Or the sky at night.

The Artist

In the poem I am not myself
But the image of myself held aloft
And examined,
Like Escher’s globe into which the room
Is curved (while it reflects
The mustache curving
Around its corners,
The eyes that hold,
Like mirrors, their own surprise)
Leaving only the steely nails
Unsaid, only the uncupped hand.