Five Poems
Rosmarie Waldrop
MALLARMÉ AS PHILOLOGIST, DYING
Even the purest writer is not entirely in his work, we must admit. A saturated white tilts off the page, a ricochet of sense like children heard, not understood. You see the gap between chance breath and the continuous line of the horizon, method to infinite power or out one candle. Anatole aboli. Bibelot Anatole. Walks down the stairs, one by one, to the bottom of the mirror. It is the lack of self splits his ear. A labyrinth like a sentence. Always, word follows word, to stave off those little deaths. Is he alive?
When he leaves the room, he recaptures a memory called meaning. A matrix where a word is carried by a foreign language. Say “th.” Say the whole word: “death.” The Box for Learning English by Yourself and Playing is broken, the string to push the puppet’s tongue between his teeth. “Debt” is not comparable, not part of the body. Throw the dice, throw. Again. If often enough, only everything. Between the teeth.
To track your dream, enter by way of the corridor and comparative grammar. The dream is called work. The corridor leads to Hebrew, which shows how to replace lacking inflection by ideal nakedness. The corridor passes time, so that the girl is cold. When you caress her name, somber and red like an open pomegranate, you slowly descend toward. Stop. The dream insists that meaning, memory and music are the same. Out of its own lack, it fashions a flesh of vowels, and of consonants a skeleton delicate to dissect. What is a faun to do?
A simple laryngitis. Does not abolish breath. A lacking word, a thought that terrible would vibrate suffocating like an open spasm splits his ear terrible his throat. Genevieve, virgin spasm, vivacious, and beautiful today suffocating. A fan of lacking experiences. For Mademoiselle Mallarmé. It is hot. Wants a book on anatomy, it cannot be too simple: he might place the larynx in the brain. Again. His breath stops, and we are all speechless.
THE THREAD OF THE SENTENCE
Etymology is one of the choices. The other, wearing your heart on your sleeveless. Cross my.
Even the straightest road conceals detours and forks. Thirst. For physical presence in tight succession. All week I concentrated on the hopeless accuracy of anxiety.
A line made to incorporate circumference. What the snow falls on. The very deep of a labyrinth, its poorly lit fortnights, its views without domain so like destiny.
Her beauty was called foreign. In relation to terms whose absence is felt. The foreign in one single thrust, absence felt elsewhere. Is self?
Not snow, but its blue shadow. Exchange of rather and disintegrating not made complex by the transfer of money. Thirst eddies.
Time is the invention of past snow. The thread I walk like a tightrope. The maze in the shape of a straight line.
Given to conclusions, I admire awkwardness in love. Open my clothes. To what stands outside my tongue.
The labyrinth is a ruse. Already passing into something else. The thread, swing, syncope life hangs by. My already share of nothing.
NORMAL DISTURBANCES
To understand the body as water. Reflecting elsewheres of light. Above, increase of waves.
No need has the language to become the law it would be. Whereas streetcars travel in straight lines. To demonstrate perspective. To extend their grooves into your body. Runs, along the lines, the pale blue lightning. Speechless, the self is now directed.
Inevitably. Projecting parts onto the outer world. Café tables. At angles. Yet development must develop out loud. Else a condition for already gone by. Here love, Renaissance architecture and increased anxiety.
Here too the gift of excrement. Excessive subservience mapped on a grid.
The laws of perspective both libidinal and aggressive. Won’t forgive you the impulse to flight.
Holes in the fabric. Medieval congestion breaks into sunlit piazzas. Ego in bits. Thus, a feeling of disintegration.
Against transitory experiences, gratification opening outward, and foreign bodies embedded in the self. Inasmuch as. The resilience of the infantile mind. Opens and closes in confusion.
I understand. You are waiting for a flourish of rhetoric, an Italian tenor. But I am drowning. There are other examples. Let’s summarize your fears, objections to, and side issues of, plain thinking.
Guilt always rises to the surface. After puritanically straight streets you yourself must walk in straits and narrows. Speak slowly and distinctly. Not to mention: stop for breath.
STEPS IN INTEGRATION
Anxiety arises, she says. To signals of the clock. To cut down the forest for the trees. To to. Compulsive ties found embedded.
White, hard piece of chalk. So that the letters resemble hunger. Subtract underwater from fear of parting.
In early childhood, atoms cannot be seen. Not mechanically interlocked. Not in collision. On billboards. Then impulse seems to attach itself, and time so short.
In a run-down neighborhood, the jazz players. The water moves around the trout. No color separation.
Is the ego capable of splitting the object? The atom? Hairs? The clock in winter, extreme context. The forest cut down.
Faced with unpleasant stimuli the organism reacts by fragmentation, considered as a weapon. Letters written in a rage. And space between limbs.
The atomists found the liquid state hard to explain, but the trout stirs under water. A raw world, she says. Out of raw world into commercial zone. And time so short.
The sound of many atoms. The color of drums. The solace of phantasy.
Condition of flight: First plant your right foot and then your left. On noun? Or adjective? Folded in, the flush of omnipotence.
SCHIZOID DEFENSES
Surrounded on three sides by foreign idiom. On the fourth, fear of overtones. To locate myself where speaking breaks and scatters I tack as many boundaries in memory. Amorphous followed by winter.
Friends unreliable if handsome. Thing else. If we listen intently without understanding we hear white. New snow falls. On this old noise, thickly. Severed, like a lost meaning, from my own tongue, I know nothing of myself.
Mismatched body equates horizon and hollow. How to open and enter, so warm the blankets. Unfinished weather seen through glass. I have my thoughts and see them drift across the snow too. The body suddenly heavier. Suddenly afraid of falling out the window.
Certain consonants coat the atmosphere. Phonemes out of a beautiful face, as a stubble of grass breaks through the snow. And reverts at once to: no landscape, no subtitles. Farther west, whole fields of indifference.
I speak as if on snow shoes, wide berths so as not to sink. Home speech, too, suddenly foreign. As if it were always another who speaks. As if I were both first and third person.
Two Poems
Martine Bellen
FOUNDATION MANDALA
—for Claire
Of sapphire. Systematically construed
off a square; offering
deities a balcony on which to dance
How does one illuminate the atmosphere?
Sheath of candles
Irrigate the four winds
Ganesha round back repairs walls
while the girl maps elements of philosophy
and posthumously eavesdrops on grandmother
whose files, over six feet thick,
contain wisdom applicable to Vermeer, birds, fabula,
penny arcades and the chance encounter
of a sirocco and softened laughter.
The girl disguising herself as an old spider
in a 13th century limnal magic lantern
exacts impulses from light and pearls of moisture
which accumulate on complex webbing
as Picasso eats cats,
woos & plays the flute.
This boundless structure binding structure,
city of flesh and bones
Hear white wheat
where mind drops, a vibrant precipice
Indra inspects the floors of the building,
consults diagram
s drawn in mineral on brocade,
tests supports, balance, flexibility.
Holiness as a star,
octagon, circle, jewel
Traditionally sand-painters applied this city
of shadow, channels, cul-de-sacs,
moving inward toward its heart
Trappings of misknowledge in Grandma’s cabinets
the girl uses to reconstruct conditions of weather,
directional colors, the need of her being in her need
to escape, she pirouettes atop the head of a pin,
petals of tears and pomegranate minaret. My lost ballerina
sloshes ring-side the spectral world held in place by neural wind
where everyone has two names,
lives according to the outer universe or
train’s harmonic connection to its crossing.
Drywall, five transparent layers
of Panisks, Dakini, Guardian Dragons
Consecreation of this mandala eliminates reversals,
a frameless forest from throat to heart,
in ornamental buildings with indelible arms
to carry and heal when embraced.
Tinkling bells announce transition of natural phenomena
NOCTURNE
The Swan sails a milky tide spread evenly across Silver River
&Pierrette angry with the moon and universe of flute, viola, harp
Harmonizing our corrupt selves with the utterly impassable
Unable to suffer
Without leitmotiv
Not to denote absence but to describe in negative terms to capture the fades and sequences
The equation of peering at the sky upside-down, at Cassiopeia, a sequin,
Butterfly’s dream, Andromeda
Philosophical toys contenting emblematic identity
Below her waist: blue coral
Cloud’s breath root-coiled to earth
How matter’s faithless
Miscellaneity under a simmering cinder moon
Omen of bones, ignoble, central moods
Crinkum-crankum frogs congesting trees
Shaded by a turbid glow
Bee’s familiarities
With the mild moon
Key to the bright world
Communal & personal aspects of integrating with sound as landscape
(converted luminosity)
She sleeps in black and white woods,
Only when awake do colors saturate
Habitats of resonance
Glass splashed with spells, decanto
Ghouls, fouler wind, and swollen waves
A passing moon, passion moon
The sword which lies ready for battle in the open heart, shiny moon
(A hidden moon scuds behind the broken cloud)
Or is the Divine Window—apprehension of our invisible body
Tucked away in the prose closet
Neck-ruffles of stars and the dones d’aigo
Sheltered in underground water-falled halls, weaving water
To gowns, the living mutable spirit of each fountain:
The Tender Fount, Course Spring,
Spring of Deceit, Glassy Fountain, The Dried Up Spring
(reduce amount of blood in body, reduce desire)
Innermost subtle drops
Suffusing throat, heart
Gave speech to bird and wind
That dance for an audience of one; still swirls
Of bejeweled tulle pirouette in echoing applause,
Like the clinks of cordial glasses
Inspiriting the dark alone
She is an idiot, walks through the burden forgetting
What disappeared. Her
World fell away. A wind, hitherto unknown, physically unanimous,
All the Devils of Hell cannot pluck a feather from one poor wren.
Five Poems
Peter Sacks
NOTE
Others choose more solid figures of resemblance but the wind blows from that place
dividing tissue seed flame unpermitted edges carrying the socket-bone’s
implicit trial—here bend—here study it—the law remains torn feather scrap of
tarmac skin you fill it in you plough over the crater lip past argument the certain
flourish, short-stemmed, reachable with signalling what comes out of the wind
as an arrest, a feeding precedent, this rapid lifting now you link away drive out
each thrust upslope above the mark the mortar set you press against more weight
as for the future peace with gaps a hive a hull white shredding petal wave it will
not stop the work’s upheaval where the impact shows its vein the unencompassable
paying out root thread survival-salted pollen knowing other judgment in the
sideways trace and drag you cast you follow it.
NOTE
Had you existed (this world) had you set your own equivalent across the track
would there have been a further purpose clearing the debris? Or earlier—before
the call, before the guarantees (the stars of heaven, sand, the wings resettling
above ordinary slaughters)—was it to frighten us away? How solitary,
with smoke mixed in, with scrapings. Listen—let the others hear the long
collisions wrapped in silence. Blank flag of surrender & no writing covers you.
CURRENT
The fossil of the fish in candlelight—a dorsal fin
set wavering by current & the spine more flame than stone.
Breathe in.
The words too grow transparent, heard-through, to this end.
What’s nearest to you now?
Ungathered sediment, you’re swaying on your stem
time loosens, thins, through-lit as by an older
element.
It knows you as you will become.
6.12.00
As dead leaves in the space between leaf-shadows gleam, you could not
keep from waking further, disentangled from what might have been
perpetual fear. The core took longer, first whom, then what.
As if all flesh were punishable proof,
they had been everywhere, the trees.
FACE TO FACE
The sky too fed upon itself
& hid behind the point where everything takes on
the sheen of disbelief.
Justice shivered in its mask.
The residue of innocence would speak if it had words. Would cry out
once more for what name? What is its sin, there at the origin?
Two Poems
Reginald Shepherd
ROMAN YEAR
Martius
The corrugated iron gates
are rolling down storefronts
in paradise, late light flecks windows,
rain’s acid fingerprints. Motes
float between iron and glass, sink
into sanded pavements, weather’s
footprints, cracked mappa mundi: silk
tea roses with a fringe of plastic fern;
grapes, apples, and bananas ripened
to painted wax: your eyes
blinking away some pollen
in wind that says spring’s coming, wait
for me. Months sometimes it takes
Aprilis
light scrolls across an unmade bed,
we were setting out for Aries
in paper planes (white dwarf stars
bright in a wilderness of wish scatter
white feathers among me, fistfuls
of light): bees busied themselves
with the seen, moment’s
multiple tasks, for the pollen, honey
in the blood, bees would drown
each day: from a thicket of nos
to one sepaled blossoming, all
in an afternoon
you thought of bees as summer
Maius
Heliotrope gaze has fixed m
e
in its sights (turning solar year suffers
sudden rain, grazes my cold
with vague waves, plashing
particles, but lightly): lightly
take this sky, bound up in so much
loose light, light wind brushes chapped
lips. Light-footed gods break open
day to see what it contains: body
survives light’s inquisitions.
Juniius
beside the shale pigeons a dove
color of old brick dust, the sound
of brick dust settling: traffic noise
rides heat-rise off wet streets, summer
music echoes borrowed air: light
centrifugal, sent scattering, lost later
every day: some gold
against bright water (handfuls
scattered over lake), unnecessary, true
candleland waning to wax
and wick, silver water shattering
like backed glass.
Quintilis
When I was in Egypt, light fell
instead of rain, congealed to grains of sand,
pyramidal, uninterred. Uninterrupted waves
of palms departed for shuddering oases. Why was it
I spent centuries in that mirage, caravanserai
of the sirocco stopped, pausing at
reflection, also called the polished sky,
and still no fall of shade? The light hung
triangular, aslant, touched the colossus
to song.
Sextilis
Wanting to understand, not wanting
to understand, by taking thought you lose it, by not
taking thought. Watching him run a hand
through thinning blond hair, passing
at arm’s length on a lunch hour
street. Wondering is it good now, am I
pleasure, and which part is it I need,
while air migrates too slowly to be seen
and noon crawls groggy over August
skin. Then thinking No, it’s too
and turning back to look at traffic.
September
Sudden storm, then sudden sun. Give me,
I almost said: and stopped, began again
with your voice, what gets invented by the
American Poetry Page 16