Hum (3 page)

against the cry of any nocturnal creature.

All against one, and the philosophical questions

on a far continent like so many markets.

Not that either.

Conditions above the smashed agora with the cowboy riding sunset on his

mechanical cart, his small mouth and child’s

incontinent whine. Casinos in full play, paying for

assault, moving to the rush of coin. And still we did not speak, did

not know to whom to speak, muttered at lunch, gave each other

proofs of care, one to

one, but did not come to the table to hear our fathers, they were dead, our

mothers, they were busy, our neighbors, they were elsewhere, our lovers, they

were not listening. Listen. This is a lullaby. Listen.

to Leon Botstein

Logic, for example, skewed from mooring.

Boats adrift but loaded.

Anchors away!
This way,
says the captain,

this way,
says the mate.

That said, the small grows

into film and an audience forms to clap.

For the good guy.

For the wounded under a halo of sand.

Bands play. Flags. Aromas.

The blackened fields ready for grafting,

seeds incapacitated

in the nuance of tragedy

stripped to its bone—

disinclined to repeat

unworthy of sequence.

A monotone of commitment.

Thus illogic disguised as logic.

Thus Faust through the ages.

And the heart’s munitions

cooked down to devotion, seared in a pot.

Pot of melted weaponry.

The margin called to from afar.

Speech acts.

Massive audience turning away in tears.

The nonmoon followed by the nonsun.

Two

IMPOSSIBLE BLUE

1.

Forget that version, gist’s

truncated eruption, stone

placating heat, avenue luminous but forbidden

up the steep assault. She of glittering rings, of the swollen

intricacy of faith, sinks into dust, frees an icon from its

distillation—unction of tears, waxy scent

of a remnant nave. Out there, things ride their riddles

like toys in space, an agenda gap on the morphic tide.

Here, the soul pivots on scripted discs

curving away from the story

we thought we would always tell.

Bird, halo, gust,

Poseidon grass and impeccable weave

(silk on silk) young sailor with one leg raised,

the bride stalked, red beads

hurting her throat.

Now a veil

is thrown clear across the disturbance

across the domestic stage

to the circle’s wet edge.

I can see through this, and this, I can see

the dispersal as if it were tomorrow, hinge of arrival opening—

how it goes, adage after adage, through the sanctuary,

the nave’s arcade,

dipped pigment and last trace

trespassing over a bridge onto a continent, the increments

bewildered by detail—

searching the site,

mouth, thumb, foot,

stone angled across the processional

where they climb to stare, the him and the her,

black goats bleating from the cloister

passing something on.

Single plaintive note, little redundancy.

2.

The arcade leads

from sacred to secular, carrying the relic

overhead, architect

hammering away at bedrock, swallows

igniting air’s scripture,

sediment extended outward and down—

nudity of the example, its accumulated rite.

In this space, glyphs

transcribe scale’s precision.

This or that step

falters at the bazaar,

postcards fall through the mosque’s vaulted diaspora,

releasing their images from history’s

crude hideout,

mistakes and dead-ends

in peripheral vision—men hugging each other

while another, bloody scrap on the road, is perpetually beaten.

There was the illusion of purpose, the illusion of content,

as if we were responses annulled by our norms.

Hired old dame weaving,

raw wool pulled through

a tourist economy,

its itinerant, spectral, real.

A false god has a greater reality than the true,

and
so extensions of the Cartesian mind are carried to the most

attenuated points of no return

babbles the anthropologist

as a young man wraps a car in cloth

to mourn the contemporary, his desire

kept under the revolution’s chronic restatement, tour guide

speaking in third person, bus of strangers

importuned with tea.

                      
The impure surface,

iridescent purple, green and silver surfaces,

these surfaces disclose a cold scintillation,

sight is abolished by a hermetic kingdom of surfaces.

The surfaces of the reliefs are definitely surfaces,

the surfaces in Scorpio Rising,

or California surfaces, the

brilliant chromatic surface—Thanatos in aqua,

surfaces that look mineral hard. A variety of surfaces

from Saturnian orchid-plus to wrinkle-textured blues and greens,

the inside surfaces of the steel sites,

every surface in full view.

3.

Comatose vision

etched in a mirror

sleep extends its tale

deprived of solace

the dream’s epithet

profits us not

sweltering veil

veranda backlit

and her hair

measured for afterlife

the Sultan’s concubine

kept in a cage

heat’s fiasco

forensic pursuit

huge jewels

perfectly arranged

the dialogue stymied

at the mark of lost faith

4.

I saw a young boy in a row boat but he did not see me.

Chaste catastrophe of a broken mast

                        men holed up in the mountains

                to travel as lightly as snow

                    to fall

                            upon fact

Already a tool’s coercion

reels with annunciations

of some one or thing. A yellowy

dross fades into apertures

whose program is scuttled—

diadems for children

made to fall apart.

O spiral of light!

The petals fall, water

dull scum. Once

among these you thought

shadow nerves would come alive

but the body is a fetish: all its moments sealed in a box.

Perhaps the sculptor’s last nobility

gives something back, like the moon to a landscape.

The old knight, there in dark garb, peers at the abstinent blank.

We can make things look natural, but that doesn’t mean they are.

We had told the story of

restoration, pasted the new leaf on the tree.

A belated significance forecasts

its currency, as if among figments

we might enter the glare where history collapsed,

catalyst dispersed as the unremembered,

one ruin much like another, one choice

for a better tomorrow: mass appeal, filling station, chorale.

And the hostage figure—transference and mechanism

caught by intention’s blind noise, site newly animate—claims its form.

Kept or held in
help me
position

and she

to whom the cry is cast

is dead.

Wheels on gravel.

Dog.

The season with a hole in its side.

Intercepted, hand out

as if one could know, or come to know,

in the city, walking among lit staves

among young girls with silver flutes

playing snippets of Mozart, gilt embellishments of the castle,

dust along water’s edge, pool

of fat children, vicissitudes of gray

in the crypt, the new museum’s

horde of old art,

the rip, breach, wound and

the hope

to make it up or rebuild or draw

in the day the things that belonged to the night:

cartoons, scaffolds,

tones massed in the bell tower, ruin

at the intersection,

walls picked like bad skin,

things literal or not, so

you think
sign,

mechanical thing,

and the angel on the plinth

its geography faltering like a compass

circumventing distance

in the place of the double moon and the silent skiff

impasse clustered over the kiln,

bony intervention, Darwin’s worms impeded,

and still the light

still the harpy comes blistering out of the crowd

to interrogate the boy,

to ask for papers, name, occupation

let me not forget.

So this is the zone of lost calls.

Or the allegiance to the gymnast

under the hood of the BMW, or

Wagner’s immensity.

There is a squirrel in the birdbath, the evening

broken in branches of maple.

Of things barbaric, ideal.

The blue  there are no slippers  phoned from the street

the countess  a walk across the bridge  finding a dress and shoes

the black shoes  transparent  raining on snow

the birds  to be ready for the dance  the second wife

came back  sailing  the blue

the bridge in gold light

the birds in snow

you telephoned

I said I would I

did not  the blue  after crossing

And that the obscure would approach

in crystal sheaves

accumulating but

undressed, denuded

as of spines or wires or where

there cannot be a mirror

only the blankly encumbered mass

as when the sitter closes her eyes

the veins under skin

or the person falls

the kitchen tile on her cheek.

That the obscure

approaches with mere crutches, polished,

and the title of a book

or the blank inside of the book

or the recollected word.

There is no telling, except by the analogy of the snow

and the embarrassed receptor

embodied, so one imagines a shell in a tree

as bells chime discursive thirds.

The stones will return, their

old grammar

leaked upward through snow.

And there, a bench, a path.

Birds, or shoes, on the hill.

I cannot say

how the vanishing

turns to a sign for blue after it has left

only the light by which it became blue

as a body makes a sign

lifting the hand

turning the head.

And the stamp in the snow

is, we say, a footprint

down into the blue

print in the snow

or of the snow

noticed, the requisite

agreement, and the normal

progress from snow to blue to cold

logic, without argument, open to shut

like curtains but not

how the dream has

no proof of its objects, not

how the world folds into speechlessness

how the silk curtains are enflamed

feeling in the folds of the silk curtains

untranslatable effects

as if we could touch the light

pick it up and put it in the mouth

exhale audible shade,

the deepest blue, say you

saying
I
say you.

to Norma Cole

Fear arguably

nobody’s name, nothing abstract

taking place in the extended

        correlates to sabotage  the villain

    sham

              the elicited shame

a politically other  condition  sabotage  or heterogeneous zone

                      things begin by falling, have fallen

into soul’s pivot

so proximate to skin

you might say, credo held

back from the image of the dark

having fallen and the bats’ high swirl after dark

additive but not ordinary, like care, how we care,

he going into the undark room with the books

you into yours, I to mine, to our rooms

                          false water burbles incessantly

                             around fake fish

                                     to save the light

against art, against nature also, if nature is not false

and if art is true

to something

to some thing or some one, some one thing

estimated to be

the eventful slosh

about which we can do nothing

how to make something from the nothing under the bridge

how to cross

to that side of the bridge

bridge

He built a house within a house

into which certain tenants enter

so we might speak about the true cost

of making something