the muse undoes her blue apron
leans an elbow on the sill
stretches her neck
waits
for the gendarme
with the red whiskers
MR COGITO’S LATE AUTUMN POEM FOR WOMEN’S MAGAZINES
Season of falling apples the stubborn defense of leaves
mist grows thick in the morning and the air is balding
the last grains of honey the first red of the maple trees
a fox killed in a field space reverberates with shooting
apples sink into earth tree stumps come up to sight
leaves will be locked up in chests and wood reply
now you can hear very clearly the planets in orbit
a high moon is rising let the scales cover your eyes
TO EXTRACT OBJECTS
To extract objects from their majestic silence takes either a ploy or a crime.
A door’s icy surface can be unfrozen by a traitor’s knock, a glass dropped on the floorboards shrieks like a wounded bird, and a house set aflame chatters in the loquacious language of fire, the language of a stifled epic, about everything the bed, the chests, the curtains kept to themselves for so long.
MR COGITO CONSIDERS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE HUMAN VOICE AND THE VOICE OF NATURE
The oration of worlds is unflagging
I can recite it all again from the beginning
with a pen left me by a goose and Homer
stand up to the elements
with my shrunken spear
I can recite it all from the beginning
the hand will lose to the mountain
the throat is feebler than the spring
my voice will not carry over sand
I will not tie an eye to a star
with the saliva of a likeness
nor with my ear held to a stone
composed of grainlike silence
will I lead out quietness
yet I gathered so many words into one line
one longer than all the lines on the palm
and therefore longer than fate
into a line directed beyond
a line blossoming
as straight as courage an ultimate line
but it was barely a miniature of the horizon
and the lightning of flowers rolls onward oratio of grass oratio of clouds
choirs of trees murmur a rock burns slowly
the ocean snuffs out the west day swallows night and in the pass of winds
a new light is rising
and the morning mist raises the shield of an island
SEQUOIA
Gothic towers of needles in the valley of a stream
by Mount Tamalpais where mornings and evenings
darkness is thick as an ocean’s anger and ecstasy
in this reservation of giants they show a cross section of a tree
the copper trunk of the West
with immeasurably regular rings like circles on the water
and a cross-grained fool wrote in the dates of human history
an inch from the center the fire of Nero’s distant Rome
halfway the Battle of Hastings a night boarding of drakkars
the stampede of the Anglo-Saxons unhappy Harold’s death
is told by a compass
finally right on the bark’s shore the Normandy landings
The tree’s Tacitus was a surveyor he had no adjectives
no syntax expressive of terror he knew no words at all
so he counted added years and centuries as if to say it’s
nothing but birth and death nothing just birth and death
and inside the bloody pulp of the sequoia
THEY WHO LOST
They who lost now dance with bells on their ankles
fettered in funny clothes in feathers of a dead eagle
the dust of compassion rises up from a little square
and a movie shotgun shoots benignly and on target
they raise tin axes and with a bow light as a brow kill leaves and shadows
so only the drum the drum crashes recalling their former pride and rage
they gave up history and fell into the sloth of showcases
they’re lying in glass-topped vaults next to faithful stones
They who lost—near the governor’s mansion in Santa Fe
(a long one-story building of warm burnt ocher brown
wood columns protruding roofbeams a sharp shadow hangs on)
they sell beads amulets of the rain and fire god little Kiva temples
two straws of a ladder sticking up on which the harvest descends
buy the god echo he’s cheap and keeps a pregnant silence
swaying on the arms stretched out to us
from the Neolithic age
MR COGITO BEMOANS THE PETTINESS OF DREAMS
Even dreams are shrinking
where are the sleepy processions of our grandparents
when colorful as birds wanton as birds they ascended high
on the imperial steps and a thousand chandeliers were glittering
and grandpa now familiar only with his cane pressed a silver sword
to his side and an unloved grandmother who was kind enough
to take on for him the countenance of his first love
to them
Isaiah used to speak from clouds like wisps of tobacco smoke
and they saw how Saint Teresa
pale as a communion wafer carried a real basket of firewood
their terror was great as a horde of Tartars
and happiness in a dream like golden rain
my dream—the doorbell I’m shaving in the bathroom I open the door
a collector hands me the bill for the gas and electricity
I have no money I go back to the bathroom pondering
the figure 63, 50
I lift my eyes and see my face
so real in the mirror that I wake up with a scream
if only once I would dream of a hangman’s red coat
or a queen’s necklace I would be grateful to dreams
MR COGITO AND A POET OF A CERTAIN AGE
1
A poet past his prime
an odd phenomenon
2
he looks in the mirror
he smashes the mirror
3
on a moonless night
he drowns his birth certificate in a black pond
4
he spies on the young
imitates the way they rock their hips
5
he chairs a meeting
of independent Trotskyites
incites them to arson
6
he writes letters
to the President of the Solar System
full of intimate confessions
7
a poet of a certain age
in the middle of an uncertain age
8
instead of cultivating
pansies and onomatopoeias
he sows spiky exclamations
invectives and treatises
9
he reads Isaiah and Das Kapital by turns
then in the frenzy of discussion
gets his quotes mixed up
10
a poet in the nebulous season
between the departure of Eros
and a Thanatos not yet risen from stone
11
he smokes hash
but doesn’t see
either infinity
or flowers
or waterfalls
he sees a procession
of hooded monks
climbing a rocky mountain
carrying burned-out torches
12
the poet of a certain age
recalls warm childhood
a wild youth
a disreputable manhood
13
he plays
at Freud
at hope
he plays
at red and black
he plays
at flesh
and blood
he plays and loses
is seized with false mirth
14
only now does he understand his father
he cannot forgive his sister
who eloped with an actor
he envies his younger brother
and bent over a picture of his mother
he tries once more
to persuade her to conceive
15
dreams
trivial pubertal
the catechism priest
protruding objects
and the unattainable Jadzia
16
at dawn he examines
his hand
astonished by skin
that looks like bark
17
against the fresh blue sky
the white tree of his veins
MR COGITO AND POP
1
During a pop concert
Mr Cogito mulls over
the aesthetics of noise
an idea in itself
quite appealing
being a god means
to hurl thunderbolts
or less theologically
to swallow the elements’ tongue
to substitute an earthquake
for Homer
a stone avalanche
for Horace
to drag from guts
what’s in the guts
terror and hunger
to lay bare the paths
of intestines
to lay bare the paths
of the breath
to lay bare the paths
of desire
to play mad love songs
on a red throat
2
the trouble is
that a cry eludes form
is poorer than a voice
which rises
and falls
a cry touches silence
but by way of hoarseness
not by way of the desire
to describe silence
its darkness blazes
with inarticulacy
it rejected the grace of humor
because it knows no half-tones
it is like a knife blade
driven into a mystery
it does not wrap itself
around the mystery
never finds its shapes
expresses emotional truths
from a wildlife reservation
it seeks the paradise lost
in a new jungle of order
prays for a violent death
and this will be granted
MR COGITO ON MAGIC
1
Mircea Eliade is right
we are—despite it all
an advanced society
magic and gnosis
flourish as never before
fake paradises
fake infernos
are for sale on every corner
plastic instruments of torture
were discovered in Amsterdam
a virgin from Massachusetts
received a baptism of blood
Seventh Day catatonics
stand on the runways
the fourth dimension will grab them
or an ambulance with a hoarse siren
along Telegraph Avenue
shoals of beards swim
in the sweet smell of nirvana
Joe Dove dreamed
that he was a god
and a god nothingness
he fell slow as a feather
from the Eiffel Tower
an underage philosopher
and acolyte of De Sade
deftly cuts open
a pregnant woman’s belly
and paints in blood on a wall
sacred verses of annihilation
in addition oriental orgies
forced and a little tedious
2
from this fortunes grow
branches of industry
branches of crime
diligent little ships sail
in search of new spices
engineers of visual depravation
labor without rest
panting alchemists of hallucination
manufacture
new thrills
new colors
new moans
and an art of aggressive epilepsy
is born
with time
debauchers will go gray
and consider atonement
then there will arise
new prisons
new asylums
new cemeteries
but this is a vision
of a better future
for now
magic
flourishes
as never before
MR COGITO COMES ACROSS A STATUETTE OF THE GREAT MOTHER IN THE LOUVRE
This little cosmology of fired clay
slightly larger than a hand comes from Boeotia
at the top her head like the holy mountain Meru
from which hair falls—the earth’s great rivers
her neck is the heavens warmth pulses there
sleepless constellations
a necklace of clouds
send us the holy water of abundance
you from whose fingers leaves grow
we born of clay
like the ibis the snake and the grass
we want you to hold us
in your mighty palms
on her belly the square earth
under guard of a double sun
we don’t want other gods our flimsy dwelling of air
is enough a stone a tree the simple names of things
please carry us heedfully from one night to another
then blow out our senses at the question’s threshold
in the display case the abandoned Mother
watches with the astonished eye of a star
THE HISTORY OF THE MINOTAUR
The true history of the prince Minotaur is told in the yet undeciphered script Linear A. He was—despite later rumors—the authentic son of King Minos and Pasiphaë. The little boy was born healthy, but with an abnormally large head—which fortune-tellers read as a sign of his future wisdom. In fact with the years the Minotaur grew into a robust, slightly melancholy idiot. The king decided to give him up to be educated as a priest. But the priests explained that they couldn’t accept the feeble-minded prince, for that might diminish the authority of religion, already undermined by the invention of the wheel.
Minos then brought in the engineer Daedalus, who was fashionable in Greece at the time as the creator of a popular branch of pedagogical architecture. And so the labyrinth arose. Within its system of pathways, from elementary to more and more complicated, its variations in levels and rungs of abstraction, it was supposed to train the Minotaur prince in the principles of correct thinking.
So the unhappy prince wandered along the pathways of induction and deduction, prodded by his preceptors, gazing blankly at ideological frescos. He didn’t get them at all.
Having exhausted all his resources, King Minos resolved to get rid of this disgrace to the royal line. He brought in (again from Greece, which was known for its able men) the ace assassin Theseus. And Theseus killed the Minotaur. On this point myth and history agree.
Through the labyrinth—now a useless primer—Theseus makes his way back carrying the big, bloody head of the Minotaur with its goggling eyes, in which for the first time wisdom had begun to sprout—of a kind ordinarily attributed to experience.
OLD PROMETHEUS
He is writing his memoirs. In them he tries to explain the position of the hero in a system of necessity, to reconcile the mutually contradictory concepts of existence and fate.
The fire is crackli
ng cheerfully in the hearth; in the kitchen his wife is bustling—a gushy girl who couldn’t bear him a son but consoles herself that she will enter history anyway. Preparations are underway for a dinner to which the local priest has been invited as well as the pharmacist who is now Prometheus’s closest friend.
The fire crackles in the hearth. On the wall a stuffed eagle and a letter of gratitude from a tyrant of the Caucasus, who succeeded in burning a rebel city thanks to Prometheus’s invention.
Prometheus chuckles to himself. This is now his only way of expressing his quarrel with the world.
CALIGULA
Reading old chronicles, epics, and biographies, Mr Cogito sometimes feels persuaded of the physical presence of long deceased persons.
CALIGULA SAYS:
Among all the citizens of Rome
I loved only one
my horse—Incitatus
when he entered the Senate
his coat’s unblemished toga
shone immaculate among lily-livered purple-clad murderers
Incitatus had many virtues
he never spoke in public
he had the nature of a Stoic
I think in his stable at night he must have read the philosophers
I loved him so much one day I decided to crucify him
but his noble anatomy would not allow it
he accepted his consul’s rank indifferently
he wielded power in the best possible way
that is he didn’t wield it at all
we failed to incline him to a steady relationship
with my dear wife Caesonia
and so sadly no line of centaur-emperors arose
that’s why Rome fell
I decided to have him pronounced a god
but on the ninth day before the calends of February
Cherea Cornelius Sabinus and other fools stonewalled my pious plan
The Collected Poems Page 16