Musette

March 30 poem: Shadow (fragment)

The penultimate day and I am reduced to fragmentary wanderings. Still, every fragment has potential, no? The first line is from Carol Snow, who I'm encountering for the first time in the wonderful "Lyric Postmodernisms."

 

Shadow (fragment)

Saw (into) and entered the wide corridor. I’m in the habit of shadows, lean toward the shift of them, their points of attachment. A different sort of anatomy. Surely hands reaching into the shadow body could manipulate it, could draw out the obstruction, make it dissipate with light. This seems like common knowledge, like applying pressure to stanch the blood or licking clean a wound. Though the lack of vivid color and taste makes for confusion. The shadow does not thicken in folds like a length of tulle, nor blue under staining to show what’s been compromised. So one walks the corridors, feeling for unexpected drafts or heat, or what falls into spaces left by doors flung open. The slant, the slam of things. Memory of a boy who says: Pull down your pants. Shadow on the floor replacing what came next.

Photo is by Mrs Logic, via Flickr.

March 27 poem: The thing itself

Quite tired now. Just four more days of this. Happy for the daily attention to words though, however incomplete they may be. There's much to return to.

 

The thing itself

What is it like to talk silently to oneself; what goes on there?   —Wittgenstein

Mind’s wind. Intermittent light below fast-moving clouds. A house picked out of a landscape, its details so bright and precise it almost seems to float. Arbitrary selection of the next feature, a phrase, a memory: Jesus in a Plexi-fronted box, the way we protect our saints. Then the next perception, luminosity of the Plexiglass itself, its attempt to break through without words. The tree as tree, taken in complete, breathed into shapes  before language. A learning to see. This silent speech as erasure of distance, the cleared space the tree, the thing, the other, fills completely. This direct apprehension of the whole (or: love) which I relax into without words, without description. Led here by the hours of knowing without naming, or attempting to. We stop, sit a little longer near the roses.

Photo by Brenda Anderson, via Flickr.

March 22 poem: What the rock wants

Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" arrived today in the mail. It was a fairly constant refrain in my recent reading, so I wanted to take a look myself and have the luxury of pages instead of screens. I scanned for interesting lines and found one, "Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations." The rest came from that. It's long. Next month, perhaps, the editing will begin on all these pieces. For now, I'm piling up stones.

 

What the rock wants

1. Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations. This you do as you feel its weight in your palm and test it for a certain flatness. To balance stone on stone you might imagine the rock aligning its crystalline structures like a spine, but that only serves to turn the rock into you, or you to stone and neither of those makes it easier to make the rock stack higher. Better, you think, to imagine a planet-size boulder cracking, fracturing, breaking its way to smaller approximations of itself. Chips off the block. Not amoebic in its division but a demonstration of some mechanical shattering and smoothing that results, over time, in a sort of cloning. A splitting off, a rubbing away of excess that creates, finally, the approximate unity of the things. A beach of smooth stones, some small enough for skipping over the yielding flatness of water, an act that gives the stone the sensation it seeks—trajectory, movement. The opposite of itself, not falling or standing but flight. Lightness. A gradual smoothing by air. What the rock wants.

 

2. We try this ourselves the night a truck dumps a pile of jackhammered driveway in the dark back yard. The idea is to turn this cairn into a patio. Poor man’s flagstone. Not, perhaps, what the rock wants. We’re kids too small to chuck the chunks but try it anyway, tipping them from the top, de facto wind or water, wrecking crew to catalyze a breakdown of the jagged mass to powdered concrete and sand, or liquid igneous that eons turn to a cool, flat slab. Or so we make believe. We imagine the mountain leveling itself to bedrock, returning to some kind of stasis, a suburb, barbecue, longed-for cement truck. We imagine the unlikely sensation of flight. We imagine pulling away.

3/22/11

Image by Chris Devers, via Flickr.

March 17 poem: The perfect solitude

Pulled a line from "Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip" and sprinted off from there. What amuses me is the way the worked line/mind I like to cultivate gravitates in the direction of the Soul Whip, but in these quick dispatches from the moment, there's not so much time for that. The odd jagged leap, which I find so beautiful—more spasm than swoon—requires art. This is more of a snapshot. The LR line is the first phrase before the first comma.

 

The perfect solitude

I disliked solitude and I also craved it, a solitude cultivated on Panamanian bushes where the berries take months to develop the proper red shade and then, pulled into baskets and dried, yield a connoisseur’s solitude, a solitude to be sipped and savored, a full-bodied solitude, a solitude only my own psychic terroir could produce. I hated the cult of it, the snobbery surrounding this method of distilling the self from silence, yet it seemed true to me nonetheless. It was easy for the makers of carafes and cafes, mountain retreats and one-person cabins built by an artisan from shipping palettes and scrap metal, but fashioned into fantasy castles of solitude, it was easy for these seducers to seed my mind with their containers for my aloneness, and for me to crave the company of the things, even in my solitude, which I used to design the perfect solitude, so unlike the one I was occupying, so far from there. I wanted my solitude to have gravity, to be a Garcia Marquez solitude that spanned a hundred years and changed those who encountered its  fading artifacts much later, its scrawls on paper stapled to light poles, its tracks in snow, its mysterious valleys of blue butterflies or forgotten, bloodstained rock. I wanted my solitude to keep me company, to court me with stories, to entertain like the best of party guests. I wanted a belle-of-the ball-solitude, not a Walden or a monk’s cave. I disliked the way I craved it, but I craved it anyway. It occupied me, that was its success and failure. It created a space I could endlessly refill. It distracted me from myself.

Image by golbenge (골뱅이) / Seongbin Im, via Flickr.

Emily

I'm back to Emily Dickinson. I remember reading her in college, my own lexicon in hand, and watching universes open out from those lines. Flipping through the Complete Poems today I'm struck by the experimental feel of the poems, many of them new to me. I'm looking at #547, which begins:

 

    My first well Day--since many ill--
    I asked to go abroad,
    And take the Sunshine in my hands,
    And see the things in Pod--

    A'blossom just when I went in
    To take my Chance with pain--
    Uncertain if myself, or He,
    Should prove the strongest One

The leap in time between the pod and blossom, the sense of the cost of those  days of illness, and the  "take my chance with pain"  are rolling around my brain.

It happens that Agha Shahid Ali makes Dickinson's 1463 an epigram for a section of "A Nostalgist's Map of America." That poem begins: "A Route of Evanescence/With a revolving Wheel--"...

I'm not far into "Nostalgist's Map," but paging through, I'm thinking, quite pragmatically, that some of his first lines, or bits of them, are wonderful writing prompts. Which means that just one line or phrase in, they've turned on my imagination.

      When the desert refused my history...
      Students of mist..
      It was a year of brilliant water...
      Listen to my account as the world vanishes...

I'm saving string this month, may not write a lot. But my couple of poem-a-day experiments reinforced how much I need to stop to look around. Look around every day, of course, but also spend a *bit* more time processing, and gathering. I like that expression "wool gathering" --which reminds me of Psyche's second task, gathering wool from the dangerous rams, which she accomplished by waiting.

Notes on the day: The fish tanks are sparkling. One is much more about plants than fish.

In praise of...

Agha Shahid Ali. I wasn't carrying a notebook today, so I asked David to pick one from the shelf and bring it to me. I'd written on a few pages in 2002, and stuffed a couple of printed out poems in to mark my place. One was Ali's "Farewell," which I still find absolutely stunning. It's here, if you scroll down, below a couple of other beautiful pieces. A reminder of the power of art to address the real, the ruinous, the worst--and transcend it, look through it and see the possible.

Here's a bit of "Farewell":

   

"At a certain point I lost track of you.
    You needed me. You needed to perfect me.
    In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
    Your history gets in the way of my memory.
    I am everything you lost. You can't forgive me.
    I am everything you lost. Your perfect Enemy.
    Your memory gets in the way of my memory:

    I am being rowed through Paradise in a river of Hell:
    Exquisite ghost, it is night.

    The paddle is a heart; it breaks the porcelain waves.

    It is still night. The paddle is a lotus.

    I am rowed — as it withers — toward the breeze which is soft as
    if it had pity on me.

    If only somehow you could have been mine, what wouldn't
    have happened in the world?"

Ali died young at the end of 2001. Seeing this poem again makes me want to look at his ghazals.

In praise of...

Ann Hamilton. I continue to look through "Ann Hamilton: An Inventory of Objects," which collects the objects created for various performances and installations. For instance: Awaken, a blanket "Embroidered with the words of Susan Stewart's poem 'Awaken.'" (It's apparently for sale, I see, as I scroll around. Many details about the piece are here.

I happened on conceptual art for the first time as a high school kid in Colorado, hanging out with a slight, outcast boy who was a Yoko Ono fan. He gave me a book showing--or maybe just describing--her work. Lights went on. Soon after I found Charles Simic in the library. They're related in my mind, and at the heart of what I love about poetry (and art). The familiar world made strange, and thus brought closer.

And I am very excited to have just found this: an inventory list from the Medical History Museum. There's an incredible world here. For instance:

                                                      

MHM00083

Compass                                      Marked on lid "POCKET COMPASS; MADE IN ENGLAND", "ESL"

Brief Description Compass with yellow face and brass rim, housed in black bakelite circular container with relief printing on surface. Has screw top lid. History of Object Included in contents of Dr. James Jamieson's medical bag (registration number 74), who practiced in Warnambool and Melbourne, later lecturing in Obstetrics at Melbourne University. He died in 1916. Materials and Finishes Brass, metal (painted), paper (printed) and bakelite.

After

I really love Dennis Nurkse's work, and at City Lights last year, I picked up "The Fall," which I keep reading. This, from a poem called "Darkness" strikes me tonight. It's a walk home after a home run and a kiss, and it ends the poem.

        "The world was composed
         of leftover trees
         and fireflies from before.

         I was less than the breeze.

         Still the massive door
         swung open at my touch."

"Leftover trees and fireflies from before...." I used to go to an informal poetry workshop of Dennis' in Manhattan. He once said he thought my pieces sounded like poetry translated from another language, which I took as a great compliment. Because somehow, I'd had the same thought about his....  Now I have to figure out just what that quality is, or was.

Poem o' the day

Still looking at Luis Cernuda's prose poems. In a piece called "The Poet," he describes a child happening on poetry, how the boy was --
     "infected with something different and mysterious, which later, on rereading the poet again and again, awakened in him something like the memory of an earlier life, vague and insistent, drowned in neglect and nostalgia."
     I can't get enough of the mood of these Latin writers and their longing, which seems to pull them through the world, into its beauty.

Another sijo today. I know questions are not part of their structure, but they seem to be an inescapable part of mine....

#20

An ending, or infinity

White paper boats carry lit candles onto black water.
Pushed by a breeze or a breath, that most intimate of elements.
When they dissolve into night, do stars fall to replace them?

What the infant sees

I'm slowly reading "Greater Vision," a book on the eyes and seeing. I was interested in this:

"Up until the second month of the child's life, his eyes can focus to the distance of eight to ten inches, or about the arm's length that separates the child's eyes from his mother's when he is being held. Research has shown that a child's attention is usually focused on his mother's mouth until he is three months of age. At that time, development in the cerebral cortex steers that focus to his mother's eyes."

Just letting that stew awhile...