ALSO BY MICHAEL PALMER
books and chapbooks
Thread
Company of Moths
Codes Appearing
The Promises of Glass
The Danish Notebook
The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972–1995
At Passages
An Alphabet Underground
For a Reading
Sun
Songs for Sarah
First Figure
Notes for Echo Lake
Alogon
Transparency of the Mirror
Without Music
The Circular Gates
C’s Songs
Blake’s Newton
Plan of the City of O
selected translations
Voyelles by Arthur Rimbaud
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (film by Alain Tanner)
The Surrealists Look at Art (with Norma Cole)
Blue Vitriol by Alexei Parshchikov (with John High and Michael Molnar)
Theory of Tables by Emmanuel Hocquard
Three Moral Tales by Emmanuel Hocquard
in The Selected Poetry of Vicente Huidobro
in The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry
in Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain: 20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets
in Twenty-two New French Writers
other
Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics, ed. Michael Palmer
Contents
THE LAUGHTER OF THE SPHINX Author’s Note
Idiot Song
Let Us Ravel the Silence
For László K
The Laughter of the Sphinx
His Artificial Lover Sings a Wordless Song
Isle of Dogs
Light Moves 1
Light Moves 2
Light Moves 3
Light Moves 4
Light Moves 5
Light Moves 6
Untitled (27 vii 2012)
Trio (Paris 1959)
In Elegy (The Mute Carter Sings)
Tomb of Aimé Césaire
Sounds for Times Bones (among the dancers)
Storm
Unter den Linden
In Memory of Ivan Tcherepnin
Call
Encounter
Call the Makers
Untitled (Jerusalem April 2013)
Shrine (Hong Kong)
Did
Untitled (27 vi 2013)
Prose for Times Bones
A Dream of Sound Inside the Mountain (after Anish Kapoor)
Perfezione della neve
Honor (O.M.)
Untitled (15 viii 2013)
Song
Let Us
All
At the Tomb of Artaud
Poem (Oct – Nov 2013)
To X (Endarkenment)
To the Polish Poets (March 2014)
A Late Supper
Poem Devoid of Meaning
Strange Now
Falling Down in America
Proposition
Addendum
Et in Arcadia
The Republic
After
STILL Zeit ist Geld
1st chorus
There’s no there’s no there’s no
The child first learning the words
2nd chorus
From the broken tower
And the children sing
Things get lost
The children drum on anything
3rd chorus
Landmarks
Cover
Title-Page
Frontmatter
Start of Content
THE LAUGHTER
OF THE SPHINX
Author’s Note
A number of the poems included here have led parallel lives. “Light Moves (1 – 6)” were written as one part of my collaboration with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company on the dance Light Moves (2011). They pointedly echo and evolve from Jackson MacLow’s 22 Light Poems (Black Sparrow Press, 1968). Both “Sounds for Times Bones” and “Prose for Times Bones” were written for the same company’s 40th-anniversary work, Times Bones (sic - 2014). “A Dream of Sound Inside the Mountain” was commissioned as a response to Anish Kapoor’s sculpture “Large Mountain” and was first published as one in a series of responses by an international group of poets, a chapbook entitled “Poetry for Anish Kapoor” (Palais des Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles; Bozar Literature, 2013). “Let Us Ravel the Silence” first appeared in the French magazine Ligne 13 (#6, Winter-Spring 2013), in Françoise de Laroque’s translation. It was published in conjunction with Irving Petlin’s “The Emperor’s Bridge,” to which it is, similarly, a response. Petlin’s pastel itself derives from an illustration in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. So the wheel turns.
“Still” was conceived as an open sequence both for voices and for the page. The order of the poems need not be seen as fixed. I envisioned it with the possibility of musical accompaniment, hence performance. Should a composer ever care to take all or some of it on, I would hope that she or he would feel free to consider a transformative approach to the texts (e.g., by employing repeats, etc.) as desired. Here too, the possibility of parallel lives.
Idiot Song
By permission of the sun,
the arctic chill descends.
In a teacup a storm,
in a sentence the logician’s fate
and poetry an enemy of the state
of things
by the roadside in a ditch
or beneath a buckled bridge.
Now it is our wounds
that make love in the streets,
wounds hastily dressed
with vetiver and mint
while slender poplars bend
amidst the violent winds.
What is your name,
mindless sun?
What idiot song
will mark your end?
Let Us Ravel the Silence
Let us ravel the silence,
its pages turning
It is a hum, after all, of no sound,
a buzz of absent bees,
a swirl of sky licked by flame
and a waste of sea,
reeds bending east towards a tentative shore,
scatter song of light’s passage
across a curving earth
There is a bridge in the bare distance
It is a bridge between silences,
bridge of steel where once
the Emperor’s dragon was meant to pass
bearing the palaces of the gods on its back,
brows furled over blazing eyes,
scales of gold coating the torso
And always the stones at sea-bottom
like extinguished stars
The sun here neither rises nor sets
Does chalk emit a breath
For László K
The characters are the victims of the novel
They pay with their lives
for our words
They fall between the pages
in their silence
and we invent hounds
to devour the
m
We invent worlds
to swallow them
We pass sentence
upon them
The hangman arrives
with his silken rope
its infinite strands
forming a circle
without beginning or end
round as the wave’s grey eye
rolling toward what sudden shore
unpeopled yet teeming
with watchful night fires
The Laughter of the Sphinx
The laughter of the Sphinx
caused my eyes to bleed
The blood from my eyes
flowed onto that ancient map
of sand
Ridiculous as I am
often have I been drawn
to such lands
rippling oceans of silence
and the distant, enigmatic glow
of burning shops and burning scrolls
overseen by river birds and mitered beasts
sad-eyed scholars and mournful scribes
omniscient ibises
and in the dust-clogged air
the laughter of the Sphinx
endlessly riddling, endlessly echoing,
loosing the blood’s engulfing tide
His Artificial Lover Sings a Wordless Song
The year of silence coming to an end
my artificial lover joined me on the fevered wheel
to the tune of Tinkers Polka, Plums of Purity,
Under the Double Eagle, When
the White Magnolias Bloom . . .
Artificial love was in flower
amidst the revolutionary fragments.
I wondered then, do captive griffins roar
in their dreams? The Mosquito Waltz,
Tiger Mourning for Its Shadow . . .
Far from the real
a day of naked beauty, filtered light.
Do children link their arms as before?
Do they play at rounders, blindman’s buff?
Will the despoilers have it all
to themselves? Even the textured sky?
Xi Chuan, we often ask the same
questions it seems, or is it simply
that together we studied the stars
in Mechanicsville? Orion’s Belt shown,
the Sisters and the Drinking Gourd.
Words formed
their own
seamless patterns
one moment,
sundered the next.
My artificial lover joined me on time’s wheel
in the painted world.
The birds of the hours
crossed and recrossed
before us.
The crowded barques set out.
Isle of Dogs
On the Isle of Dogs we barked.
We had our say
from day till dark.
A chorus we were
of piebald hounds.
Our howling spiraled out
across the downs.
We howled at the redness of light,
bayed at the rising waters
and approaching night—
we lived on an island of sounds.
None listened, none heard,
the sounds were entirely ours .
None listened, none heard
but we didn’t care
as long as our howls
shaped the still air—
we lived on the Isle of Sounds.
Light Moves 1
Mineral light and whale light,
light of memory, light of the eye,
memory’s eye, shaded amber light
coating the page, fretted
light of anarchy, flare of bent
time, firelight and first light,
lake light and forest light,
arcing harbor light,
spirit light and light of the blaze,
enveloping blaze,
century’s fading light,
light of cello, voice, drum,
figures billowing along
horizon, aligned, outlined.
Light Moves 2
Bright light of sleep, its
shortness of breath, its
thousand sexual suns, curved
and fretted light, lies of that light,
dark, inner light, its
whispered words:
Now beyond, now below,
this to left, this to right,
scarecrow in stubble field,
nighthawk on wire,
these to cleanse your sight.
Light Moves 3
Light through the Paper House
rippling across floors and walls,
across the words of the walls,
its paper tables, paper chairs,
its corners,
pale light by which it reads itself,
fills and empties itself,
and speaks.
Light Moves 4
Watcher on the cliff-head
in afternoon light, aqueous light,
watcher being watched
in the salt-silver light
amidst the darting of terns,
beach swallows and gulls,
between the snow of sand
and the transit of clouds,
keeper of thought or prisoner of thought,
watcher being watched,
snowman of sand,
anonymous man.
Light Moves 5
Night-sun and day-sun
twinned and intertwined,
light by a bedside,
cat’s eye by night,
owl light and crystal light,
endless motion of the light,
the rise and the fall,
the splintered flare,
churning northern lights,
phosphor, tip of iris,
gunmetal moon’s
far, reflected light,
oil sheen
on pelican’s wing.
Light Moves 6
And yet what have we done
where have we gone
sometimes in light sometimes not
traveling
we say the great world the small world
the fields
patched with yellow the sudden crows
the city’s streets
alone among others
the billowing streets
bodies crowding past
outlined by light.
What have we done
among the roads and fields
in the theater’s shadows and the theater’s light
so bright you cannot see
those watching beyond
in perfect rows in the dark.
(in homage to Jackson MacLow)
Untitled
(27 vii 2012)
A messenger passed over me
(it was 11:41 PM)
and I thought:
I wish I were as stark
and true as Sonny Rollins
those nights on the singing bridge,
wish to gnaw on the singing bones
in Charlieville and Rome,
wish for the peace of the blaze,
peace of the parricide,
of the eternal ferryman
blind to the river’s twin sides.
A messenger passed over me
(it was 11:43).
I washed the last dishes,
gazed at my altered eyes
in the fractured glass,
found fellowship with a moth
flecked with gold,
tore certain pages apart.
A messenger passed over me
(it was 11:51).
I watched the rain
seep through the roof,
counted the drops,
thinking of Li Po.
A messenger passed through me
(it was 11:58),
passed over the waters
of the warming world,
passed through the eaves, the walls,
the pages of this house,
and I knew that soon enough I would become
a fossil bird or a diorite stone.
Trio (Paris 1959)
And at the Blue Note
that night Bud called
Pork Chops and Assholes
In Elegy
(The Mute Carter Sings)
Sings:
When young
we lived in a certain
enveloping light
and things turned
it seemed
toward our eyes
as if coming to be
Yet to see them again
as if ourselves then
The quartzite
stone the blood
pours through how
it pours silently through
the bright stone
The pepper tree that speaks
of lost meanings by a stream
meanings of speech
meanings of tree
what meaning to the stream
Wheels on the night path
sounding their way
The mute carter sings:
My cart is full
my cart is empty
one and the same
The voices of children
and dogs intermingling
the slender girls along the shore
chanting the coming mysteries
the confounding mysteries
of what is to be
In elegy the mirror
reassembling its shards
In elegy memory
embracing its shadows
In elegy shadows
refashioning the body
In elegy the bell
betraying the hours
In elegy the page
borne off by a breeze
The mute carter sings:
We swallow the earth
limb by limb
The Laughter of the Sphinx Page 1