Lyn Hejinian (1987)
The Souvenir
The town where I was born, Radautz, in the county of Bukovina, threw me out when I was ten. On that day she forgot me, as if I had died, and I forgot her too. We were both satisfied with that.
Forty years later, all at once, she sent me a souvenir. Like an unpleasant aunt whom you’re supposed to love just because she is a blood relative. It was a new photograph, her latest winter portrait. A canopied wagon is waiting in the courtyard. The horse, turning its head, gazes affectionately at an elderly man who is busy closing some kind of gate. Ah, it’s a funeral. There are just two members left in the Burial Society: the gravedigger and the horse.
But it’s a splendid funeral; all around, in the strong wind, thousands of snowflakes are crowding, each one a crystal star with its own particular design. So there is still the same impulse to be special, still the same illusions. Since all snow-stars have just one pattern: six points, a Star of David in fact. In a minute they will all start melting and turn into a mass of plain snow. In their midst my elderly town has prepared a grave for me too.
Dan Pagis (1986), translated from the Hebrew by Stephen Mitchell
A Walk Through the Museum
My only pleasure these days is the museum. The exhibits, the air almost clear of dust, the reflections on the glass of the display cases. The way the attendants, two old women, sit in the corner, their grey hair permed into waves, one of them carefully sipping coffee from the cap of a thermos flask.
I don’t really look at anything. Please don’t think I’m there to look. I look at nothing. Regrettable but true. Celtic axe-handle, medieval tile, picture, non-figurative statue: I ignore them all.
Or do I look? Have I looked in the past? Looked too much so that all looking is superfluous? Because I can look at them now, there on the wall opposite, a whole row of living proofs: blues, copper-colours, patches, gradients, the dark-brown charges of night cavalry
‘… tomatoes with cabbage. Simpler.’
‘I used to make it with peas.’
suspended by their spears, driven forward by spears, holding them, vertical, howling as they fling them. Or is it something else? Is this the same set of pictures? Do any of them match up? Mere references on a wall, quotations from an obsession?
Perhaps this is enough. A picture frame on a white expanse of wall, possibly with a picture in it: it may be enough. It might be a row of broom-handles in the frame, that naïve little path leading into the background of trees. The road can take us no further: it is impassable. There is no shoe to tread it, no hoof to gallop it. Not even an aircraft – some small agricultural whirlybird – to flutter clumsily along its curves, cleverly sniffing its way from above. Yet how poignantly the road invites us, with its imperceptible arcing movement, sucking us, wafting us in, my eyes, the eyes behind my eyes and the eyes behind those eyes (its magnetic field comprising man-made eyes) along lines of force organised into arcs.
Could there be a more relaxing window anywhere in the world? Such a bundle of sunlight on a sunlit-yellow floor? Are there, anywhere in the world, such rough corroded blocks of stone displayed on such polished stands? Do they include such balls of cotton fluff, feathery playthings, just a wee bit dirty. Is there
‘Plain one, purl one.’
‘Then a blanket-stitch.’
a greater power than that of dawdling down a long series of exhibition rooms, past successive stripes of light – now dark, now bright – air set into columns?
Then to step out of the quasi-colonnade into the square, with a glance from the topmost stair at the lazy panorama in front of you, at the Danube, with neighbourly lines of hills beyond, then slowly meandering down into the smaller landscape of the gothic garden. Into the narrow space between building battlements, geometrical lilliputian flowerbeds, with tiny round laurel trees beside them: whenever I do this I feel I am stepping into a child’s drawing, a Book of Hours with small coloured engravings. I have to move more carefully here, to learn the scale of an existential game. Slowly, warily, ever more narrowly along the path of an enormous mini-universe no shoe can tread. Nevertheless, I must proceed and measure this alternative terrain with steps whose deeds exceed imagination. Breathe slowly and warily. The air has been calibrated into limited quantities.
Whence the shadow on this domain, whence the light? Of course, it is the two chestnut trees there that are the cause, two scarlet-flowered great wild-chestnut trees that glow above me, that act as tents in a holiday mood so that the hidden otherworld down here is soaked in smoky greenish-reddish light. One must stop. One listens with slightly raised head to something almost audible.
There is nothing left to do now but to leave. Leave the garden by the gate, descend the hill, with the rondella to your left of course, and to the right … to the right the quarry shed with its wire-fenced side where feral cats swarm over miscellaneous old stones. My suggestion would be to take a look at it. See the cats, teeming monuments, squatting on the exhibits, blessing the marble with their little rumps. Their feline stench will follow you, their wonderfully artistic necks turn lazily after you and watch you disappear down the slope.
Ágnes Nemes Nagy (1986), translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes
Hearts
It is essential that the U.S.A. standard of hygiene and inspection procedures is maintained on the killing floor and throughout subsequent handling of all offals.
The hearts shall be trimmed of protruding veins and arteries making sure the aorta valve is removed. Hearts are to be incised to enable them to be packed flat.
Each heart has to carry a clear impression of the ‘Australia Approved’ stamp. It is permissible to brand in ink but if a clear impression is not obtained the hearts should be fire-branded. The hearts are to be drained of excess moisture and will be packed flat with care taken to present a neat appearance, into a plain polythene lined regular style solid fibre carton 22" × 14" × 5". The hearts are to be bulk packed to 60lb net weight, it being in order to cut one heart to obtain the exact weight.
Laurie Duggan (1985)
The Land of Counterpane
The toys were all ready. The faded but resolute general, the mountie with movable arms, the nurse, and the three sheep. They all set off along the maze of narrow rounded valleys that criss-crossed the green and mauve eiderdown. Their journey was not to be without adventure – the sick child was sure of that as he spoke out loud their conversations. The sheep with three legs kept falling over so had to be propped between the other two sheep or set against a suitable slope. The path was like those that wind from the crest of the Downs south to the sea. Bare hills and small copses set deep in the combes.
They bravely struggled on. They would fulfil their vague and continually changing mission and then return home. When dusk overtook them they started to make camp. They soon fell asleep around the campfire, but were suddenly awakened by a giant hand that descended from the sky. Though plucked from their world they soon settled into their new home, a box on the bedside table. The curtains were drawn and the child was soon asleep.
In the next-door house the child’s two friends were also asleep. The boy, who is King of the Birds, can understand everything they say, lies curled up clutching his blue blanket. The girl, who is Queen of the Insects, sprawls in her bed, her arms and legs thrown out, fearless. One of their parents enters the bedroom and stands watching them as they sleep. It’s as though he’s trying to make time stand still, to somehow fix forever this scene in his memory. As tenuous as trying to engrave the colours of the sky in one’s mind. The silver and gold over the sea seen late one afternoon looking from the Roman Steps west across to Bardsey. Moments that go beyond joy or tenderness into some other land that’s beyond any words.
‘I was a giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.’*
* Robert Louis Stevenson – A Child’s Ga
rden of Verses
Lee Harwood (1985)
from C
The brass plate polished wordless. Stone steps hollowed by the frightened hopeful ascending, the terrified despairing descending. (Probably between three and four months, perhaps one hundred days.) Out of the surgeries in this Georgian street, and similar streets in similar cities, some of us issue daily, bearing the ghastly prognostications. How we hate you, busy, ordinary, undying – taxi-driver, purveyor of the Evening Star, secretary bouncing puddings of malleable flesh. Incongruously I plan 100 100-word units. What do you expect me to do – break into bloody haiku?
Verse is for healthy
arty-farties. The dying
and surgeons use prose.
Peter Reading (1984)
Many Musicians Practice Their Mysteries While I Am Cooking
The geniuses I’ve put on to play for me want me to feel better, and for them I do. They saturate the kitchen air and I feel again these emotions that my people felt once upon a time, and I feel true. I feel most of all that music is what the house needs, this osmosis into the high sentiments of one another so I can be any genius I want, including a composer. One secret of growing up and staying grown.
My mind becomes Apollo’s mind while I cook and agitates when it hears for the first time details of score and, therefore, of feeling not clear before genius found and realized them and engineers uplifted mere performance to this high abstract version of the actual that gladdens the fumes I make and nourish by. Praised be the dozens of perfectionists who have rinsed and made absolute the notes the composer once exhaled for passion’s sake.
But when I overhear Sarah in the front room trying her Bach, Mick in search of the right tenor note, a guest testing his want of skill on a hymn the whole family can play better but not well, there is exposed the amateur brown root of music, a commonplace stubborn as the smell of cabbage cooking, after which occasions I am always the downright cook tempering his vision of the human heart while he dresses up dead things it can’t live without.
Bink Noll (1984)
Or Else
As I went into the tabac to buy two boxes of matches, I happened to glance to my right. Or else, as I glanced to the right on going into the tabac to buy two boxes of matches, or else I had gone into a tabac to buy two boxes of matches, and glancing to the right I saw a small woman, not old, not young, perched on a chair, and she was eating what I took to be a tartine, or else the remnant of a tartine. She held the bread in both hands, like a squirrel, and her feet did not touch the floor. She was a very small person, and her face was round and white.
Then I asked for the matches, paid for them, and while turning to leave took a second look at the small woman. It was a small tabac, too, with only two or three tables and chairs lined up against the wall, and a mirror ran along the wall, reaching to the floor. The woman, perched on the chair, her feet not touching the floor, was half-turned toward the wall, she took a bite at her tartine, leaving behind a white streak of bread in her two clasped hands.
She sat turned away from the rest of the tabac. But she was so small that her round white face hardly appeared in the mirror. She ate like a trapped animal. She did not want to be seen. She did not want to see herself, yet, turning her face away from the space of the tabac, she almost had to be seeing herself, in the mirror, and also in the mirror the inescapable tabac space in which she felt conspicuous.
Or else: she was a very small woman with a round white face which nobody wanted to see, not even herself, but she had to be somewhere, in order to eat. Still, she was eating in such a way as to indicate that she wanted to live, hands clasping bread, even if living meant disappearing.
All around her, all around me, in that small space, the packets of cigarettes and the boxes of matches, the people walking in the street, on their way from the day’s work, in their appropriate clothes, and the dogs going about their business, and the continuous roar of all the cars.
Or else: I cannot say all around us. No link. No common root, at best a rhizome, contrived by the other bodies and the noises, in their scatteredness, connected her particularity and mine, within a surface of observation more fleeting even than the last white shred of her tartine at which I saw her now sucking, not chewing, no, but sucking.
The question of her teeth had not yet arisen. Strong teeth, squirrel teeth, grow in straight jaws, but hers might be weak teeth, in such round jaws. She lacked the courage, or else the presumption, to use a good toothpaste, and this had been going on for years. Nor had she the means to visit a dentist. Or else she had once scraped and saved, had once made an appointment, but the dentist had sent her away the moment he saw her. A tartine has a strong crust. So many sacrifices, in such a life. The cheapest food, a tartine, with ham or jam, and a little butter. Even then, she had to eat the tartine in her particular way, by sucking, and in public, she had to turn her face aside and not look, she wanted to eat while being invisible, she had a passion of great force, dangerous, for the tartines of this tabac, and here the rhizome put forth another bud, because in her I saw another being who had to aim, straight-on, for the impossible.
Or else: I went into the tabac after spending an afternoon with a young woman, small and beautiful, with a laugh like the silver trickle of starlight seen in the water of a well. We had walked across bridges and along corridors, we had exchanged sweat from the palms of our hands, we had sat beside one another with mirrors behind us, gazing out into the world, or gazing at each other, in the envious ancient way of Assyrians; but who, now, among the ancient Assyrians would care to wonder about the small woman with the round white face, or who else, one century or two from now, in Paris, would want to know that she existed?
She might never have been touched. I saw her short legs, white and lumpy, because, the way she sat, twisting away from the world, her skirt was hitched up to her knees. Nobody had ever wanted to stroke them. With her weak teeth she had never bitten anybody. With her small and frightened mouth she had never sucked anybody. Or else nobody living one century or two from now, no ancient Assyrian either, would, unless I am mistaken, want or have wanted to be bitten, or else sucked, by the small woman with the round white face and the unstroked legs.
She was not a tiny soldier in the battle against chance, so by chance she had to be a nullity. When she looked in a mirror and saw herself, she might have found it hard to believe that this was all she was: not even worth a glance, but worse – a pretext for averting every glance. Round, small, white zero, with a circumference nobody would dream of stroking into place, thus not even, really, a zero. The continuous roar of traffic. The dogs going about their business. Perched on the chair, a blob of absolute anxiety. Blob – and there they go, the beautiful ancient Assyrians, and others, who can be seen, who think it is they who happen, not chance, who receive existence from a knowledge that they are to be seen; and there they go, the dogs, capering and sniffing, a blob in their track is a small woman with a round white face and wet-looking hair which nobody wants to comb or pat; a blob sucking a tartine in a tabac and looking aside, or else down, she wants only not to be there where everyone else happens to be going.
Or else I am mistaken, entirely mistaken, and what I see is a large and very beautiful flea. A star among the fleas. And the dogs, in holy terror, worship her? From flea to angel, the spectrum of perception bends and cracks under the buffetings of chance, as, in a changed perspective, a world of different objects comes into position. Lens-grinding Spinoza says to the small woman (she does not hear, and I may not have heard correctly): ‘Every being which is made conscious of its interior power comes to persevere the more insistently in its particular nature.’
Never once did anything occur to the small woman such as might have shown her that plenitude of interior power. She perseveres because she has been doomed to do so, by the dogs in the street, or else like them, by the space of the tabac, by the mirror which has finally annulled even her capacity to despair of herself. Or else: A chair in a small tabac, her twis
ted body insisting on it, is this a likely perch for the Celestial Globe-Hopper, the Pure Flea Spirit? Passing from Spinoza’s triangle to the cube, I put one box of matches in my coat pocket, the other in my trouser pocket, and could not say whether or not I was mistaken. Or else I had ground this lens not cruelly enough, for I felt mounting in my throat a galaxy of tears; or else I was grinding into the lens not this indelible presence but my own shadow, nicotine, idiotic.
Christopher Middleton (1983)
abglanz / reflected gleam
from the field borders flows a dried-out baking quiet of thistledown and crumbs of soil. a grey velvet, which scratches on the throat and makes a fur on the tongue. the overheated, glassy air curdles under streaming strokes of shimmering. untameable thirst. earth-chilled springwater slurped in long, greedy gulps from the scoop. the burnt-down field devil inflates his nostrils and licks at the reviving moisture, which rebounds from the sky and perks up the wearily drooping turnip fields. the bare, bone hard surface deeply cracked. from long ago the noontide demon walks through the man-high corn to frighten children, knowing the locality and full of cunning. spectral cutting of rye. thrifty herb women, who draw from the holiday riot of the field weeds a yield in bridal white, hump skips loaded high from the verges. earthy stubble dance. stooked scales of sounds. long-stalked, the sheaves bounce onto the swaying wagon. wobbling dewlaps of oxen, shapeless, almost dragging the ground. the rhythmic sway of the animals’ bodies. the hanging threads of slobber. in dust and rumble of the threshing machine swirling up clouds of husks and awns. with the rake, the chaff swept into baskets. the grain tipped out and piling up. thumbnail test. our daily bread. this year’s harvest weighed up in the hollow of the hand. ‘false weights are an abomination to the Lord, full measure pleases Him.’ piled up rows of sacks leaning against the barn walls. stacked on top of each other with the handy carrying-pole by two people. on the circle behind the mountain of cheese a robbers’ castle reared up out of bundles of straw. by Korah’s band secretly scaled and conquered without a fight. autumnal sign of a childhood.
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem Page 14