by Susan Howe
restless eye
Cognitive focus of “attention”
Small head and torso of a Silenus with wineskin
Graeco Roman
Motif of variation of statues of Eros carrying an amphora
Child satyrs holding wine skins
The lure of Bog-Latin, Shelta and Bēarlagair na Sāer, Ogham, and cryptology may feel superannuated or fatally picturesque to some, but I treasure my edition of The Secret Languages of Ireland by the archaeologist R. A. Stewart Macalister. It’s reprinted by Craobh Books (Armagh, 1997) and has a paper over board cover, a plain light blue jacket with text normally reserved for the inside flap in simple serif typeface on the front, so the effect is both dryly pedagogical and rebellious. According to Macalister the work is based on a random collection of loose sheets, letters, manuscript notebooks, scraps of paper, dictionary slips, “relics of the industry of the late lamented John Sampson, known to all as one of the greatest of the world’s authorities on the Gypsies.” Secret Languages is wonderfully littered with etymological particulars, diacritical characters, hieroglyphs, wordlists, oblique slashes.
Sometimes I think of “Tom Tit Tot” and “Debths” as collaged essays on the last poems of William Butler Yeats, the poet I loved first.
Content
New Poems was the last collection published in Yeats’s lifetime. I enjoy facsimile editions (such as the Cornell New Poems: Manuscript Materials) of poets whose manuscripts have a strong visual component. What interests me most isn’t the photographed handwritten original on the even numbered side but the facing typographical transcription on the odd. These doggedly Quixotic efforts at conversion are a declaration of faith. The textual scholar hopes, through successive processes of revision, to draw out something that resists articulated shuffling. Secret connections among artifacts are audible and visible and yet hidden until you take a leap—overwriting signified by a vertical brace—superimposed letters with others underneath—sometimes empty brackets signify a tear or a worn place. It’s the mystery of strong music in the soul. Our eyes see what is outside in the landscape in the form of words on paper but inside, a slash or mark wells up from a deeper place where music before counting hails from
Hnuy illa nyha, majah Yahoo
“Strike the rock,” says the Piper, “and tears will come out.” “Remember I have been here for an endless number of years always keeping up with laggards. These instructions are not to be whinnied around Boston.”
TITIAN AIR VENT
A work of art is a world of signs, at least to the poet’s nursery bookshelf sheltered behind the artist’s ear. I recall each little motto howling its ins and outs to those of us who might as well be on the moon illu illu illu
Beacon
A tiny artificial theater of the world. I am here to slay the dragon in the ready-made name of an earlier Susan. While there is still time do you know anything about my watch being stopped? Put your hand over my eyes and say I have got it in my mind.
Ceramic, plaster, laquer, newspaper
Footprint
Certain bronze elements found among the Pied Piper’s personal effects have been moved from one exhibition room to another. Here are messages. “The Face of God.” “Dust,” “Time is a river.” Props and other disinherited paraphernalia are never enough.
I have to go in and catch my breath
Electric bulb
It’s a manic condition; barbaric conceptions of an “other self” sawing away our finite future as we approach the laws which govern clutter; leaving at death to return no more although fitfully visiting old haunts with the aid of metal, clay, guache, glass, glue
Odysseus Creeping Forward during the Theft of the Palladium
"If you want to know what the law used to be, go to such an one of his colleagues; if you want to know what it is going to be, go to such another; if you want to know what the law ought to be, go to a third; but if you happen to want to know what the law is, go to Gray.”
John Chipman Gray and the Rule Against Perpetuities
Something more anc ient than what you remember or may not remember moved me to lean on you. Because of all the dead.
I can’t.
My cry is in the frost
Mary Temple. Present as absent.
The Dutch Room, Saint Patrick’s Day, March 18th, 1990.
You can’t fool a regular boarder, as Mr. Holmes would say.
Morse Code, army flag signal, plaster
Ellen Sturgis Hooper. 1812–1848.
Thanks to Boston here is a poem.
“I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty
I woke and found that life was duty
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on poor heart, unceasingly. . . .”
Glass, plasticine, dried flowers, foliage
Te turo turo
Running footsteps. Interlete te interlute. Ages have passed. A bell of the Chou Dynasty is in my hands. Goodbye for the present. I seem to go back to things that do not belong to me. Call when you get depressed. There are those of us at a distance who may have seemed to drop out of touch but never really did
Mary Howitt. 1799–1888
Oh for some old Mystery
Something we could not know—
Something we could not fathom—
As it was long time ago.
Yamuna river map, spreadsheet, riverbed
Eme ede ege edu elu
Peter Rugg with child, horse, and open chair. “Is this the way to Boston?”
Eye piece, prism, Euryscope, Platiscope
Perpetuities
Boston shifts with the winds and plays with the compass. We are oathbound we cannot stop, so hush little chair with light blue slipcover
Reliquary, trellis cross-grid, shoelace, comma
For what Porpoise
My body is made of bones. In times of trouble and perplexity I can bend my limbs and stretch half fish half Fishman in Excelsis. A luminous aura surrounds all things noumenal. No need for money money money
Believe me I am not rubbish
Lattice Phonesis
This variagated fabric band hints at what waking point, within itself and upon itself, a work of art is nourished and multiplied through subliminal abecedarian recollection
Antique Mirror
Etce ce Tera. Forgotn quiet all. Nobody grows old and crafty here in middle air together. Long ago ice wraith foliage.
I had such fren
Our mother of puddled images fading away into deep blue polymer.
Seaweed, nets, shells, fish, feathers
TOM TIT TOT
PERISCOPE
God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom
Moby-Dick
Closed book who stole
who away do brackets
signify emptiness was
it a rift in experience
Mackerel and porpoise
was this the last of us
These tallied scraps float
like glass skiffs quietly for
love or pity and all that
What an idea in such a time
as ours Pip among Pleiads
Mystical accidentalism for
sound-hemmed naught in
night’s botanical glossary
Over unnamed cycles see
the rich on that rust heap
Once when the real world
was our world in its nature
to mind our would world
Threshold word little hinge
hope of bewilderment its
parchment memory sign
Each word may be six six
razzle rungs it may be two
places at once in the old
secret escapades a vault
benediction for one lucky
one under thimble thumb
Cobble on downward path
long story renegade with
silver money in latch box
Plaint when then was then
at the lief end of ciphers
Cross counterclockwise via
cobbled childhood juvenalia
to hobbled monosandalism
Choose one rugged raggedy
quatrain its puppet pattern
A coverlet has drifted down
in double compass with sled
loom as if it were patterned
Many shuttles many treadles
That beam was only a straw
So long as one fact stands
isolated and strange one
fact supported by no fact
Woodslippercounterclatter
I can spin straw by myself
If to sense you are
alive is pleasant itself
or can be nearly so—
If I knew what it is
I’d show it—but no
What I lack is myself
Come lie down on my shadow
Being infinitely self-conscious
I sold your shadow for you too
Let’s let bygones be bygones
Dust to dust we barely reach
You sit in our tent of belief
and ask what to do with it
Faithful first then frivolous
Half scientific but good at
guessing by sensation you
look at a flame is it orange
within you or without you
In another poem I’m in a
perfectly black room with
my eyes directed on this
sheet of paper to make a
long story short I will tell
Baba Yaga in her tinsel hut
to heal your hobble foot
Hut running on chicken legs
Achilles has his heel what’s
left to a thirdhand sightseer
Caves and rivers imagine
having to bury yourself over
and over knock on wood
Telling the story of a man
who is responsible for his
own ruin and is inexplicably
condemned to wander in
a one-horse chair eternally
around Boston from which
historical song he himself
cannot free himself with a
wave of his hand whither—
Dusk friars carrying tapers blow
farewell kisses to Peter Rugg our
missing man but what’s the use
he’s skipping across roof tops
Let’s be human we can’t carry
the Galoshes of Fortune home
In the old days I used to sit
up late till an owl appeared
Negative infinity melodrama
I shall never forget you half-
way owl shadow marauder
How you flew over and over
To stagger and fall to the
nether side of the hut never
to stand with your back to
the forest because the hut
when it wants to allegedly
rushes this way then that
Do you hear the clock lock
Just wait till I turn back—
When stars are not so faint
and new astronomers assign
numbers one may count one
other and each secretly jot
down in units and tenths for
photometrics other instant
infinitesimal arc predicates
A nearest faint ghost alias—
Unseen in canoe or cut glass
skiff scudding past centuries
on another map kept secret
from earth moon vision each
reflecting an end point where
is will remain as is etcetera
Setting sun then Lethe where
ever fabled swan-white Helios
in our own time underground
In this second place we think
we only think we think though
our ghosts appear in mirrors
This side I will show miniature
network entanglements comma
Blessings full stop yours very
half-hesitation semi-colon semi-
colon yes the sea lies about us
Our tininess on earth as such
These quiet stars each free
intelligence sealed from us
Days and hours are blinds
These screens these means
each new extreme outvies
each quickening after after
After the millennium a little
before at brink at the brink
Humming octaves with wild
trills of magic and symbolic
logic a not-being-in-the-no
DEBTHS
Copyright © 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 by Susan Howe
Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Publisher’s Note: Woodslippercounterclatter, a collaborative performance by Susan Howe and the composer David Grubbs, was produced as a CD in 2014 by Blue Chopsticks, under the Drag City label. Parts of Tom Tit Tot appeared in Woodslippercounterclatter and also were exhibited at Yale Union in Portland, Oregon, and in the Whitney Biennial of 2014. Portions of Debths have appeared in Hambone and in the Cambridge Literary Review.
Author’s Note: Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives; New Poems, Manuscript Materials by W. B. Yeats (edited by J.C.C. Mays and Stephen Parrish, Cornell University Press); The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 16, Part 2: Poetical Works II: Poems (Variorum Text) (edited by J.C.C. Mays, Princeton University Press); and Paul Thek: Diver, a Retrospective by Elisabeth Sussman and Lynn Zelevansky, with essays by George Baker (Whitney Museum of American Art and Carnegie Museum of Art, Yale University Press).
Design by Leslie Miller
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published as New Directions Paperbook 1380 in 2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Howe, Susan, 1937– author.
Title: Debths / Susan Howe.
Description: New York, NY : New Directions Publishing, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017009786 | ISBN 9780811226851 (alk. paper)
Classification: LCC PS3558.O893 A6 2017 | DDC 811/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009786
eISBN: 9780811226868
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
by New Directions Publishing Corporation
80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011