FROM 3SONNETSERIES
Omaha Beach
A bedroll out on the sidewalk, a drunk asleep, my father noted, their flats smashed, my mother jarred awake, the Atlantic between them. “Something has happened to George, but he’s okay!” A story repeated: how she knew, how knowing was a curse. What if someday he were dead? She would know. It was her fear that her vaunted sixth sense would betray her the dead make that last call, I know, like my late friend, gone at thirty. Her story ended happily for us: our lives continued with the survivor. So naturally I liked the story. Where would I be had he died? Not here.
I was twelve when we went to Normandy, saw Omaha Beach, Blois’ twice-curved stairway, ate a seven-course meal, or so it seemed, with a family my grandfather knew, bourgeois. The old lady, lost in her reverie, wasn’t lost on me; even then I knew where memory can take you. It must be some remnant of my past, my own sixth sense, aware what burns in us, what flows fire or river, call it what you will. He was manifestly there, my grandfather Joe, who waltzed through France twice, remembered fondly. This was my twelve-year-old version. The truth is more complicated, or maybe not.
In war, tomorrow is all that matters. “The day after will take care of itself.” I can’t say this was my father’s credo. Perhaps it was “Live for the day,” but this lacks his optimism, always believing that he’d manage to survive, looked out for, although for what reason, who knew? The gods are not to be questioned; just go with it. In peace, today matters more, so begin by setting aside whatever can be: not dust from the road, but motes in the eye, blinding us to others’ unfolding. As they live in time, they prove mutable: like fragmentary rivers, not the same.
Sometimes the wind blows the curtain outward and the reverie begins: how it was, how it was whether it proved true or false. It all comes back, mocking those distinctions. I have them, too. Don’t think I can forget. Did my grandfather? Love leaves its traces. There is no black or white, to me, just was. Just was with its sounds, smells, tactility, and fecundity fulfilled, deflected. In reverie, still afloat, not yet sunk beneath the waves, with no apparent sign, no wreckage, no survivors, a true end. Or so it seems, yet always the debris washes up, bleached, takes on a new meaning.
Won’t repeat them, I was told, yet mistakes, like much else, are never quite the same from one to the next; we blunder anew. Pointless to think we won’t, although we do. Life admits no duality, mistakes cohabit with perfection, the pure lie down in the mud, snort and roll around like the animals they are, enlightened for blazing moments and then not at all. Progress is ruled out, I was told. “Just sit!” “Just sit!” is all there is. Minds land on walls, delusion persists some call it practice. As destiny shapes us haphazardly, don’t expect error not to follow suit.
The trajectories of the lives we lead embrace like lovers, and then sometimes not, ripped from each other’s arms, perhaps, or else sacrificed to some higher truth and lost to each other for a time; no matter how long or short it proves to be, point is we unfold along with life, cannot know. Our folly is to pretend to ourselves we do, pretend we are exempt from this. The glancing blows we suffer in consequence are from the outset almost guaranteed yet we persist, driven on by longing. Persevere this is our human fate. There’s no way to know except to embrace.
Signs abound. We wonder which pertain to us. We know the telltale ones our bodies make, stigmata of desire, clear or hidden, The god Eros is indiscriminate, and we have only hints of what we seek. Mars may be like this, too, strewing the beach with false hopes, each abandoned with a cry, amid rattling of guns, cannon fodder, each alone within the crowd, begging Mars to be spared. Thus, the usual process is foreshortened, the span of a beachhead. Seeing it at last, there’s no turning back. Those who lived pressed on. Above the beach, the luckless dead were buried in long rows. Once Karen said, “What the gods give us cannot be rejected, being their gifts.”
I believe we have some hand in our fate, choosing its broad outlines perhaps karma does this for us, so eventually we are content to be, and accept as given life’s real nature and our place within it rising and falling like the tide. Curlews haunt the beach, not questioning its bounty. With alacrity they find sustenance. They did so even then, despite the dead, the last living things glanced by some of them. We often affirm how lucky we are. That luck begins with being here at all.
The Barn Partitas
1.
"And what would that look like?" she might have asked. The question looks ahead, if doubtfully, but his mind tends toward retrospect: what's formed has taken place, associative scenes stretching back to time’s bending point, where he regained consciousness of self and others. The scenes arrive like Swedenborg’s heaven: not a great distance when they first appear from where he is or was. The observer in these scenes is also present, a filmmaker’s eye, but more holistic in what he takes in on the journey through: green walls behind the mosquito netting; white cotton with its narrow line of wet.
2.
"Abandon no one": his maxim, not that it was believed. Love and friendship mix badly between the sexes; they want one or the other. He learned this slowly, noting along the way that unfolding time opens life up, makes it possible to find the river again in that space. And while she may only put her toes in there’s a glint of warmth in her eyes and voice. All because time has turned the ground over and those wildflowers that betrayal scorched emerge and flower in a new season. The gate is always there, the hedgerow sometimes a wall, else more of a curtain.
3.
"Ask someone else," the woman said, turning back to whatever it was, blocked from my sight. In the cafés of life, I'm still learning to distinguish a wrong move from a right. We spoke of art as he drank his wine, art that sometimes lived in, the remove as slight as one remembered. Did he give a start? Time's distance is no match for the flight of memory. Like how I can hear you as they must have, too, your door ajar. "Sounds like thunder," they might have said. If they knew, geologic terms could have made the rounds seismic, perhaps, or volcanic but then memories fork, don't they, now and again?
4.
Sometimes only boughs are visible, near as passersby on crowded city streets, close enough to touch, but we hold back, fear to touch, the way we might have between the sheets. A different season the hedges form a square, a distant bell sounding, the sea fog-edged: Held in the mind, these thoughts ward off despair, even as the boughs bend close, winter full-fledged. They say there are hot springs hereabouts, far or near, I know not. Heat intuited glimmers in consciousness like a faint star and yet proves faithful and deeply rooted. Somewhere in this Milky Way, steam rises. Make for that, a traveler surmises.
5.
They each write out their provisos: how much emptiness exists between points A, B. He wonders why he now declines to touch. She asks him what, if not this, love could be? These are fair questions. Somewhere there’s a street that isn’t haunted by the past. Somewhere there’s a house, a garden, a bed, a sheet with no story. “In heaven, too we share everything with a doubled eternal,” the Zen master told his listener. A spoon was the object doubled, not infernal, but ordinary as the waxing moon. In the middle of her night, he awoke to find it was that moon, not her, that spoke.
6.
Inside the room, inside the head: one could write stories of such stasis: nothing goes right or wrong; there’s neither must do nor should. Around the desk, around the chair, life flows like a mysterious substance. Women come and go. The book lies upside-down, tent of paper and board, small markings like Zen, those koans, so hard to read, if they meant anything to anyone else: doubtful. Cats also come and go. A jay lands, screams. The mind wanders in its confining skull. Somewhere, it thinks, a woman dreams or creams. Wake! A cloud of sanguinity draws close. A black bee, meandering, snorts a dose.
7.
The moon appears and disappears, first round then a vessel, pregnant, soon round again. I watch and time passes. I miss the sound. I miss the heat. Why do I not stir then? The question was posed elsewhere: Would it shut? But no, it hangs open, adrift in my doubts about setting out for the coast. Abrupt thoughts crease the stillness. I hear distant shouts, but the sound missed isn’t heard, nor is heat tangibly beneath my hand. These are felt like the moon’s passage, like the ever-sweet taste I crave eyes rolled back, a deep hue smelt, how I measure the seasons I’ve striven and striven, a mind split, feelings riven.
8.
In the midst of months, each day divides the time as pre- and post-, like a gate that’s opened and closed, before and after. A slow climb up a road to a boxwood park; we spend an hour there, then climb again where hawks drift in the wind. Stones, a fence, clear air, the sea distant, iron blue. We take walks. Cold in the morning, rising slow, your hair: divided time up like salt, and after, cleft, the line inexact but fixed, bone dry when you left. Between sadness there’s laughter. Divided and divided, yes, and why?
Smite the sea and it opens, life confides; the corollary unsaid: time divides.
9.
Sometimes I see the film the music makes. Would you be in it? There are no traces amid the scenery poems aren’t outtakes but I can picture it: our two faces (I’m looking up, your head is turned) close in, talking like we used to do. And outside is the changing view. On a map, a pin or pins, rather, would mark our high tide. Variations like those I’m hearing now would do well in this film we made, suited to its mood’s wobbling course. I wonder how the happy endings they want are mooted?
“Define happy,” La Rochefoucauld might write, skeptic that he was, doubtful yet so right.
10.
He wrote of borderlands transgressed, the bounds so readily passed through, despite knowing how unbending life can be. Making rounds, it came to seem, riding the range, sowing no wild oats, however much desired. A ring, not a badge, a vow, not much use, a waiting, waiting game. She grew tired, he thought, or was it him, cutting them loose in hopes that life would bring them somewhere new? He still rode the range, but slowly. Fences make good neighbors, he thought. “Rode it with you” in his head, despite distance, defenses. Mending fences is not the worst pastime. Builds character, they say. Must be sublime.
11.
Memory, the title read. Noticed a cleft almost hidden amid his tropical points of reference. Nominally he was in his dotage, yet the flame still lingered: an oceanic concubine fingered in moonlight, her moaning against the buzz of whatever the lizards failed to cull, an art to the one means he still had left. Thinking back, it seemed almost comical to be reduced to this trick, how it was in youth when some brazen schoolgirl, languid then leaning back, lips parted her skirt hid, feels his fingers' brush, gasping as she does, riding his hand's mix of slow, fast, a lull.
12.
Long legged with dark slippers, tatami cushioning the blow, hair clipped, wedding ring a bronze band, and a boy's face. Can't you see? Her neck is how her lover views it. Sing, oh muse, of how her back would arch, taken dog-wise, wet from earlobes caressed, parting lips somewhere along the way. Mistaken as we sometimes are, drifting, departing all too soon, those cries still echoing, walls marked, sheets torn by hands grasping. Holding still until taken, taken until spent, balls aching as they sometimes do, no ill will, mistaken as we sometimes are, depart too soon, drifting, humming, playing one's part.
13.
A surprise to find paradise out back, Straightlaced on the outside, like a Russian dacha within. French influenced, no lack of creature comforts. “Nothing Prussian,” he might have said. His friend’s wife outlived both, his real wives ailing and absent. “In France,” she told me. “Heart attack.” So, first half a loaf and then none. And yet nothing seemed askance. This may be the territory old age brings us to, when transience really takes hold. The last scenes played out on this earthly stage need a few actors still standing, though old, French-style armchairs, shelves of books, leather-bound, blue walls, distant chatter the only sound.
14.
I want to tell the truth about love. Death can come as a relief when it goes wrong. Breathless, they say, but then there’s no more breath, no space, no room, no road: end of a song you sang in harmony and counterpoint, in reality and in illusion. Love softens you up, puts you out of joint severely, a sure cure for delusion. You stand on the balcony and look down. Below are the dead, their quiet sleep, still as stones amid a field of green and brown. They make no comment. Jumping holds no thrill, they seem to say, as if the dead could talk. You could leap or wait. You could take a walk.
15.
In one sense, visceral, then burned, scattered; in another, each and every, imbued how quickly memory attaches, grips one's sideways glance of things, raises places from their background status. One picks them up; one picks up on them. Present here, one says, telling a story that overlays death with what lives on. I used to picture it slipping between time's folds, a shimmering into and out of material life. It's not quite the Noh play I imagined. Despite the flames and ashes, so much persists: not just what we trash or give away, nor what we think we see. Being here, he, too.
16.
The paper flowers, the father, granddad, the graves like Chinese cities, all the dead arrayed. What a war they had! Not so bad until it plowed them under. What was said went mostly unspoken. Silence, a sound often written, slices through time and space. The dead either hear us or not. It goes ‘round, the silence between us; face to face it would be different or else diffident, depending on your mood. How are you, then? I ask each time, less and less confident I know how you are, really. Well, amen. Mass is over and we’re both still alive. We could talk. I could see you, raise you five.
17.
Prokofiev wasn't so very nice.
("Like you," you might have said, eyes turned away.)
His wife, devoted, kept the flame. "The spice of cruelty stays with you," I heard her say, remembering his self-centeredness.
"Tough luck if he was cruel; the grit of it rubbed raw the mind that animates the parts that fuck, and of course, he was brilliant, as you saw.
(Your eyes turn back, then look away again. At least they do so in my thoughts. Days pass between us, even weeks. Like a surgeon, time cuts things up: big, silent gaps, alas.)
"I light a cigarette," she said, "and touch the parts that ache, though by now not as much."
Table Music
1.
All else that can’t be said is written: backs of envelopes in old steamer trunks for the executors to mine, smitten by the prospect of affairs, those drunks ambling along sidewalks in anecdotes: the muse puts up with this with how it is when writers sit down to write. How she smotes some handy object, the muse, with this biz floating past and not safely bottled up. Everything that can’t be said is uncorked, filling glasses, even the loving cup. They toast the many times a straight road forked. The muse looks glumly on. Plot’s familiar, she thinks. Forks are closer than they first appear.
2.
“Everything is movement,” I read. Poets “align constantly with the flight of time.” Tzara knew firsthand how far from MoetChandon the lives of poets were. Sublime words became a noose in the hands of black shirts and icepick-wielding apparatchiks. No wonder his wariness: off-the-rack bureaux sprang up like weedlots, full of ticks. Some poets edged their way, a starving lot save the few rich wives and patronesses, save the doctors and insurance men, not writing revolution but of tresses shaken in summer’s waning light, a leg seen briefly, a doorway, “Don’t make me beg.”
3.
At the institute up the hill, the talk revolved around the Great Fugue. Beethoven brooks no explanation, he thought. A walk might suit them, alone together, but then the repeated theme: no place to go. Turn it upside down like composers do, it still looked like frustration. It tested his wit wondering how to carve out space and not kill bystanders. The maestro sought love in vain, he read not an easy man, though brilliant. They flip whole stanzas who are parched of rain and go unwed. They long to rut and pant. Love is spontaneous, Tzara wrote, yet Horace bemoaned the temple fate he met.
4.
Then the streets were only her. Roused from sleep he made his way to the post, to use the word it wasn’t a storefront with screens and deep into the day by then, a day tipped toward strung out, disrupted by thoughts of her. Aix had its charms, its peculiar shops, women sitting vacantly inside selling pecks of baubles to the students. Corsican Mafia, his son said, laundering cash that better lines of work brought in: drugs, sex, discoteques, festivals, the wedding bash for the Russian tycoon. He longed for text. Fate arranged a preview: Men who smolder when wives assert prompt them to be bolder.
5.
Sometimes he chooses evening clothes, black tie, and other times he circles lazily like a shark or, feigning sleep, he waits by rivers. Sometimes a match is handily produced to light the gas in the tire or a last ounce of will induced to pull the trigger, slash the flesh, tug the wire. Sometimes he sidles in, pleasantries full as the glass of morphine he has ready, his eyes alive with excitement, parties in the offing: funerals and wakes. “Steady on, old man,” he says, “you made your sorties, it’s time to wrap it up,” then beckoning those who tote it up, make a reckoning.
1.
The road south of Olema wound through dense, encroaching woods, straightening as I approached the lagoon. Bolinas forked west and Stinson lay ahead. Heat brings traffic; it was winter. I chose the cot on the landing to sleep alone. Waves all night, the sea down the block. Writing was my nominal purpose; to wait my reality. Coming, going: the way it’s said is this, but I doubt it is. Another time: Hood Canal, mountains across an inlet, a deck, a moment of certainty brief, eclipsed by time, but there. Where life touches this other thing signs appear that we carry along. Waves all night, the moon rose and fell, their sum infinity or zero, full or empty. No shaman now to give them potency, no way stations, side altars, or relics, just the road, its hubcap shrines obscured, articles of faith scattered behind me.
2.
Greens. Kitchens are a leitmotif, domestic notes that speak to how passion’s corralled as conception or more simply as a marriage, untrammeled. Fruits. Preserves are laid in. What was spun is woven. Questions are raised, complaints made: “Don’t explain to me.” Days. Her short, striped dress derails without intent. Happens. Another’s house is another’s. Even one’s own has ghosts. Rooms. It’s so small a place the spines’ titles can be read. Love’s recital in my mind: you bend and twist, moan. No issue, no harm done. Only poems get with child.
3.
In the archive of memory, a gallery’s set aside for it, shelves for motion, drawers for sound, hooks to hang categories of grasps, splays. Like Thoreau, mostly local, though rooms for hotels, the road, there to the right, just past the bowls of sheen, salt, sweet. How the sound of it is like a dog the way it cuts through all else. Only the sound, not the scent, the way beds are like boats, pitching in their waving rooms, the windowsill a jetty’s edge.
4.
Jesus appeared, it’s said, spade in hand, to the questioning Magdalene. “Don’t touch me!” He warned her, being halfway there, fresh from harrowing and still toxic or otherworldly.
“Just a pinch?” she asked. He held out the spade. “In heaven, a bed, a garden, windows, children.”
He looked at her. “A woman will write that man’s desire alone permits his knowing if she knows it to be true.”
When they found her, spade in hand, the grave empty, her account omitted the second part.
So much else left out. To France, some say, with their son; Daughter of the Church, some claim, a spade mistaken for the true cross.
5.
In the end, a terrace, drink placed on a glass-topped table, the sun at an angle, green close and distant, the ocean intuited, a long walk through a terrain of white deer and their predators not yet, he thinks, drink in hand, turning his head vaguely west, squinting, puts it down to find his hat.
Alone, no one left to love or one to love no longer here, although he thinks of her. She resisted description, declining objectivity as pinned down, a specimen. And while he foreswore the rites, spring’s fecund air caught him out possession’s dance zero sums, transient, a comet. No doubt never figured in her thoughts, benign, a null. But then, null was where it always started. Ex nihilo, as they said. He’d made a go with that, long the game, chancing, playing odds, and no one odder than him.
Took her measure: a season insufficient proof of love, as he conceived it, what we intimate between us, close as one flesh, exchanging genes. All this flashed by, the terrace platform to his reverie.
6.
Your birch trees are not mine. Mine were river aspens. Fishing brought me there, I tell myself. Your wood lapboards are also another kind. Mine were painted, noticed as I walked to the rocks where I once swam. Your small meal is not the one I ate alone: an oat scone, dark coffee with steamed milk. It was here we met, the eve of our sabbatical year. Later, there were phantoms, two of them to be precise. If one took possession of my wife, I heard a curse of sorts, half of one, a fourth. Both figure in the poems I wrote for them, not the ones where I'm alone. Who would notice? Birch and aspen are similar in the moonlight. Night joins and conjoins us all are repossessed by sleep. Space proves random, barely speak unless they're ready. I wait. Across time I’m immortal, so never rushed. Beds are where the warp is felt, or one place.
7.
In the afterlife, the two reenact how one waded in to save the other. This while their wives look on, marvel at the drama. So much work spent on love. One procreates or not, lives on detached, paints. The colors traipse in thin clouds, penciled lines a leitmotif, quotations as subtitles whispered as if to an ear just a tongue or two away.
8.
Oh Pioneer, your red tie, your Lenin badge, your brother children of future-makers, heroes of non-fictional science, the circling space dog, cosmonauts taking flowers from golden-haired girls with bangs, the everyday gravity of Utopian ice cream and soda in shared glasses! In my bourgeois plot, spring holds Dystopia at bay. How distant we are from homes with their beautiful mothers, from promises made to us.
9.
A layer of white, crimson, a lip’s point's provocation. Tattoos float, drift. A walk loosens the grip of things. Buildings tell time as we pass, future provisional, their stories yours, but my small chapter.
10. His suitcase disappeared. The grave, a stone rolled or a name reversed, gave away nothing. In my mind its contents converge, an end point opening out not a particle but a wave.
11.
Wings like shrouds later, folded up. Summer’s gift theirs while they have it, innocent of any ending.
Close observation stirs up resonance, they say. A bird hunts for food across a deck. Myriad droplets of rain cover west-facing windows. Walking yesterday, the ferns drew her notice. Woods cut back bring them forward, she told me. The hills from here were outlines, dark against a lighter gray. Two corners away, more rain, though it had stopped when I left. With sport coat, no umbrella, a man crossed my path ahead as I neared the left turn home.
13.
The world ordered in chaos, foreseen in dreams and omens, spoken as oracles, swayed almost incidentally, a god’s affection captured without intending, a truth perceived without one’s knowing. We set the myths on the side and leave the gods’ altars bare. We treat their world as ours, dismal stewards throwing crumbs. Days we take for granted pass unrecognized, fruit rotting in baskets, friendships squandered. Hermes appears nonetheless. Charon’s ferry plies the Styx. Near Hades’ gate, gathered shades gossip as they wait, looking for what they thought they had, death leaving little trace. Life’s short, the Muses sing. Art is long.
14.
I stood not far from you. A glance, I think it was a glance, the way particles dissipate when chance spares them collision, a rebirth the sort that warrants us to pray. Of prayers there was a dearth; just mirth of a funereal sort. A few preened, gossiped, until grief broke in. We can speak of it or something new, the measure of what we’ll miss. Musil pointing the crowd ahead, Berlin ambling toward an abyss, toward a nil, yet cracking jokes in the middle. We edge away from it, often unnerved if life proves too brittle.
He had his work, future, promise. Saw him just weeks before, so thin, hopeful. Is it the work we’ll miss or is it up to us to write it? In my case, occasional talk, cigarettes and spare words, his wit, his surprising affection, like a dog or guide on a walk that turns and looks for attention.
15.
Simple language, much emotion:
figure in Natalia's oeuvre. It reached me here, an ocean and two land masses distant.
To write is all that behooves her, she reports, a point consistent with prose that makes no claim to be more than it is. Ordinary.
As the IChingsays, “No blame.” We live without foreknowledge, which may prompt writing out those times we failed to tarry.
A familiar city seems a redoubt compared to exile in a village. The vows made when we marry place us on an unseen ledge.
Like a diary, the everyday, like alleyways we overlook that end blindly. Feel our way, hoping not to sense alarm.
Looking back, the time it took; how it came anyway, the harm.
16.
In place, you could be in Shanghai, but in time you're proximate. Others are so distant that I'd need a clock set to ebb to uncover islands, find fields once fertile with possibilities. Shanghai can be lonely, empty, narrow and hard, warmth gone. One can live there exiled, driven not to long too much. A film took this up, theater of regret. In life, we write or speak. Walls and doors have messages in ink. I watch, write, dream at night, inverted, complicated dreams that play with every distance. 17.
Memory is matter and spirit, alive in our heads, Bergson said. Finches mating seasonally, their differences, revived an old narrative: all things unfolding from a source. Finches retold Darwin this story. Surfacing as sensed, nature seemed to be given them and then unfathomably stretched out. Minds took it in, hearts quickened, hands set it down reflexively, hoping for enlightenment. Walked or tramped, then wrote while others dug or sketched to coax it into consciousness.
18.
Winter counts, time marked on the skin, in dreams, times awake at four to the strikes a hammer makes, a spring of sorts that sings distantly. Winter counts, the streaks of chalk white passion leaves, human sounds, ends after starts, beds made and torn, rented to use, one flesh again then separate and gone. Winter counts, slowing ordinary time's rhythm bodily, the beach wet and foamy, then bleak, littered and windswept. Winter counts, ripples the day left shadowed.
19.
A sketchbook view, taking in a grey streak or the way age sets in around her eyes, how her daughter is taller, a tot when I last saw her, chasing Robert’s dog. I’m older too in the same degree, lighter than I was, dressed in blue, a sweater against the cold despite the harbor’s glare. No mystery, I think, writing this out. Just my friend as she was this morning, there.
20.
In red, I think of her, red or some other solid hue. She glances from man to man in search of bona fides. Who will bring her a future to justify the effort?
Red like a flag, a banner, a parade of one, waiting for a car, a text, a sign.
21.
I used to want it, wrote it down among early January’s desires. In Aix when I felt it everywhere, despite loneliness. Words draw. It was May, fifteen years, some months away from now. The way that heat dissipates and cold descends on us: we build our huts, wrapped in furs like old people, shamans, traders, amber in our pockets, bits of life floating in a kind of glass, once so viscous two fingers slid in, angling.
22.
Rational life has doors, gates in hedges, shadows behind columns, other rooms. Irrational wraps her hair up, then slips. Time and space alter on both sides. Back’s another place, slowed clocks now rigorous, one touch so different from another. Lips and much else ache with memory. Later the ink’s a slightly different hue, words and lines colored, darkened, lightened. There’s no way to know. Each side’s a mystery to the other, but she bleeds in both, bears signs of crossing. Bears perhaps another, minutely sparked.
23.
Little escapes us if we listen. Love's ceasing is not love's ceasing. Nothing's lost. Mute's as good as whispered, blows are struck as before, words find their places, the voice still hers who spoke, may speak, may decline to speak. An emptiness is a garden; is intimate speech, silent as roses the color of persimmon jam; is lavender dried and bundled, faintly bearing the giver's scent.
24.
Never was the word you used, that chasm drawn with chalk. Small birds sang along the walk, their haven green and dense. Not far away, you struck something like a longer chord, not purely sound. The women two doors down kept talking. Not far away as I measure time, and never, she said that too. Dharma is like headlights as the cars turn, the chalk faint on the walk, the trees green and kempt, barely shelter. Not far away. Leave taking, melancholia: chalk X below for bones; Y for where desire lived; a circle for my empty head. Not far away as I measure lives.
25.
Novalis maintained that art reflected an idea. Does its necessity include a desire to impress?
Men of the Heian Court wrote post-coital poems, an art sidestepping criticism.
The aim of which, Benjamin wrote early on, is to free the future from the present’s deformations. It must be perfect. Somewhere up ahead orgasms are unsurpassed in every possible sense.
I am the necessary man, many a noble thought, gathering up his garments while his lover tidied up. But an idea eludes me just now. Perhaps a nap? Then I’ll write something apt.
Inspiration will come to me as from Heaven or if not, I’ll find a Chinese model, something about a phoenix or a flashing carp, glinting brightly as it leaves the depths.
26.
Travel is a dream that we put off as long as possible, like flagging down a hearse to ride in cars we used to hail by app. We walk, masks ragged from overuse, hair like a garden's neglected topiaries. Cars are scarce; there are vans, young men with masks, packages bought, take-out fetched, women with dogs, women with kids. We step out onto the street, gallant as they eye us over masks of colored, patterned cloth, kids uncovered, and we who should have been in Naples are out with them taking the air that is admittedly clearer than it’s been for ages, houses on distant hills visible again. We wave on getting up, blush to remove our bedclothes without the smog, wonder how it will be when Mammon flips the switch, the birds' songs plundered by the rushing trains, trucks, motorbikes, sirens, society's calendar, corner tables, beauty's sottovoce.
27.
Sometime in March, driving east, we stopped at Little America, four a.m., heard a waitress tell a truck driver she was pregnant with his child. Thereafter, somewhere in Wyoming, a woman wouldn’t sell me cokes because “Indians in your car.” No, they’re Chinese. “Oh, in that case.” And before that, in Salt Lake City, the boys pumping gas did their work then, finished, rolled tires at us, godless hippies in their estimation. Later, we lived off Telegraph, Dwight near the corner store. I dropped acid. This was summer, nineteen seventy.
28. Had she been, then nine, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-one, the mother dead.
29.
Across a counter, that connection, instances of which run life to life, find their line. How smitten I was, how doubtful such a one could be courted. Yes, her sister said, write. Offspring were desired, so marriage loomed into view. I wrote the letter, projective prose, one could say. Sent, it garnered no firm commitment, but she returned in May and we married in late August, wanderers in the east. August found us living on the hillside above the stadium, a brief vestibule to marriage that gave us a first son, wanderer with his parents, imbiber of our wedding day champagne, who made his presence felt on the train near Edmonton. “I’m pregnant,” said with the certainty of an oldest sister.
30.
The deep throb of ships, cats asleep, the easel standing, how I slipped in and out of it, how it’s folded now into memory. This is my version. Yours, his, those of others may differ, but I was there filming it in my head.
The split: I or he, you or she, the ships in their channel, the line we made together visible, arguably a stain, then crossing yet again that momentary bridge nature grants our species. This is another.
The curtains billowed when the wind came up. I’m fairly sure that happened.
31.
The fact of the house, the rooms, curtains gusting out of frames, books, boots, cats, coats, an easel, lives present and lives absent, a tinge never quite dispelled, domesticity bespoke hour by hour: was this a narrative or a list?
32.
Peel away the clothes: how malleable the form our bodies take, taking, taken. Disregard the flesh: how malleable the mind that rides on top or is ridden. Ignore the genders: how malleable the sex, like the mind’s root or one of them. Take care of the self: how malleable the heart. “Nothing is lost,” the IChingsaid.
33.
Marriage banns were not read twice. A distance traveled and then this. Mark how life takes down desire, persistent in its nostalgic form, bliss a memory of skin rubbed raw, bathed in warm agony afterward, a payment for afternoons on borrowed sheets. Like saint's days for a bride of Christ, stations, as the Church has it, mark where those small deaths led. Crossing leaves us only silence except in dreams. On floors, the moon's traces reminisce.
34.
Deaf and blind share things, fail to note or overlook how she wants or desires, and he wonders what clothes will suit. The days grow shorter, a cliché given seasonally and remarked on. Darkness is something she puts on, but still sees, the paradox desire needs. All in time time wobbles in its axial frame. He sinks into sleep at two or three. She's bothered most at other hours, craves the things she craves. Siesta Hotels open out onto brothels, their sofas rhythmic with her hungers, sating though days tighten imperceptibly, the gaps of longing growing longer. She wonders what the day will bring. He puts his clothes on in an order, wavers inside those trappings, keys in pockets doors and cars, a case once filled with things she wants. "Put away long ago," another said, but no, they live on in her head.
35.
A layered life, women loved in sequence and in parallel, families vying unknowing for primacy as marriages were ventured. All this across two decades. I wrap it up in golden tissue, layers meant to obscure the marks such living leaves, deep blue in places, like the stripes of fish caught after a struggle, their radiance muted.
36.
How women move is a reason to wait. They are in every case distinct, but you are you. To wait is to remember this not to move on, but recollect. I put her apron on, pretend to be a woman. If I wait long enough, I’ll come as one. I’m devoted as a mare, the IChingsays, but my mind is like a dressing room in the Kabuki Theater. I dreamt a kind of purifying dream. More often, I’m failing to catch a flight my suitcase half empty, my clothes in disarray. Always the same city, yet it makes no sense. My parents appear, although they’re dead. Being dead, they never reach their destination. I vowed to stay here to the very end, waiting games, the last of it, like slabs first, then we decay. Will you attend? The odds aren’t good.
37.
Monsters have their topics, how it was out on the plains. They roll their cigarettes and measure ankles in their heads, the distance covered, the sounds evoked. A table’s more a surface than a divide, and the pull of physicality is so odd: you swear it off and there it is again.
38.
I caught a glimpse of him in his workman’s apron, the hallway filled with boxes. She’d come back with her children. “Couldn’t you be happier to see me?” a question I used to ask her with no answers. The last time he wore it, you handed me Montaigne. I may have said I wanted to be loved. When I heard the word, I wondered. Not so much insular as unhindered, possessing as momentary, a gift, but gifts are their own category, to which I’m partly blind. Each has its correspondence, like the rug brought back from Greece or the mountain poem, written out, descriptive of the room itself, solid and precarious, with its view, the bed where we lay once in plain hearing.
39.
Reading Pessoa in August, tomatoes ripening as the vines dry out, the race against the goddess's return to ground. It leaves her half in, half out, not like Europa, astride her bull, a continent to name and populate, Neanderthals' claims notwithstanding. To Pessoa this striding, this tragic displacement, were only a tram's metallic screams, rain on Lisbon streets, each morning memorably like the last. For Europa never graced his bed. Zeus too had fled.
40.
Walking across the city in the afternoon, there’s no distance suddenly and then there is, time a concertina too when we grab it at both ends.
41.
Time noticeably slows down. Conversation opens out like a film. An afternoon could pass. It takes that long. “Children are the end result,” I heard the therapist point out. In films, there’s denouement of some sort. We come back to it. “I didn’t catch that part.” “Nowhere to go,” the therapist said. It had no meaning, yet it did. You said it was the thing you liked.
42.
A yellow sofa surfaced and traffic, especially the buses. Not the ocean of another room. Distance is relative with another body. She liked kings but there we were, there it was. Under the bathroom light, a hole. The universe is rent and warped, the odds coming to mind, weighed. How to square these two things?
43.
Falling in with regret or falling out of love, regretting this. Regret falls silently, reproach for all reproachable things we bring along, souvenirs out of love, derived from it or carried as memories. Time we swam in once or waded through, soaked to excess and caught out, tapped. Life opens out, closes in. Regrets aren’t even texts, there being no recipients. Ruled out. Numbers only come to mind, of phone, year of birth, of day and month. Names drift and somewhere pianos go untuned or, if tuned, evoke the memory of tuning.
44.
Possessions stuffed into weekend bags, a watch around his wrist, their car cooling from the drive. Dressed in summer wear for this cliffside place, they bring their expectations along. And from them, arguments. Later, a child, brought back barely felt, all that they possess a bit heavier, tipped ahead.
FROM DANCECARD
1.
Dark, blank, cold, hot peril where light casts no glance or overwhelms. Great flags and portraits hang in squares, the names and phrases said over and over until apostasy hears a loosened song, finds its tongue. A distant square grows ever smaller. Names lose potency in proportion, states waving their banners, iron grips rusting in place.
2.
You take your aching residue and write it out. How it spreads: you read it aloud; it inches through a crowd of hearers, just as blind poets' chanting in the market ended up in kitchens, whispered in hallways, bedrooms, the baths. When first the danger of ink and paper, words declaimed to oneself and overheard? Write them down, say again who longed for whom, whose hand grazed fingers parting lips. Small and jealous gods find this an affront. Better then to write in silence, conjure how it was, set out those times of taking, the five lovers or was it seven? At night the count blurs but dreams retrieve them, one, two and many, as each child asserts.
3.
In my ideal poet's world, great whites, coyotes, and lions still stalk those who are insufficiently in awe. The dacha has no fear of a blaze in rain, only of a wind-pitched tree. Seismicity remains, the ground cloven somewhere deep. My ideal poet puts down her pen, stares outward past a reflection ghosted now. Lights from a distant house invite the terrors of speculation her mind unravels, like some tragicomical novel's taut and plunging trajectory. It's cold, she thinks, sun vanished, a fire warming scantly.
4.
On the cigarette package, Krakatoa looks benign. I smoked one once, clove-flavored. Now they're banned. Horace wrote an ode lamenting how he was two-timed, comparing the aftermath to a half-drowned sailor drying soaked clothes in a temple near the sea's glitter, close to where he first set out, as if an Argonaut, Argos where the women were, the sky so fair, the wind so good. My Krakatoa: on the card I drew, the tower sheds its head.
5.
Thrown over the way a steamship's rolled so plates slide and waiters laugh. Pain's what their eyes reveal, how we grasp at solidity despite our roiled planet. Time's out the window. Each mind tries to right itself.
6.
Backgammon and bull dice Sam's Grill, circa 1995, according to a source. Not a gambler in this sense. Never particularly a fan of games. Lunch was lunch, but life raised the stakes.
7.
Trouble's out stalking, women say, or it arrives soon after church, sin ablaze in its addled head, a gun or two at hand. Biases mount up like the gum cards boys collect with some idea of future value, the way emblems on jackets give a certain swagger to the wearer. Men mostly, swaggering, a few women standing by or spouting the gospels the radio spits out or making their way alone, white and Christian, possibly pagan, sewing runes on men's collars as their substitute for history.
8.
We're like weather, blowing hot and cold, female and male. There's no helping apparatus and a man in a dress is who he is to passersby, whereas a woman: there are exceptions either way, drifting through or tight-roping pole to pole, tricky if you meet on the same highwire, but then we make it work, don't we?
9.
"Je vois, par taches." Cézanne anticipates the knowing of afternoons' half-lit rooms, northern hills dissolving into westward orange, hills compressed as viewed, window-framed, houses lit up, domesticity revived at day's end, the shower, the walk, the train, all we knew still here despite the disappearance of the rest.
10.
In the grinding house of prose, words arrive squealing, are herded and hooked, lifted aloft, their necks sliced open, bled. A dangerous business to be taking up, your long polyethylene gloves on, caps and long coats, boots that glisten, thick lenses encased in rubbery frames. Books arrive in slabs, the ink still red and wet. At night, I read them with a knife, sliced thin as skin felt between tight borders. Decades pass but I still read by touch.
11.
A piece of you, a piece of me: we must be locked together in some sense, rutting dogs bewildered by aftereffects. Of no import, negligence merely and yet each one's like a narrow line of acid in my brain. (Possible?)
Every single particle of us washes up and I lean down to look again. How shining they are, pooled on asphalt.
12.
Titan laid low. a critic prowling. Even their art merits no thought, it’s said, the houses, marriage sterile. Dinner parties are cited, guests appalled. At Sam’s Grill, a funeral deconstructed: brought them together, quarrels alive, but soon they'll be gone. A jackal tears at an old beast's thick skin. At MoMA, their names evidence their largesse. Flecks of skin mix with pigment, viewed closely. Walking I saw his vault through the glass: gold or jewels, stock certificates imperviously stored. Lenin in Red Square, Napoleon in the Invalides lie as quietly. No jackal or animus harries them.
13.
"At 70, I put the woman problem in a drawer," the French architect told the young, attractive gallerist. I understand his impulse to halt. Or rather his impulse to shift her to another plane, less incendiary. We emerge somewhat torched but also brought the gasoline.
14. Your letters go unread, but their phrases recur. Sometimes at night the moon angles and I want to tell you. Lately, I remembered how it was, the conversations in between. If they could happen in their own world, separate from every other, then the sign would point there.
15.
Paralyzed in a way. They go off to mass.
“It will be sung,” she said. Laundry’s dry and folded in this material world. Songs pour from the box, season appropriate. At the funeral, Heaven was invoked, life eternal. Like here, Swedenborg noted, only it goes on and on, a telenovela of good and evil. Banality, Arendt wrote, like buskers on the train, murdering time to make a buck. A waiting game, I read, imploding as they will, which were mighty, and so, we wait, avoiding vodka, living on to reap what rattles east, soothes envy knowing they will fall just as Marx wrote. Even the pope struggles to pay his bills. Those choirboys seduced, lawsuits wives to keep them honest or at least more honorably corrupt is our answer. No Prada slippers, no monkey business.
“It will be sung.” Laundry’s dry, folded. Materiality brought us here, stranded but we do our best with it. Abandoned, we embrace it, tell you what the news is.
“A bumpy year” to everyone. Vodka and a chaser, the usual denials. Mass is over. Hope your husband’s better. The prince is crimson, so Wills then.
16.
The language poets use and how it reads or is heard, not least in the writing of it, read and heard as an action like a kiss and its resonance, a window shaking from the wind, a passing truck, ghosts felt sometimes rising from these pages.
"Why did you have to ruin it?" Questions like this drift in from distant Iowa, posed rhetorically. Sometimes you have to ruin something to decide on its reality. Youth is illusion mostly, and then a discovery: who sidled in from three hundred lives?
I set the cards out on the table yet again. I apologize in advance for a randomness that comes with them. My apology rings hollow, I imagine, the Fates just an alibi. Surely a card up a sleeve, sleight of hand? Despite their accusations, I never cheat.
17.
In Eva’s wonderful poem the god expresses impatience. His father was subtler, though, coming on as a swan or a bull, drifting golden, theatrically lit. Seed wombs, found continents reason enough for subterfuge. They remembered him fondly, wings, horns, spangly things, and how they cleared a path for him who took their measure in long crescendo, not like those ordinary men, offspring sweet being half of him, their beauty.
18.
Immortal yes, so I can see destiny given form and space. Too soon gone, so I imagine it, oh cradled one, asleep now to rest a mind life overflows. Suitors will call you in time, their allure, beguiling tone, mortal fires sometimes raked, the fires others stoke, the rivers women bring, their mystery. Carried along, those months of arising that courting sparks. If I'm present, you'll hear me in the blessings on their lips, lights flickering on the water when the lanterns float by.
19.
A shock. Or is it whispered? Evening clothes, it was said. This mystery, how it melts in metaphor and yet persists glacially, also melting now. Light cigarettes, lift drinks: both touch the lips, scorch a bit going in or down, yet their effects accrue, a truth we'll deny until we can't. Art for art's sake, for culture: armies march for this? Is this what we stake out, this fence with missing slats, thin dogs nosing at them indecisively? Whispered or does it hiss offensively, a clenched hand and an orange haze recalled, sinking? Gravity's unceasing despite accruals and denials.
20.
Remembering walks taken, sometimes accompanied, the sight of dried thistles in the dead of summer, field of horses, the lower gate ending temple grounds, a barrier for novices. We were novices once too. There’s an element of this that makes it possible. It drops away and the walks cease, gate breached or car gone, love gone or fleeing. I took refuge in a friend or two, no novice now, a kind of sage only, old enough to know the knowing’s past, this mystery I left unresolved, left remembered and remembered. You scoffed at this, but it comes to mind.
FROM PAMPHLET2021
1.
To be modern is to have a city or two in tow to recollect or set in time, not merely in space, to populate with love interests, trains, hates, the incidentals on which all texture depends. In tow is to say in mind or in a heart's pocket, ready to be taken out and examined at home as one o'clock rolls around or four is heard, the insomniac hour when it's all rehearsed. To be postmodern is to live in alienation, each one an atom of apparently repelling mutuality, no city large enough for both. To be modern is to ignore this stricture, to recollect or set in time how the space your legs took varied, how heat radiates in memory its walls must be very thick to retain it and yet your soft, wet self's there too as music, perhaps, a fugue repeating the way a city does, always improvising on what it felt and heard.
2.
Night is lights in distance, bright lattices and singular points in motion according to someone's vantage despite stillness from a kitchen window. Night pulses owing to its cricket heart. Sirens, trains wail and wobble, traveling at unknown speeds as points of sound, ebb and flow as my garden's heart's chorus does not.
3. We speak of give and take, possess. We think of one who gave and took, desiring and desired. We remember rising and falling, tempo and pitch, heat, the sliding way it goes, goes, and how we look at it and sense affect in its electric state, audible now and then against the rhythm of the rest. What is left, we ask? The quarrels, the estrangement, afterlives of unstated obligation. Yet once pictured her straddling a gear shift in anticipation. Take it in, whatever it is desire seeks, possess a facsimile or the man. We are bystanders in this play, troubadours hired by the hour to gather beneath her balcony then make our way upstairs, in quarters close possess her as in a film. What's left? Rushes we screen later at our leisure, technicolor, the soundtrack on a kind of loop, coming memorably again, again, as background to the talk that foregrounds memory, and how rooms, houses live on like sets, a stage we could recreate, enact how it was with fresh actors, stand-ins for us as memory provides, two humans of a certain age.
4.
We are so far from modern now. Narratives lie dead on the page. We roll irony like the cigarettes we made with gummed paper and loose tobacco. Gauloises are now an honored memory, like how the Métro smelled. In between, we made love, sparking children and aches, ruptures life creates despite our passions. We navigated these upheavals. We longed for that wet heat sometimes, went back to it, irony alight in the aftermath, modern now and then, or contemporary as my friend put it in her list of 44 mistakes to avoid, life shifting even as we lay in bed.
5.
How many have seen her thus and thought she shone for them? You are faithful, oh floating boat. East to west your arc is traced while looser coordinates define where her trail left off, the date there but otherwise unmarked.
Words painted in lines, a memory of women sometimes desired, sometimes transgressing. Matisse in his suit. Montaigne with his pen. I am them. Each word weighs what it does. Each word echoes down the corridor from my room to death's that chamber of uncertain volume, if ashes or a corpse. Each word escapes into time's fluidity, spilled from my desk to a quantum floor. I am Stein, walking in occupied France or looking out over it from a terrace, thinking of a woman's endless layers, her progress toward death unwinding. So many deaths. A terrace a prelude like a table's chair with curving arms, irritation as a step, anchored to legs the servant fixed, exposed, whipped. I am the bed, horizontal as a grave. I am the end of time, that ceasing she wanted, to step away from life.
I am time's fluidity, time's shouts when carried away, its agonies, no escape, its hopelessness, cold and hot together both too much. I am Rilke, self-loving to a fault.
7.
She sketches himself in dresses ever more flamboyant, and he gives her a desired apparatus in its primordial form, rooted from deep within or floating more likely in consciousness, unconsciously, like his fingers, a hand admired across a table. He writes herself into plays, a bride stripped bare, a man watching as she comes. She complies reliably most times if the sequence is followed, a half-moon a boat, her sign waxing, slow plunge. Come, it says; she hears him say it. Apparatus is her gift, twice granted, he thinks, it's her dispensation, key to release. Bound, she thinks, it's his way of being close, a hand and fingers consciously straightening out a kink. Found, he thinks, so thin the light comes through it. A dress, sunlight behind it. Her eyes masked, mouth ajar and tongue strolling. He sketches her portrait, still life but she's moving.
8.
To move is finally to break with distance with the dead. We run from it, in our minds, treadmill gesture we're aware. To move is to follow, embrace others loved, we tell ourselves, among our stories said aloud between us as in exile we live as natives, ones transplanted. Snow arrives, the sea larger here than there, the houses grander, a formal symmetry. Their graves were stones; upright markers too formal for the men beneath, ashes and spirits. I was two, then older as one by one, dead. To move is finally to go some distance, more than a stone's throw, and hear a different sea, its light less prone to memories, its rhythm living for me like an open boat's song at summer's height, sun obscuring nightfall, dusk hardly noticed, the moss forgotten hiding names, their faces always young.
9.
Vapid novels of bourgeois life. A man happy in the present, unambitious, dressed demurely in his plaid skirt playing a script girl's appointed part. Back street in Crete, a house he set out to three patronesses, half a stake each so oversold and yet so charming they forgave, and slept with women as an extension of friendship though preferring sailors. Prisoners are best, being hungry, but that was the other. What then is the key to immortality?
Bourgeois life is like a garden gate one slips into when life is pressing, when someone wants you in theirs. I sleep alone. I dress in work shirts and eschew those striped city ones I wore for years. I walk. I could be demure, a script girl of a sort, trade among those potentates demanding a kind of sexless deference. Demure and self-effacing, but I gave it away. What then is the key to immortality?
Too much sun is bad for painting. Too much personality's character's destruction, it is said, it is said, but what then is the key to immortality? I miss the heat, the way the sun set across the north end, the bay's slot and the island old prison like a ship. I never went for boys, but the girls are unreliable as lovers, only friends.
Immortality is so many dice games with the afterlife, oh so many names worn away with time or never cast or carved in the first place. Beauty only, its form and features, endures.
A mother is laid to rest and her man remembers her tenderness, wrapped between her legs and thighs, sighs becoming children in time, babes and then men women following her casket, the garlands of flowers still there in the stonework, a head in profile, her torso with her breasts and flanks. This is her monument, this resting place, very like a bath.
10.
Edgware Road, affair of hookah shops, my friend's old place around the corner, another world. I stayed at my dad's hotel with his namesake bar, a room quite small and devoid of view, but the Wallace close. When was this? Eight or nine years ago. It feels an eternity. Outside, a lot of rain. I read how the lines should be broken so the readers know how a line should read. Oh reader, read as you desire! A hookah came with a smoker, a man out of synch with a great in its own mind metropolis but at one with the sidewalk's diaspora. Oh London, take it all in stride! Terror passes quickly with its knife. Stay, stay away from bridges, the underground at its deepest points, those old lines with ancient tunnels, cars to match. Pray we may be safe, even as safety is this random unfolding of hours and their subdivisions, slowing as we catch a glimpse, see light minutely ahead of impact, feel lightheaded just at the thought.
11.
Requited, unrequited in between, there's an expanse of disintegration. Looking back it's flat and nondescript, with gas stations here and there, the diners of small towns that advertise the same fare, barely filling. Later it can be bleaker, depending on who is looking around. I knew the territory; now she had her own version of it. On the road you see wreckage no one's removed, guess as you drive by that it will be, as accidents are the peril of motion. Like an Iranian bombmaker, we think we can just drive along. Looking back, it's flat, harmless, a blue truck off to the side with a tarp. It's nondescript, so we remember blue as we move toward it, or the sea, wind, the sun sinking, the windows ablaze briefly with reflected light. An expanse.
12.
In this constricted world, small things draw my attention, like how tomatoes seem to know there's a wire frame close to hold them. Bamboo stakes do this for the beans, their tendrils wrapping around them after they felt their way. It takes twenty minutes to water them, twenty minutes times the days my wife has been away, but I've lost count now. The garden across the street I measure in watering cans: two and a half, more or less a bigger can than the one here, which takes two fills to water much less.
13.
In the winter, trees are lesser impediments to the horizontal bands of city, bridge, town lit, moon and Venus up above, and the hills that sawtooth from the Gate. Then summer fills it in, yet still glimpsed, a lover's body intuited when it's warm or when the fog obscures her yet her whole terrain's there as we add to it based on the smallest hints. In the winter, life is a lesser impediment to our memory’s more horizontal aspects. Summer makes so much overcrowded, while lives condense as days grow short, beauty made singular by their concision.
14.
Crabs dance sideways, I observe. Rain brings them out, also frogs, comes the report, a distant place where I am not, nearer Panama than here. A crab is a remnant of another time, although here inarguably. If queried, the crab would say so if it had the words.
15.
Nature calls on us to whisper or stay silent so her monkeys can be heard at dawn. We're nature too, one might object, but Nature's silence respects her creatures' needs to speak in hoots and cries like babies, in the thrum of legs or wings. Her silences are like shouts, fate wrapped up in arisings of man or beast, all transient in the slippery world we love from the heart, animamundi .
16.
Casanova, accounting for his many selves, saw that he loved them more than others. They in turn condemned him, their loves animated by self-love, self-identification. In this sense, just a bystander, seducing through advance notice, wit, charisma, curiosity most of all: he wants to know, yet notes, accounting, how after-talks live on when the rest is dead on pages.
17.
In the garden, the lavender reached an end and blight is noted. One tree goes; another is slated for chopping, but those tomatoes are left alone because their fruits, ripening, are too plainly there. The apple tree’s also spared trimming, a similar sort of reprieve. In the world, the usual story. No end to it.
18.
Hold on, I tell myself. Evening putters on, papers read, tea made, consumed, lights announcing a room in use, then darkness. For some reason immortality is hovering again, a talisman of some kind, rolled out elsewhere as a question, but not possible, I think once more, despite blandishments of an abstract sort, like grave insurance. I’m warned of time squandered. Time sings a waning song, reedy, coughing. Habits die hard, the ritual of evenings where our mortality goes undiscussed. Should it not be Topic A? Too boring, we both agree. Here, I’ll take that cup.
19.
When you wrote “Berlin,” I remembered how I love you proximate, a presence. When he displayed a book or three, extolling one, inviting others to hear, I remembered how mine spark doubts until I read them and their language speaks to me at least. If I wondered what they meant, really, a world less obvious than what the others shout, it isn’t that I don’t see why they do it, but my life is rooted elsewhere, soil to be turned over, replanted as one does when the winter’s finally done, life being this fecund thing even as it goes to ground, food for thoughts that arose when you wrote “Berlin,” tacked it on, some sun in autumn.
20.
It’s awkward, not like when we felt our way and mostly spoke warmly until those reasons we wove so close unraveled, as the French say of endings ribbons we untie, finding they’re straight again or kinked, or left in pieces, useless.
21.
I spare us both (can’t you see?) from what might devour me.
1.
Creativity, Whitehead said, started it all, but has an agent (as they do) to sort things. Neutered, rumor has it. Creativity’s a pro, sidling in like old Zeus. Word gets around he’s on the make, but then she sits back, denies, shapeshifting like Kim Kardashian. Out here in the suburbs, it’s just in and out, baby mamas the doubled form these takings take, the run-on cycle Creativity needs to cosmically get off. And then the flood, streetwise the strollers, tats, tinted hair, earbuds to muffle their screaming.
2.
Almost fifty years, I noted. I wrote to try to say how it happened, love being this oddly malleable thing if that forging’s what the gods intend.
3. Grief takes different forms. Some welcome distractions others hate. Some resent as shallow sentiment that’s there because inexpressible is the reality and yet desire’s there to say something, try to fill a gap they know is unfathomable, wider than an ocean at its flood, no sign of receding but it does or they cope better, which mimics the recession that almost lulls them ‘til it doesn’t.
FROM PAMPHLET2023
1.
Walking back once in Venice I noticed how the buildings curved resisting the urge to straighten curves too are illusive a more suggestive order yet an order. A doorway's indentation or a window's invites our speculation as does every boundary like this the water's edge a wood seen from an adjoining road. To be within it is a different feeling closer to unknowing.
Elsewhere Venice straightens opens out to squares and rectangles bridges the border promenades narrow waterways while the grander ones are more riverine conceding to water its implacable priority to the point of flooding evidence of man's designs. We walked through a sequence while you spoke of long familiarity and even of disdain for ancient errors.
Stasis appears to be a theme of this place which anchored trade and dominions from its stitched together islands and accoutrements preyed on by epidemics curveballs we say now and we would know subject to odd strictures benefiting older sons the most marriageable daughters leaving the rest to fend a condition not limited to Venice but accentuated there.
Is stasis the rule or is the natural order to destroy it dynamo of flatten and rebuild spread wealth so it can accumulate again? I wander off the subject whatever it is exactly curveballs and curving streets the way a wall of doors and windows unwraps reveals briefly by chance or by intent how love seeks out such streets' rooms within rooms and ideally a canal's distance.
We take our chances with a narrow one smoothing out its slightest curve appreciating others how those forms excite us when we behold them hold them press our case our suit bodily with accompaniment of words lips fingers while she sings the chorus and the other parts as if Vivaldi composed for her another innocent giving voice in that curving way music goes.
Is there an innocent beyond the fall? Did you abscond or shift the hedges? We traded knowledge ignored the street imagined distance as a vanish point the music sung but not transcribed looked for later in memory that hall past ends disjunctions rifts. Songs they say are the final things to go.
2.
So it was we met and met, then never met again, and again then I seek to recreate our as it was, panoply of distant views, closely met, their contrast noted, a bed is a bed is a bed, their similarity broken only when a warm room led to delayering, its own thing each time, science of unmaking.
3.
Like a cherub he walks from bath to fridge. Much talk some shouted a long history of it and regret a child not sired though desired we should wait six months he said the drugs not sure I can even have one she answered.
4.
Spoke of starting stopping starting how one's leaving leads to another's. She bakes for her life's sake no longer able to abide only to be here baking the dough like shoulders legs napes but no it's only dough quiet under hands perhaps less heard than felt.
5. In my neighbor's backyard once a gray fox that color was told us barked at night. "Unearthly," we agreed and she wondered if there was a burrow, but the fox moved on, taking its otherworldly bark with it. I thought of this earlier, reading two of Merwin's poems. Foxes are folkloric, not just Zen. In Tokyo, small statues of them appear in shrines. Kurosawa's film made out it's unlucky to be caught looking, but this isn't just about foxes or maybe it's others about whom we're caught out, lost in lures she brought along without intending and we too didn't exactly intend, caught as we are the way a careless fish is.
6.
Short Memoir Prize: How short a life despite efforts made distractions those raised alienated those who left in different ways yet I'm here.
7. Another winter lived through green leaves yellow limes lemons blue and red and bees cat sitting no-cloud sky bird sings spring.
8.
“Woman as a work of art” Burckhardt wrote on a slip of paper and then left it out of his story perhaps seeing that they had lives of their own and declined to be untrue t0 lives that were self-created as they hoped wanting freedom taking selfmaking as something given not worked up knocked up smocked up as for better or worse the kitchen nursery feast days church days birthdays were art as well not art that slipped easily onto paper so better to leave it as a passing thought.
9.
Dark houses (although cars pass) clouds I guess and no sign of stars reminded of the street-of-nakedladies painting (adolescence) also the city of the old lady beloved of Babar but no streetlight nor balcony nor even a green suit.
10.
Out of context rain in August thought it was a stove left on backdoor open no mistake it was rain as she affirmed light audible water the plants we will take it I said unseasonal and no clouds but there are (glances up in darkness) yes.
The Virgin rarely speaks let alone is seen but her Son is present where they gather. Wherever and how makes little difference: a crush is like the old days' roads strewn with fronds or the long after with shrines, but she looks warily or else is summoned singularly, one to one, but searing so her reality is palpable, convincing the priests. "Spoke like me," each hearer recollects, "like a sister or a cousin. Said 'the world must awake to peril, but you know this. I was known like you will be. Calamity come to save the world, I whelped it.'"
From our terrace that strained week when we were somehow us not us the view was a second tier of balconies and rooftops green the way green is amid terra cotta and chairs small tables the deep red not seen exactly specks or flakes of color that form a Roman palette. From our bedroom the crowd below was like an ocean and at the bench on the bench by the great head hands a sack of a man I thought imagined you must think it too my life flailing in that odd way I never really flail but take stock in bits. Later Zurich suburb terrace to which I retreated haunted by your pregnant fears said so rapidly in bed unnervingly but then life's like this the deep red intuited by the eye because distance is too far or too close to know what just happened or failed to happen.
13.
Each year shortens. Still, you figure, dead, alive, or missing, as you are you, once so close, like others I counted as close who proved elusive, evasive.
Who am I and who are you? The first question greets me. Good night it says, or I say it, surprised again, but survival is no answer or is an answer.
Who are you, those of you I knew, sometimes will meet or never will or not likely to, which is a kind of never you predicted, never rolling off
your tongue? But you meant it, I feel sure, and will prove just how never your never is amid all the nevers ever said to me, of which quite a few.
EIGHT NEW POEMS
1.
Free indirect (it rolls off the pen): she grasps or is grasped without saying a word or we’re left to imagine what she might say, grasping or taken or left speechless depending on factors to be woven in, hopefully, as context.
2.
Materiality, the countess thought, it counts for little as life peters out. A palace shared with generations of my sex after four boys now men should count for something, walls rising from the canal, the boatmen singing, but it means less or I feel it slipping away, being swallowed.
3.
I saw Death today from the train, wore a hood, hockey stick in one hand, slipped behind a barrier as we moved away, so not now, the glancing blow to the head, no.
4.
We are all factories of taste even if wandering in fields with old Nikons, the scents waftingly encylopedic. I too have wandered in my time with my old Leica knockoff, unable to name a scent yet I remember them all fondly.
5.
Household magic, that is, ordinary like a marriage or friendships adrift in an ether of self-/shared doubting, a plague or merely one more black dog set loose in an absence of light. "Here, boy" we think and even say. In back, some books of spells may finally repay their purchase, tramp doubts down and stretch the time past its breaking point. One waits.
6.
Milton's shadow fell, per Blake, (the dead poet's descent written out in two books) into Sussex, just two minutes from infinity. Others mention Martian visits but Milton and Blake converse as colleagues, friends, floating on life's buoyant, infinite tide, land's end for an edge, the sea and the sky refuting it jokingly, like so many other boundaries.
7. (Belvedere)
I.
Not then the view, precisely, nor the platform, yet nicely made, she observed, an eye. It's here, his hand sweeping.
The decking and balustrade drew momentary attention. He paused to look beyond. Even when fucking he liked a view the window framed, its curtain like a July flag or a jenny filling out, towers close enough to be a view if someone looked up, but viewed had its history, his cock hard beneath a coat, the crowd below waiting:
these are love's exacting prices, set that high yet we paid them, hemmed in as we were, hemmed in, but now a platform or a plateau with views in all directions, hawks gliding. The sun exacts.
II. Less panorama than a forest, its clearings brief then back at it, the burden is heavier that was naked once, finally naked, willing an end to all starts that strike us as false. Then desire's wet turns to flood, recrimination, lives sodden, bedraggled, steeped in reality, to give it a name, unlike a belvedere, purposebuilt for an afternoon of our own devising, our mutual artifice.
8. (Spring View)
So many emperors in our midst. It warms and then a fog rolls in. Will it lift when my artist friend draws her crowd at bay's edge?
Complacent in the face of heat, unwilling to inconvenience, so all is thrust upon others, floods and droughts, sun storms, hues not usually seen. Soon a fever or two move steadily north to bask in it while coral reefs die, we read, distant and detached.
If I mention a beachfront, then you appear, a handknit white sweater and your tanned face, much as a waxing moon does with clockwork regularity, but a slower rhythm unlike waves. Brick walls and a long whitish range bring another to mind.
I could express regret or savor the play that commenced then ended, a year or seven, give or take a month, but my savoring is truer to memory. My mind tilts toward pleasure and yet pain trails not far behind. Its doleful looks pass through me to strike life's mirrored ending, its endless self-reflection with a cast of others, appearing then disappearing yet again, whereas
we figure somehow as a drifting presence, only briefly present even then, slipping easily as our malleable selves do, who wink as they say who we are, while who they are remains a mystery. Empires still vying obscure this view of spring.
John J. Parman (left, at The Pallas Gallery in San Francisco, photographed in January 2024 by its founder and creative director, Elizabeth Snowden) is a writer based in Berkeley.
SomePoemsis produced by Snowden & Parman Editorial (spedit.net) and offered by The Pallas Gallery, its exclusive outlet, at 1111 Geary Street, 94105 (thepallasgallery.com).
Text and images © 2024 by John J. Parman.
SomePoemscollects work by John J. Parman. Writing against the grain of this culturally partitioned, post-postmodern era, he found in foremothers and forefathers who wrote from their own lives and situations a confirmation.
