Still Life

He is hunched over the book (why hunched?
Because it takes effort to keep yourself in place
So long: you have to ride the stillness like a bronco
Or it bucks; words buck: because there is something
So subtle and difficult in sounds, even only
Silently in the mind, as silently as a mirror…).

I already explained why one hand
Is clenching the burlap – as if the fingers
Needed something palpable,
Something to tear into, again
As if the entire heart were straining
Like a muscle (it is a muscle):

He is being ripped apart
(And strain the wrinkles on your forehead
When you think – because that helps:
Bury your scalp in your hands).

Sigma Phi Iota Nu Chsi

“The forever of an hour,” saith the Sphinx,
“Man, that is your forever,” and turns her tail,
And lumbers off, leaving the riddler to puzzle:

And such a puzzle, because it must mean
There is some eternity to our existence, standing out
In the cold of the garden like a bloom (only admitting
Sensuous qualities, whose names are
Sensuous sounds) and the hour of that bloom
Is the eternal vision. Someone comes to the inquirer

And, “No,” he says, “Because
You are just thinking of a flower in a garden;
Imagine you were tossing words like dice
And they came down in any order: would you ask
What is the meaning of the order?
It’s just a toss of dice!” I take it there are dice
Hanging on the dashboard of the Sphinx’s brain.

Kant

Even though I don’t understand any of it,
I keep on reading, even pick up the pace; further,
I cannot help but think there is a kind of virtue
In not understanding (not: in misunderstanding)
As if here too were a part of the infinite,
As if here also were encountered those things
That should and do but will not fit together –
At least to my mind: and perhaps this
Is the feeling of truth, the feeling that there is a truth
Apart from what is known – not the incomprehension
Nor what is not understood, but that there is something
Not to understand, not entirely to understand,
Something more than what is given or known, at all.

Dasein

The concept of the project first shows itself
As something to dispel the angst of death –
It is the work that aims at the other,
I have been told, ensconcing Being in its light,
Like the religion of time, that,
Sub quadam specie aeternitatis,
Reveals itself, reveals the hidden god.

God! To write that name with the capital G
(I almost do not know how to write it),
If only as the beginning of a sentence,
Beginning a sentence to feel as if there were a capital G,
That God is the name of a god,
That there is a god, God -- even to proclaim it…

You would think that there’s some magic in a name
That picks out its object among all the objects –
Perhaps because it can hear? Because the sound summons it
Here? Then to call the name of God is to stir
The living god, lurching through the ether,
To come upon you like an arrow, to drop over you
Like the mantle of the prophet, so that you might speak:
God! Call the name again and again: God!

But the loneliness of that word is its echo,
Also reeling through the silence of space,
Like the silence of any word that cannot pick out
A living thing or any being. Whom are we talking to,
Ourselves, it suggests. But what is wrong
With talking to ourselves? If God is dead
Then all is permitted: then it is even permitted
To talk about God, and to talk about ourselves,
And to talk to ourselves. Is this the project?

Not quite yet. Talking is one thing, but it is another to listen,
It is another thing to understand. And there’s the crux of it,
That we can understand and through the echoing silence pick out
The words. There is something about speaking to yourself
And hearing, something more truly yourself,
When you take the time see what you are, and to see
That you are seeing what you are.

It's In the Contract

What is all this change that's heading towards death?
Is it so bad? The changing asks this: is it so bad?
God save me if I'm profound! Yes, because I am ludicrous:
Such a proud man, peering into matters under the earth
And above the stars, seeking out the causes of things
Though ignorant of himself and everyone around him

Or rather too mindful! Too eager to seem deep
(That's the poet's streak for you, writing
What he hopes the po' folk will mutter someday,
Sitting on the porch outside the general store
And squinting and reciting while the flies buzz:
"That shore wuss deep. Leiberwhitz shore writes nice."
And meanwhile the horse tied up against the post shits.

Let me venture a guess as to what all of this is about:
I can't write, I can't think or act without supposing
Some continuation, a kind of eternity in which the action
Finds and fills its end. Life aims to perpetuate itself.
But how can anything have meaning if everything
Must end? Is there a strength in living that disperses
Through life's several projects and gets lost in them,
A vigorous rejoicing in health? When it is wretched
It is worse than wretched, and I don't mean to say
That ugliness is heads to beauty's tails, but the capacity
To exult is the capacity to suffer, wisdom is the fruit
Of fools, and perishing, perishing is part of the package.

Progress

1972 has passed out of speech,
Or it has passed back into speech:
It is spoken again.

I am the living mind you fail to describe.
That you fail to describe,
Writing, as you did,
That I am the living mind.

We could go on like that between us,
Surpassing each other like the waves
Of the incoming tide.

Think about this for a moment:
The water is always receding or moving forward,
But it must leave a place to go back into its place
Until it returns – this is the continent,
The shore, this is the cycle of death and life,
Dispersing through the metaphor.

Adrienne, when I speak,
I think of a flood of words,
Like the Tiber overflowing
As Horace imagined,
Only the island of the world’s generations
Has nowhere to go, no paradise
Lost to poetry and thought.

My point is that when I think again
That I am the living mind you fail to describe,
I think neither forwards nor backwards to a time
Bequeathed no living mind, an unmind undermined
By the tides of our restless kind.

RE: The Bird Carver (David McKain)

You bring me to a man
Who is perhaps even handsome,
Because I should not say
He has the look of the land,

I mean the gnarls of trees he passes,
Or stoops under, grabbing a branch
Maybe or a sapling
From his pocket

Of course
Because the ground is not dry
And it is cold

And whittling through the idea --

It is not perched on the stump
In the wind ahead of him:
It is like an after-image,
It is something ignited
And still glowing within.

Yes, he is young and handsome,
Even after so many winters,
Because his eyes have not absorbed
The glint of the snow
Through his tracks

I do not mean
He was not looking down at his feet,
On those hikes,
So that his eyes
Would be rather a simile
For the blue sky,

But that there are characters
The land cannot shape…

Cannot shape?

Because he is the original
Of his mind,
Like anyone self-made,
Whatever else composes him,
And like the birds he carves.

Querelle de Brest (In Progress?)

Often the idea of murder evokes the sea, and sailors. This idea is not, however, like an image projected on the canvas of the mind, but rather the sea, the sailors unfurl it like waves. If the ports are the repeated screenings of this violence, that has been easily explained, and we will not reiterate the numerous histories in which you have read, if they are true, that the assassin was a captain – and if not, still the two are linked more intimately. After all, it is not from prudence alone that a man dons the sailor’s cloth. The disguise is a part of that ceremony whose jurisdiction is tribal atrocity. We say this first of all: that it envelops the criminal in clouds, detaches him from the horizontal line that links sea and sky; that in crowding, muscled undulations it pushes him to digress the ocean, like the Great Bear, the North Star, the Southern Cross; that it – but we refer always to this disguise, this criminality – lifts him up and places him on shadowy continents whence the sun flies and whither it roosts, under moons of bamboo clusters, witnesses to murder, and near the immobile rivers where alligators swim; that it allows him to act on a mirage, and he thrusts his arm, though one of his feet be resting still on the watery beach -- the other is rushing above its surface towards Europe; in advance and already it permits him to forget, since the sailor “returns from afar”, lets him believe that the terrestrial are nothing more than weeds. It bathes the criminal. It envelops him in the straightened pleats of his jacket, the capaciousness of his pants. It cradles him. It cradles its victim, who is already hypnotized. We will speak of the sailor's "mortal look". We have attended his seductions. Indeed, in the extremely long phrase beginning: "it envelops the criminal in clouds..." we abandoned ourselves to this facile poesy of the verb, each proposition serving only to amplify suspicions of authorial complaisance. It is in this way, that is, beneath the sign of a very peculiar interior motion, that we will present the drama unfolding in these pages. We would like to mention, also, that it is addressed to homosexuals. When thinking of murder and of the sea, the idea of love and passion suggests itself quite naturally -- and moreover, the idea of a love contrary to nature.

Paradox II

A puzzle whose solution is a puzzle,
An unbroken line of links,
The severed chain of infinity
Fastening the watch
On the unlit edge of time.

Paradox

Ah, the fruits of a paradox,
Since paradoxes multiply themselves --

They are puzzles that puzzle,
Sayings that do not know what to say,

Long lines of fat truths crowded out
By slinking falsehoods, the adamant links

Of a broken chain fastened on a watch
At the end of time. Their temptation

Is the seduction of the key-hole
By the key, and yet both key

And hole are so very different:
The container is not

What it contains. But what is a paradox?
A glimpse of something infinite

Embedded in our finitude, or the promise
Of a blaze in our infinite darkness?

True, they fascinate like flames --
But better, perhaps, to look away,

Better to live by the shadows of our day
Than the moonlight of Reason's unfathomable night.

The Anxiety of Interpretation

I will stray, I will say ridiculous things
And be laughed at, just as now I am laughing.

I will speak in order to impress,
But I will not be impressed by my speech:

I mean though they will impress me,
My words will not impress themselves upon me:
I am condemned to misunderstand them.

Why will I try to say what I cannot say?

Because I will want myself to be able to say it
And others to know that I am the one who can say it,
While they will know, on the contrary,
That I cannot say it because I say it,

And conclude that I have nothing to say
And laugh at me, because unlike me they will know
That I am not who I take myself to be.

The Work of Mourning

Why bring back the molting and powdery histories
of the middle age,
because the knight has departed forever? --

Just as the sun saps water
And the mud becomes dry and cracked,
Leaving a desert, a lifeless plane
Whose intersection is the present
Moment, and by whose dissection
Both are robbed -- accompanied

By his minstrels in concert,
The fairy's spells, the glory of his...
I couldn't find 'preux': I think maybe 'pres'
With the acute over the 'e', 'lawns' (?),
But also the preacher's
Circumflex, perhaps when he lifts his hands
Above his head (I imagine),
Figuring the 'omega', beseeching the mercy
Of his lord:

For he has departed to --
Or the capital has diminished
To the lower case --
Or when I think of him,
I see an image that retains
Its focus, as sharp as its parts,
But which has lost
Its electricity,
That je ne sais quoi that made it
More than it could ever be.

What does this incredulous century care -- incredulous?
Because it was so incredible, or...? -- We who are so in awe
Have lost all sense of awe -- for our marvelous legends --
Note to the reader: legenda, what ought to be read --
Saint George breaking a lance over Charles the Seventh,
At the tourney of Lucon...

I leave you now, Bertrand,
Because I don't love books that much,
(And in this respect I am closer to Russell
Than you), leave you to pore
Across the letters of the past,
A world of dust, a world
In the absence of the world,
Yearning for that absence,
Since to yearn for what is gone is called mourning,
A mourning that always secludes itself
To the night of an obscure page.

About Poetry

I am a scholar, from the Greek
Word for 'crooked', and my ways
Are crooked: I write poetry
About poetry.

There may be some people
Who truly
Have something to say --
I am not one of them.

All I can do is repeat
Others' fancies,
Maybe looking inside them
For something I fancy myself.

Words are my tricks: I twist them
In amusing ways -- but even this
Is no revelation.
A pun is just a relation
That the language itself somehow
Spoke, and a metaphor
Speaks around what already is,
And is hardly ever true.

Some say language
Involves us
(Devolves us)
In massive delusion, but they
Are still inside the poem --
I mean they think that language
Will always remain in itself.
I am trying to twist language
Like a mobius strip:

When I read a poem
I am trying to find a way out.

There Is Much More To Say

In the zocalo (there should be an acute
Accent over the 'o' -- but I am too lazy
To fix what is, within my execution, lacking)
a one-eyed salesman (again,
Here I would have capitalized the beginning
Of a line, perhaps because I have not grasped
The signification of the lower-case, could not shake
The shackles of mute centuries, holding sentences
In terror by their sway, which have had
And thus still have in me their definitive
Say) offers me a gourd
wrinkled
dried
with the face of God
painted on it
in cochineal & indigo

God is dead,
I tell him.

You are right,
he answers,
but it is only one peso.

I shake the gourd;
the seeds rattle
like thoughts in a dry brain.

O unfortunate country!

No interruption: the real terror
Of transcribing -- a purely arbitrary act
Nonetheless belonging to a will, which judges,
"There shall be poetry!" And so gives us
Someone else's. What am I to say?

Every moment of the experiment unfolds
As another verse (of no moment),
And the farther the carpet unrolls,
The smaller the words
From which it departed
Become,
As these too grow more distant:

For instance I have nothing to serve
So fancy as cochineal,
Of which I had never even heard
-- until now.

But maybe that's the purpose of poetry:
Hearing something new.

And now you have heard it too.
You will repeat it to yourselves again.
And an impression's replication
-- An idea's respiration --
Will have been served.

Big and Small

The world is so large a place
-- It was not well expressed by the poet who said,
"It is hard to see but think of a sea" --
Or perhaps it was, because everything in it
Is different than we think,
And yet we think of it the same.

There are very small things: I could squint
Trying to turn a screw on my glasses, pick
At the tiny pimples on my face, or maybe --
But do we have a name for these parts? --
Something has fallen into the drain
And needs be fished out (a minnow!)
Or there is a splinter
Lodged under sheets of skin
That you'll have to dig up
With pliers.

I just mean that what philosophers call
Medium-sized objects, we know
All about those, for instance if you pour
Cereal into a bowl and bring it to your mouth
With a spoon or there is something
A cup of coffee on the counter you reach for
With a grasping hand (all these words:
All these useful words!).

The argument continues: but everything large
Is made from what is small, and what is small
From what is smaller (see how the words
Grow tinier and more abstract,
Like the outermost branches of a plant
Beginning to tremble in the thinness of the air)...

But what is small is so different from what is large!

And what is large is so different from what is small:
Climates are flowing like the tides,
The globe is warming, the sun will be burning
Come summer, from millions of individuals producing
Mountains of individual things -- waste: societies,
Wars (Tom shooting at Fred firing
At Bill...), science (the research results of
How many professors? Just take the journals,
Article upon article waiting for synthesis --
Or is it better to compare the production of DNA?
Collating, checking, synthesizing,
Reforming -- and how many of these
Make up a body? But none of them are
That body)

But finally one tiny planet drifting
In this immensity of drifting stars...

How tiny large is large tiny!
What tiny things we are:
We who make everything large.

The poem is a project:
It returns, day after day, like the sun,
Illuminating what is dark
And darkening with its illumination
(Light is the possibility of shade).

Whither, then, goes the poem in the night of the mind?
Are these forests terrors only, from which I emerge,
Surpassing myself by finding myself again, in the poem?

Is the poem just this journey to the poet?

It is at least not the journey of the poet,
For he has already arrived.

So whose?

He who has already been
And he who is not yet,
The beginning that ends
The end where it begins,
Where neither
Beginning nor end
Begins in its ending
Or ends its beginning,
Though both end up
Right back where they began...

These are the spiraling circles downward
Of the poet's thought. He is like a metaphysician,
Except that sometimes, he writes pretty.