Gap Gardening

by Rosmarie Waldrop

When above the poem flames. And coal black the dream. Round the soles of your feet because. The earth pulls your body. More fiery through spheres plunged. But lovely it is the soul to unfold. And the sand burning.

  4

  The moon is a thin line and we see a thin line.

  By Thebes and thieves! let not our names be blotted out.

  *

  The things that enter one’s skull. But a real skeleton. With key. And describing your eyes the dark.

  *

  Plainly a heavy heart. Can it bring about death? Impossible to understand. But when heavy the feet yet venture out. On a path you know as long. As you live you. Cannot die.

  *

  A horse stares unblinking. You slap a tree trunk as if. To imprint all that’s the case. Or a snow goose high above the globe. Where are you?

  *

  Stripes. Blue lilies. You know your neck. (Not your mind.) Is damp with sweat. And like the more solid vase both. Not without limits.

  5

  Narcissus, clematis, ranunculus, rancor. All the forces of flesh. And spirit clash. Shrieking birds inside your body. As when you say both Yes and No instead of music. To your own questions. As if flesh were not. Grass death should forget to mow. The ship anchored. In your head goes up. In flames and time backward.

  *

  You should take everything. Except your shoelaces. To heart. Which moves within the flesh. And should.

  *

  My friend. Take care not to die. Not be torn to pieces. And let not because we’re raw. Gods lash with waves our flesh. And its muscles and fibers and vessels and fat. And with this spell move on. If indeed life is. A dream it had better be. A good one. Which goes to the heart. Yet the world is all air. My luck to hear scholars debate the word “smoke” and not. Suffocate. Whereas imaginings take shape. As though in this world.

  IV. Unaccountable Lapses

  1

  What is memory? A palace? The belly of the mind? Of absence a dream? The baby in the picture I don’t remember, but I remember my doll.

  *

  Knowledge with a flavor of thin air. The more invisible the fabric befits neighboring particles. But the sun’s eaten in the sky and still. Its own body keeps. And where it is we pursue. So more like a piece of property

  to which I lay claim. Than a state of mind. Or androgyny. Or love of black pepper.

  *

  In dark ivy I sat. In the shade of an oak. Just as noon poured down and lost wax. In my ears loitered. According to tradition. A shadow fell across clear-cut narration as I followed Wittgenstein to places. Where nothing happens.

  *

  Even as I let wander my thoughts. The way blood cells circulate to any part of the body. Or birds keep hopping. From branch to branch. Which makes them hard to keep track of. Unless I have words that don’t fall. Between the tracks.

  *

  How many times can one single heart beat? So many breaths deep and shallow. While the years pass without hard edges. So I could put them end to end.

  2

  Animals do not hunt for a story. But blind am I in my soul. A fault is embedded. And were it not for the doll I would not. Know who I am. A pocket in space expanding less rapidly.

  *

  A riddle is anything pure. In pure memory (what is pure memory? and where?) I might know my image. But not find a caption. Though a name of my own I have no matter what time of year.

  *

  So should I inward turn? Breath held long enough to show. The rim of vertical time. Molecules into slower vibrations betrayed. A flake of death off the skin.

  *

  Do we remain as we begin? Not to words then would thinking turn but to our first soaking sunlight. To rage raw and desperate cleaving the body. Like lightning the earth.

  *

  So where must I search for my childhood? Among folds of the brain at the risk of falling between? Or in my throat an acid reflux? In order to repeat? What to complete I have failed? Until there’s a hole in the window where I meant to toss the stone?

  3

  Maybe the past is enough for the past and all its inhabitants. They need not be drawn out of retirement. But if I repeat without knowing I repeat? Am I in my own body?

  *

  Or is the past, like the Gods, without emotion? and gropes for our feelings lest it transparent turn? Like a woman not looked at? Fading between the pages of Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen?

  *

  Meanwhile breath by breath down burns the house and under its rubble buries us. And great bodies of thought melt away. And no form identical to them ever again on the face of the earth appears.

  *

  Though of love and sweet of summer traces float through arteries like great ships. Carrying kits for survival since the body is practical. And only when the brain’s defenses are down, as in dreams, do we drown in the pure stream.

  *

  The way Madame Blavatsky dipped her body in the Ganges and, says Yoel Hoffmann, said a prayer for plants. And did not consider the history of the earth and its reigns of silence and long sleep.

  4

  Not every fish has a jaw and many are the soft-bodied beasts our ancestors. And many forgotten beyond the shale of recall. Though their history can be read, some claim, in the cells of our body. The way language contains the layers of its development.

  *

  And Dante said angels have no need of memory for they have continuous understanding. But we. To enter into thought. Need a bridge.

  *

  But a mind obsessively drawn toward memory. Its own obstacle becomes. Like magnets pushed apart by the field they create. Or I enter the picture as a shadow because dumbly I get in the way of the light. And because I am shadow I cannot see.

  *

  Or the way we cut open. Heads and x-ray our chests. In the effort to find love.

  *

  Clustered on the tip of my tongue. Are names of species. Intermediate links that heard with their skin. Now missing for lack of. Or other reasons. While we improbable and fragile too. Head toward extinction.

  *

  Not hard-shell certain the outcome in the match. Of recaller and recalled. And may alter both beyond recognition. Property is not passive.

  5

  Sudden the song of the blackbird and touches buried desire. You are there in the sound. What goes on in the soul that we must understand and can’t?

  *

  If the eye were a living creature, says Aristotle, its soul would be its ability

  to see.

  *

  Skin stretches below the subconscious. The song gathers. In their straying flight. Lines that carry the weight of absence.

  *

  This is a thirst that resembles me.

  V. At the Sea

  1

  Down to the shore. And smell of brine. Away from moss, fern, mortar, brick. Form is fatal, some say. Whereas an endless unborn surface. Without point. Of reference. Containment. Or even vanishing.

  *

  Here where the light is. Less hidden? Less dispersed into less things? Rolls in. White-crested. Splendor after splendor. Wall piled on wall. High as a house. And down comes crashing. Rocks. Severed heads. Centuries. And from the sand a thin veil of white recedes. And ripples and shadows and a ledge of clouds lined orange.

  *

  Seeing is believing. But unthreatened by the dark are words. And there take refuge. Unshadowed. And thinking too takes refuge and then its own seed of light tries to sow.

  *

  Pounding pou
nding the waves. Breath skyward drawn. Out of observable space, of muscular intuition. And the light goes on pretending that seeing is simple. That with mine own eyes have I touched. The shell in the sand. The fin of the minnow.

  *

  I know the creed of light. We see. On condition of not seeing. The light. Transparent we dream the immediate.

  2

  With such amazing speed the eye. Of Ted Williams, say. Makes contact with the ball. It does not seem tied to its body. Does this reveal the nature of vision?

  *

  Out at the sea I stare. As if it were the universe. Could pull the infinite into my eye. Without the rational lines of perspective. With absent wavelengths represented as imagination. Slow the eye I brought with me from Germany. And does not leave its body. Nor change the stance of distance.

  *

  Blue. Two kinds of. Gray. Immersion. Open. Foam. Hallucination?

  *

  Not toward. Not where I came from. No home beyond hard the sky limit. Away then? Seeing is leaving? The Western profile? The country whose mechanisms I understand no better than the light? And which. Like the light. Pretend they’re not there.

  *

  We come to a limit and stop. If there is no limit we cannot distinguish. Lost and no longer. I and everything else.

  *

  Eyes breathe. Like open wounds.

  3

  Monet writes a friend he’s painting “the instant.” Succession stopped at success. A light his palette gives off. And color subdivided into into. On the retinal surface. Ground so fine. In each ray of light. Move motes of dust.

  *

  Vibrations. Speed. Weather. Whatever blue.

  *

  The killifish slip out of sight. Out of my mind: Sunrise. Tequila. “Änn­chen von Tarau.” Nails growing. Axons and dendrites. The dentist. My mother’s maiden name. The ordinary physical scale.

  *

  And how to talk to. I don’t know. The dead. We’ve drained the symbols so our stories be cool. But it would take. The depth of years we stand on. The sea. Frequencies out of range. And air. Insurmountable its lack of resistance.

  *

  Which I breathe in and breathe out. And commit my tongue to mate with the nick of time. And like a dream bone worry it. And the sound of the words has no measurable size.

  *

  Eyes wide open. Retinal warp. Into the distance where it stops. Being distance. The brain turns pale and like to freezing. The body takes a long time to reassemble itself.

  4

  Out of the word came the light. On the first day of creation. Introduced separation. From the dark. And time. In alternation.

  *

  The light took time. In its headlong flight. And knotted it into space. Where we pursue happiness, always belated. But the light did not remain. Unknotting the dimensions back it went. Into the word. And time’s left with nothing.

  *

  Or the light neither returned nor issued. And needs no justification. But in the swells there’s memory. Between crest and trough. Of great upheavals.

  *

  Refracts words. The light. Into runaway decay, instant loss. We make do with coins. And wish for slower language. Of darkness an eyeful. More local colors.

  *

  Eyes cross the frontiers of glass. Penetrating. Penetrated. Like lovers. And like lovers rocked loose from the ground. By the grammar of convergence or some other force. Bloodstream pulled out to sea.

  *

  Before slowed circulation and red sleep.

  5

  High tide. High above my head the water level. Rising. And thoughts float on it. Out of my depth. Their number displacing their weight. Movement in all directions, not going anywhere. A desk on the Atlantic.

  *

  Eye without lid. Absorptive like a sponge of undecided sex. But I’m not made for all worlds.

  *

  The light falls. On. Like the eye. And lingers. While its unseen colors try to penetrate under. The skin, for instance. And are blocked by the opaqueness of the body.

  *

  Inward the nails grow later and the mind turns on itself. Myopic poison. And great ships sail over dry land.

  *

  There is no clemency in the light. Or in the dark.

  from As Were

  Vesalius as Apprentice, Fabrication

  for Mary Caponegro

  Clearly on the dissecting table the reason for parts and position acquainted entire the fabric of nature

  The apprentice with a syringe with skin to peel with no thought of the old man he will be

  Candle fed by the fat of life

  Clearly the number position and shape and no doubt contradiction very clearly

  Patently the apprentice with his syringe given the finger with no thought of ill of infirm of the chamberpot he might need by his bed

  Wrongly remembered becomes murky smoke

  Then the function of muscles imagine through glass where thickens acquainted entire pockets permitting a limb

  Tourniquets did little to stay the

  The apprentice with his syringe with light bright as advertising with no thought of his funeral of who might weep who send flowers

  Death extends as far as the smoke continues

  Hand in pocket hardly one for dissecting the living clearly the contradictions are many

  Hernando De Soto as Writer, Intrepid

  Sailed from Havana, cast seven days’ anchor, discovered the Mississippi — to the surprise of the red men not in a rush to become deckhands. The writer at her desk begins with a convulsion of the thumb and index finger or, sometimes, the big toe. She wants his body. To change geometry just as space curves near a large mass.

  Talks too much, book on the floor, spine torn, vain, boastful, sand in her mouth, drinks ink, beside herself with

  Reasonably certain he looked across the river, maybe stopped swearing, but did he look at the muddy current, how it rushes and overspreads the swamps? As the writer’s doubts sooner or later spread across her fleet of nine vessels. We avoid these spasms by holding on to definitions of the rigid body and three meals a day.

  Sudden calamity, carried off, the current, eddies, rafts, ridges, too clotted for narrative, rings under her eyes, too slow for a long life

  His gaze, like most men’s, on the far side of the evolutionary process, with hardware confidence. But the writer, “exceeding ready” with her words when there’s already much bad grammar. And what should we interpret as physical deformation of a body, what as geometry of space?

  Sandbanks, swollen waters, foam, crevasse in the levee, plastic bags, needles, telephone numbers, one silver spoon, not in her mouth

  Remained to die and be buried beneath its waters, so his pact with the river not superficial. Is it worthwhile to pile on turbid water invention, hallucination, déjà vu, and a horror of death? And what is a force — I mean something to change a body?

  Gators, damn it, oaths as detonating commas, sold down the river, fuck, with the lights on, cacolalia, phrases filched from

  Stein as Exact Resemblance, Exact

  Strangely simultaneous the larger the crowd at work. Strangely identical phenomena the more distant yellow splashed. Chatter angelic gesture polite honey so beguiling strangely.

  Did spend time to be meant among opaque could save the sentence. Did spend into the world once an angry man is no wiser a sentence. Goes on elsewhere dragged we think along the ground did spend.

  When we listen astounding no longer listen the midst of bewailing. When we lis
ten a temporary umbrella a candle a quart of sleep. Of swept water flushed out of sound out of sound when we.

  Plenty of space plenty of ordinary plenty of present. With plenty of dust to cover a single event and no comma it’s nothing. Means nothing in spite of assembles assembles plenty.

  Musil as Potential, Aloof

  His body is the distance that separates him from his object. A definition must precede measurement and reminiscences. Everyday actions, like she came down the stairs, multiplied by population. More than heroic energy. A slap in the face, a bite from a dog, a pair of coordinates, fictional lucky numbers.

  His strange attachment to the visible even when there is no fountain. Mistake: to think the definitions cannot change. A piece of paper. Without anything written on it. She pauses, trying to remember all that might just as well be different.

  He is one with the distance that separates him from his body. There is no logical objection to this. Possibility not only includes a sudden toothache, but the yet unawakened intentions of gods. Which divide the body impartially. Breath, flickering side effects, energy from the inside.

  Every sensation sides with the world. In practice, a breeze through the brain. A possible experience does not equal real experience minus the value of real. Nor a woman who mails parcels to her children. Fingers feeling right under the skin.

  He tries to distance himself from distance. In this connection “small area” means “on the order of the size of the earth.” A possible experience, according to its followers, is something divine, a will to structure, fire, flight in quick succession. But she is dead. Separate out familiar and simultaneous.

  His strange attachments. No logical objection can be advanced in small areas. So that philosophers could see what kind of unborn forest for the trees. He takes refuge in the next thing to be done. He’d go mad inside the blindspot, the place of no proof.

  from Cornell Boxes

  Enigma Box

  Am I caught in the stare of a Medici Prince or do I hold him in the cross hairs?1 I myself have always been quietly alert. In my dream I both stood at the stern and struggled under water, but a gun is another story. Don’t step on the shards, she cries, not with bare feet, so frightening the smart missiles, the limits of time and space, the implicational character of mathematical demonstration.