Dark Art I-XII
james meetze
A MANOR HOUSE MONOGRAPH
also by james meetze Dayglo. ahsahta press, 2011 It’s Overhead. fashionably pressed, 2007 I Have Designed This For You. editions assemblage, 2007 Serenades. cy press, 2004
Dark Art
i-xii
James meetze
Dark Art
i-xii
a manor house monograph | ny&sd 2013
COUNCIL
No one wants more than this theory of forgetting this ribbon of steel a river turned or a precarious mind that turns it on its side. No one wants this more than I do when our heads flood with all the voices the furniture movers move, the voices of being who we are when we are free. When America overflows within us. No one wants to be a river more than we.
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Dark art I
It is the reluctant magic of human struggle too connected to living. It is a library in which we are lost beyond the door. If I open it, I will remember the outside of poetry, the bark and June beetles having fallen from heaven because it is seasonal, it is summer’s migration rest-area. If I discover in wood the light of someone else’s cool breath I am magic for it, I am a common fool in the unmoved world. My prayer is a ghost, a leaf falling to the ground the rhythm of what life is and is not doing. I am told there is a god for everyone and this is our darkness, our loss: to know is to wander blind without inquiry. Look, ghost, you too are legend, madman a stanza in our larger story. The words are only echoes returned both origin and copy, body and shadow. Eventually, the image wisps away, sings and listens at each discreet transformation. My prayer is narrative; it too is a form of song. These hold together everything we remember.
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Dark art II
We raise our voices until only echoes only civil twilight, until time or heaven eats our propositions, our temporary ownership, and our certain foreclosure. The flimsy magician’s hat-trick can’t fix it. The broken tower is an irreparable future gravity and day and dust adumbrate. The myth beneath it all, a lake in which a battle shakes. I hear the report and think, maybe now it will end, now we can say. Morning’s salient digits announce a new decline. Still, we are magic when we wake like only the breeze matters the projections of light only gold and warm. Prediction of light and heat; a better magic above us. A different darkness now begins in blue a spectral composition of light, of matter of no sound escaping to carry words in space. The specters of our past are with us to say. In the oak, bare and crooked spoke 10
an historical man to me of now and future history.
Dark art III
Here is a point in life those lives both other and behind me inform. Want and story and loss inhabit me speaking words aloud to make them real things. A disappearing act gone long reverberates in the eyes, or the mind’s eye, it is a flash of magic no text can so easy unravel. The answers lie between boards. The ghosts are over my shoulder they are reading with me. We metamorphose when we read. So who’s to say that light isn’t blue or pink when woven between leaves, isn’t wood or pulp, isn’t paper printed with ink. The story grows darker with the forest, the poem in the space between trees. A different magic is a darker being when it lives inside us complete and electric, acting and reacting, fire and matter. Gray matter in the body’s copse, gray presence, it bends over to hear. We learn something in the register of a whisper. It isn’t wind we are listening to.
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Dark art IV
The moon is a burnt-out Edison bulb. You can’t read by it, it’s so cold. A realer cold gathering in the touch of dreams of real people as ghosts, saying words that won’t ever return. The words have not unfinished business. They are magicked into being in our throats, our mouths, in air, to say “where language fails, poetry begins.” So we are present at its genesis on I-don’t-know-what day. We thump out its rhythms metronomically like a phantom hand drums on our shoulders. If the rhythm of all life, if you listen shines in the body like a celebration then why is it so hard to be happy to be inside a life, and living it? To not be darkness or the absence of real light under a dark sky? Why does the city’s glare subjugate the stars? It’s the history of light being guided to each of us, to illuminate a path 12
to follow the voices that lead us on our quests. To find whatever the grail might be.
Dark art V
It is our condition to question the placement of the thing whether neutral in its field, or utilitarian in its holy seat, my public face. Come to find it isn’t here, isn’t waiting in the golden light like an answer. I was reading about cups, words contained in a trinket of flesh, words for the thing of love: the human body, I guess. The way a body churns everything else is only talismanic you touch it and are taken. How can one divorce an object of its feeling? Will the memory of a place make it real again? Does the orchard still bear its fruit or is it too just a myth of old religion? Who guards the gate, who waxes the artifact into a remembrance? I wanted to drink from the goblet, say into the handset, “this is the answer, I have read the prediction for sun in all our eyes.” The grail is hidden behind a cloud. It is the way we are connected.
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Dark art VI
Certain connections are made in true discourse that negate this impossible distance. These two points in time, situated on a map, the particulars of history and locality phenomena, are attached to a common memory. The immovable tissue of the Interstate the study of fences and infinite length our imprint left on the immortal world the integration of man and earth and man’s idea of earth. It’s the idea that we all just stumble through life until we land in each other’s arms and know providence is stronger than accident. To feel is a condition without remedy, a question. Are we better off to simply believe than we are to really see? Is the process of arriving more important than the vehicle in which the journey is taken? Does the language itself limit the possibility? 14
Poetry is the darkest art. From it, the world unbraids into a scientific representation of the one thing we cannot equate.
Dark art VII
I can say dark because I know how light happens; every filament burns toward its end like we do. Even the biggest stars their projections in the dark are waiting to be pulled into the hat. Because of this vibrating string a note here changes the whole fabric and another note returns order. I wanted to say without distortion: language is just a tool. Warped, it becomes a poem. The order of the poem is arbitrary, like constellations are; the recipient of it draws a line from here to here. So we see a line. Anyone can make a god out of it. Morning has broken because magic is at the heart of the story we are taught, but magic is also naughty. Stars pulled from the collapsible hat become a bunny, or a lion, or an archer, then everyone oohs and ahhhs.
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Dark art VIII
If I could hocus pocus you into my arms like a levitated assistant, we would call it floating. To float upon Orion’s shield. The Isle of California read to be floating too. Ghost of the native tongue, a pixel on the map says, no one builds a friendly city to write a new legend. No earthly body is a master of maps. Each hamlet’s dot has a mirror image on the star chart. I go there, we go there, or we are somewhere else a constellation’s history of movement. We are always in the process of not knowing, I don’t know, reading the book of. Many places on the map we’ve yet to go floating in and out of. We are above the distance between two cities with not a cloud at all to rest upon. Everything is small when lives are being lived smaller than this or that issue, smaller than our cumulative memory when the lights go out. If I could float with you into the otherworld, I would. If I could have anything to share, then 16
this simple articulation of sharing would mean love is a better magic than resurrection.
Dark art IX
Again we must begin, must say a constellation is visible is a little trickier, say assemble all we know of human geometry: my arm makes an angle and my brain makes a connection of little bursts. I am thinking in discreet units. I am a triangle. I am a feeling triangle. My arm unfolds and reaches toward the ideal. In these little bursts, I think of you in negative space and you are elemental, you are a charm of light on this dim bracelet. The guidance we read bends for us like a stave of English Yew, how prophesy is bent to mean anything. There is no quest, just a flashlight in the distance the signal of the fool. The night sky is littered with these errands of the foolish. We can’t turn anything to gold so we keep looking up for it. We have begun to say how nimble words can be: gentle, spell, very, far from me. Feel how they tumble in your fingers pieces of dust, pieces of stone, pieces of the story.
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Dark art X
Narrative arcs will always intersect our real lives in this circle our emblems in that circle. Are we following the arc? In a molecular cloud, light and matter are kaleidoscopic in my magic eye. Does the arc follow the sound of my voice? Does it use the language I know? Partly for sun, partly for cloud. Did you note the loft of dandelion seed as it hovered gently to another field? Are we always beneath a vast field of blackness, though it appears blue waving our arms to feel our way? Maybe it’s the greatest trick played on humankind that we think we’re alone on our rubber ball. We produce applause for ourselves for no real reason, just to put our hands together in an irregular staccato clap, clap. Look at how far we’ve come. Look how magical it is to gaze at a glowing screen and interact with our evolving storyline. 18
There is no special equation for storytelling neither now, nor even in our telescope’s future.
Dark art XI
Intermittently, the messages do arrive like my daily horoscope to say do not sit alone with your scrutiny of the little things: text, figures, balances or hummingbirds buzzing on a gray day. If nostalgia enters our cosmographeme do we remember each increment of anguish where so much space? Is our alphabet really that important? W X Y Z vocalise, the nonsense melody that colors each day’s ambience. Can you hear the feeling of a place in its coloratura? I can see a great island rise like alchemy’s gold is just metaphorical and real beauty is more precious than shiny rocks. Strata whispers in varied tones, cloud-wake flood-waters’ poem, prepared trees with wind. There is a translation of birdsong for orchestra. Sharp and rising vibrato, then a magic flute the echo’s contradistinction tells me this is our instruction for listening. Let go of frames and forms, silence in what is never without sound.
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Dark art XII
This is the time to acknowledge memory, the fuzzy inaccurate revisions, the magic in idle life we reconnoiter to be better engineers of our own uncertain destiny. Our libraries have too many answers and, being such an individualist species we will never agree or find a consensus. We will never walk the righteous path. This is the shape of two currents meeting and bending, being like water, which we are but can never embrace. So the stars’ projection of the far-off past arrives on this dark orb to a faint and incandescent reply. Electric magic, arrogant magic, burning to a predestined resolution. We are here. I am among us with a song that is every sound the world makes without words. Silence is the place of true language speaking with what breath all of us have. I sit here and say there, my tired heart there are those words we know and use only as incantations.
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tINY DYNaMINE
The colors chime October’s trinity a messy palette to compose from but you are a dynamic pronoun and this is our way our tiny effort at pink, orange the connotations of red. The history of blood today’s white tunics and monomaniacal cross. The leaves burn autumn at the stake of sundown. O book, you are a heretic too.
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Manor House, LLC New York, San Diego www.mhquarterly.com Copyright Š 2013 by James Meetze All rights reserved Frontispiece by Debra Scacco: I am trapped in your shadow, Ink on paper, 150 x 150 cm, 2012; Designed by James Meetze. Covers printed by Daniel Heffernan at Clove St. Press, signatures printed in the United States, and hand sewn in an edition of 150. Typeset in Mercury with Goudy Text titling.
This is ________ of 150.
First Edition, 2013 ISBN: 978-0-9859095-3-6
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to the editors of the fine print and digital publications in which these poems first appeared, often in earlier versions: American Letters & Commentary, The Equalizer, The Offending Adam, and Ping Pong: The Literary Journal of the Henry Miller Library.
manor house monographs 1. Dark Art by James Meetze, 2013 2. In The Air by Peter Gizzi / Richard Kraft, 2013
I can say dark because I know how light happens; every filament burns toward its end like we do.