by Howon Lee
ms
Copyright 2012 Howon Lee
Do not even think that. When you see it, let a smooth darkness descend upon you.
Have you heard of pink elephants? When I read of them, I cannot think of them.
A cold egg is cracked over my head, and what runs down are my memories.
What memories? I have never had memories. Do not even think of such a thing.
There’s no such thing as strong or weak medicine. It’s all just medicine.
How do I know that? I don’t know it.
If I have never had memories,
Then how could I know anything?
I have never known anything.
I have not even the word ‘never’. But I can still tell what’s new.
You just have to look for the pauses. The pink, and purple, and the little
Boxes next to the painting, bigger than the painting, or the whiteness of the walls,
The metal splendor of the lights, the little railings, the young man taking care
To not seem snooty, but to be very snooty. Music that’s rock, because it
Sounds like somebody hit the musician with a rock. Sculpture with the ancient care of the masters, crafted in a foundry in fifteen minutes. That’s how I know it’s new.
Even if it’s a century old.
Gray wrinkled tomes tower, and unnumbered
Stacks on stacks of books, glare down, the gold dimmed,
Antique words babbling, silver ink faded,
Saying hallelujahs, making obeisance to other
Crackling vellum pages, for us to kowtow.
Melting, shining fey reflective green,
We think in green clouds, tarnished tones of brass,
The corpus straining, binding cracked, pages
Floating in the air, green to autumn, then black.
Drink the black ink, ever thirsting, but
Find that it does not sooth, but parches. And
Smell the red smoke, Generations will now
Never see we reap the salt our forefathers sowed.
When were the skies expanding,
The water blue and clearing,
The green grass growing?
We cannot go through the flaming sword.
Tomorrow, they will read for today a wondrous day,
But we know that Eden is far away.
I would that this song be the last thing that I hear,
That its nothings would be embraced within its strident tune,
In grand entrances, soft exits, in thoughts ringing out,
In sweet murmurings, in mercurial tones,
Walking past the mirror, while the mirror looks at it.
But this is no omphaloskepsis.
Out of the mirror, something human lurches out.
Its silver substance would carve in bold logic
Its demands, its dictates,
The soul, in its keeping, from before time till after time,
Standing, still shining, and viewing us in brutal, gentle judgment.
In the utmost wasteland, there is a hut, ragged with age.
In it is a man, gray and unbowed with years, a bulwark to the ages.
He is not. He does. He acts. Plows, cleans, sews, cooks,
Fights, shoots, kills, buries, prays, thinks, seeks absolution,
Learns, sees the wrong, sees the right, sees which must be done,
Does the right, builds a hut which looks old
From the first day, and settles Plows, cleans, sews, cooks. Never can he be called
Anything, or nothing, or something. He is not. He does.
Let not such words tumble out of your mouth. Let even your words be silenced,
Or let them glue themselves together with words, words telling a tale, the tale,
Of friendship kept in times of trouble, love requited from despair,
Of the frail pale hand dipped in contagion, coming away pink, new-born.
Of long silence broken by birdsong, sound born of trackless mists sounded anew,
And the mute bird listens, its jealousy turned to comprehension.
The music says that groping in the darkness we found: a stone, a bedrock stone.
All mankind are brothers and sisters. That was the stone.
The freed prisoner sees the blue haze of the morning, the orange shining glow of the dusk,
And breathes air undreamt-of in his hole, and in turn is silenced once more.
Every man fights a hard fight. No man comes out of life alive. Yet it can be said that:
Every man wins the hard fight, wins the war.
Look around you. The hill is there.
It slides up, topped with grass.
Climbing it, you see only the step before you.
Foot step, foot step. Step foot, step foot.
One step up, then another.
Step until you reach the hilltop. No more steps.
But if you sit there, you will never see the mountain fog,
The trackless peaks, the snow, the bones of those succumbed to fate,
The bones of trees succumbed to the cold,
The hallowed crag, the mystery cave,
The flag triumphant, planted long past,
Your flag, triumphant, on some undiscovered peak.
So look around you. The clouds billow up, they goad.
It is time to brave the mountain. Look at the peak.
Step down.
Plug it in. There is a noise,
A fountain of despair crackles out in the soundless beginning of the screen.
Press the button. There is a sigh.
We are shadowed by rectangles of light, and we shadow them.
Lay out your petitions, your troubles,
Your worry, your joy and fear, before it.
They burn like so much kindling, and the smoke smells good.
Last comes the supplicant, bathed in unctuous oils,
Singing to cats, the mouse in a box.
We lay out no communion anymore: we are the communion.
And we lay ourselves out, vassals to a Great God,
Our heartstrings wound in a grand Net.
See the crack in the earth that you might think natural, until you dig.
Get a shovel and shovel, until a gilded chest is seen.
Crack it open, and find the treasure-map. Crackling with age,
Speckled, brown, blank.
It is still a treasure-map. It still leads you.
The circle of time, or serendipity, will point you to its marked spot,
Although its path is tortuous, and it often loops around itself.
See the crack in the earth that you might think natural, until you dig.
Get a shovel and shovel, until a gilded chest is seen…
Smell it. It smells like medicine. The axe is ready.
The pine tar stinks and the air smells of desolation. The axe goes on.
You never wondered at that sort of cruelty, did you? The splinters fly,
That tree will never bear fruit again. This tree, they thought full, but it is hollow.
They will not use it. It will rot, and the butterflies will circle around the carcass.
Some useful ones get pressed. No confession will they give, but plywood and tears of sap.
The others are flayed alive, embalmed, painted silent colors that hide their weeping.
You might think that the ones burned are the worst off. Not true: that title
Belongs to the rotting ones, untimely carried off, casted off to the bin.
No worries for the axe. It stays sharp on splinters.
The hand that wields it oils it also. The craftsman must have his tools.
Yes. The craftsman does not complain about his tools – but his tools are good ones.
The air is full of voices
, frozen fixed,
Today we speak in tongues, raucous noise and drumming,
But tomorrow we are silent.
Worry for a winter of words.
No silence, but the cold of bitter words spat,
Harsh with thoughts which admit of no defeat,
Blunt speech made speechless,
Bold speech hidden with sibilance,
Merely a hiss in the wind.
What can we speak, teacher?
May we speak the unspeakable?
Think the unthinkable? No. Bluster,
Pretend summer is in full bloom,
The flowers speaking soft, the grass ruffling semaphores,
But the frost on the windows will tell otherwise.
People with a voice, politicking, telling
Things that we should hear,
But the silence on hungry lips will tell otherwise.
The wind-up toys we played with are broken, gone.
They spoke of glory, once, but now they speak no more.
They have been replaced. View the music instead.
Read it. Peruse it.
You cannot hear the springs anymore. Silence the music,
So that it freezes to crystalline form,
Slows down, grows creaky – never making a creak – and, finally, is still.
Show the player-piano the thirteenth note.
It can still play the other twelve,
But no matter how you tear the strings, you cannot hear the thirteenth.
There is a man in the depths of a valley, hidden to the sun.
He has never stirred from there. In this valley, that monument presides.
The valley lays sides of stone for him, and the peerless cliffs of granite
Lay for him shadows in which his visage turns marble, grand.
It took his eyes, and put veined diamonds in their place.
It took his arms, and rendered them in stone.
In the sunlight, he might have been civic, but here
He looms, greater than any watcher. His own murk spreads.
You would not be able to bear his gaze.
But in the darkness it becomes impossible
To fail