American Poetry Page 16

  Five Poems

  Rosmarie Waldrop

  MALLARMÉ AS PHILOLOGIST, DYING

  Even the purest writer is not entirely in his work, we must admit. A saturated white tilts off the page, a ricochet of sense like children heard, not understood. You see the gap between chance breath and the continuous line of the horizon, method to infinite power or out one candle. Anatole aboli. Bibelot Anatole. Walks down the stairs, one by one, to the bottom of the mirror. It is the lack of self splits his ear. A labyrinth like a sentence. Always, word follows word, to stave off those little deaths. Is he alive?

  When he leaves the room, he recaptures a memory called meaning. A matrix where a word is carried by a foreign language. Say “th.” Say the whole word: “death.” The Box for Learning English by Yourself and Playing is broken, the string to push the puppet’s tongue between his teeth. “Debt” is not comparable, not part of the body. Throw the dice, throw. Again. If often enough, only everything. Between the teeth.

  To track your dream, enter by way of the corridor and comparative grammar. The dream is called work. The corridor leads to Hebrew, which shows how to replace lacking inflection by ideal nakedness. The corridor passes time, so that the girl is cold. When you caress her name, somber and red like an open pomegranate, you slowly descend toward. Stop. The dream insists that meaning, memory and music are the same. Out of its own lack, it fashions a flesh of vowels, and of consonants a skeleton delicate to dissect. What is a faun to do?

  A simple laryngitis. Does not abolish breath. A lacking word, a thought that terrible would vibrate suffocating like an open spasm splits his ear terrible his throat. Genevieve, virgin spasm, vivacious, and beautiful today suffocating. A fan of lacking experiences. For Mademoiselle Mallarmé. It is hot. Wants a book on anatomy, it cannot be too simple: he might place the larynx in the brain. Again. His breath stops, and we are all speechless.

  THE THREAD OF THE SENTENCE

  Etymology is one of the choices. The other, wearing your heart on your sleeveless. Cross my.

  Even the straightest road conceals detours and forks. Thirst. For physical presence in tight succession. All week I concentrated on the hopeless accuracy of anxiety.

  A line made to incorporate circumference. What the snow falls on. The very deep of a labyrinth, its poorly lit fortnights, its views without domain so like destiny.

  Her beauty was called foreign. In relation to terms whose absence is felt. The foreign in one single thrust, absence felt elsewhere. Is self?

  Not snow, but its blue shadow. Exchange of rather and disintegrating not made complex by the transfer of money. Thirst eddies.

  Time is the invention of past snow. The thread I walk like a tightrope. The maze in the shape of a straight line.

  Given to conclusions, I admire awkwardness in love. Open my clothes. To what stands outside my tongue.

  The labyrinth is a ruse. Already passing into something else. The thread, swing, syncope life hangs by. My already share of nothing.

  NORMAL DISTURBANCES

  To understand the body as water. Reflecting elsewheres of light. Above, increase of waves.

  No need has the language to become the law it would be. Whereas streetcars travel in straight lines. To demonstrate perspective. To extend their grooves into your body. Runs, along the lines, the pale blue lightning. Speechless, the self is now directed.

  Inevitably. Projecting parts onto the outer world. Café tables. At angles. Yet development must develop out loud. Else a condition for already gone by. Here love, Renaissance architecture and increased anxiety.

  Here too the gift of excrement. Excessive subservience mapped on a grid.

  The laws of perspective both libidinal and aggressive. Won’t forgive you the impulse to flight.

  Holes in the fabric. Medieval congestion breaks into sunlit piazzas. Ego in bits. Thus, a feeling of disintegration.

  Against transitory experiences, gratification opening outward, and foreign bodies embedded in the self. Inasmuch as. The resilience of the infantile mind. Opens and closes in confusion.

  I understand. You are waiting for a flourish of rhetoric, an Italian tenor. But I am drowning. There are other examples. Let’s summarize your fears, objections to, and side issues of, plain thinking.

  Guilt always rises to the surface. After puritanically straight streets you yourself must walk in straits and narrows. Speak slowly and distinctly. Not to mention: stop for breath.

  STEPS IN INTEGRATION

  Anxiety arises, she says. To signals of the clock. To cut down the forest for the trees. To to. Compulsive ties found embedded.

  White, hard piece of chalk. So that the letters resemble hunger. Subtract underwater from fear of parting.

  In early childhood, atoms cannot be seen. Not mechanically interlocked. Not in collision. On billboards. Then impulse seems to attach itself, and time so short.

  In a run-down neighborhood, the jazz players. The water moves around the trout. No color separation.

  Is the ego capable of splitting the object? The atom? Hairs? The clock in winter, extreme context. The forest cut down.

  Faced with unpleasant stimuli the organism reacts by fragmentation, considered as a weapon. Letters written in a rage. And space between limbs.

  The atomists found the liquid state hard to explain, but the trout stirs under water. A raw world, she says. Out of raw world into commercial zone. And time so short.

  The sound of many atoms. The color of drums. The solace of phantasy.

  Condition of flight: First plant your right foot and then your left. On noun? Or adjective? Folded in, the flush of omnipotence.

  SCHIZOID DEFENSES

  Surrounded on three sides by foreign idiom. On the fourth, fear of overtones. To locate myself where speaking breaks and scatters I tack as many boundaries in memory. Amorphous followed by winter.

  Friends unreliable if handsome. Thing else. If we listen intently without understanding we hear white. New snow falls. On this old noise, thickly. Severed, like a lost meaning, from my own tongue, I know nothing of myself.

  Mismatched body equates horizon and hollow. How to open and enter, so warm the blankets. Unfinished weather seen through glass. I have my thoughts and see them drift across the snow too. The body suddenly heavier. Suddenly afraid of falling out the window.

  Certain consonants coat the atmosphere. Phonemes out of a beautiful face, as a stubble of grass breaks through the snow. And reverts at once to: no landscape, no subtitles. Farther west, whole fields of indifference.

  I speak as if on snow shoes, wide berths so as not to sink. Home speech, too, suddenly foreign. As if it were always another who speaks. As if I were both first and third person.

  Two Poems

  Martine Bellen

  FOUNDATION MANDALA

  —for Claire

  Of sapphire. Systematically construed

  off a square; offering

  deities a balcony on which to dance

  How does one illuminate the atmosphere?

  Sheath of candles

  Irrigate the four winds

  Ganesha round back repairs walls

  while the girl maps elements of philosophy

  and posthumously eavesdrops on grandmother

  whose files, over six feet thick,

  contain wisdom applicable to Vermeer, birds, fabula,

  penny arcades and the chance encounter

  of a sirocco and softened laughter.

  The girl disguising herself as an old spider

  in a 13th century limnal magic lantern

  exacts impulses from light and pearls of moisture

  which accumulate on complex webbing

  as Picasso eats cats,

  woos & plays the flute.

  This boundless structure binding structure,

  city of flesh and bones

  Hear white wheat

  where mind drops, a vibrant precipice

  Indra inspects the floors of the building,

  consults diagram
s drawn in mineral on brocade,

  tests supports, balance, flexibility.

  Holiness as a star,

  octagon, circle, jewel

  Traditionally sand-painters applied this city

  of shadow, channels, cul-de-sacs,

  moving inward toward its heart

  Trappings of misknowledge in Grandma’s cabinets

  the girl uses to reconstruct conditions of weather,

  directional colors, the need of her being in her need

  to escape, she pirouettes atop the head of a pin,

  petals of tears and pomegranate minaret. My lost ballerina

  sloshes ring-side the spectral world held in place by neural wind

  where everyone has two names,

  lives according to the outer universe or

  train’s harmonic connection to its crossing.

  Drywall, five transparent layers

  of Panisks, Dakini, Guardian Dragons

  Consecreation of this mandala eliminates reversals,

  a frameless forest from throat to heart,

  in ornamental buildings with indelible arms

  to carry and heal when embraced.

  Tinkling bells announce transition of natural phenomena

  NOCTURNE

  The Swan sails a milky tide spread evenly across Silver River

  &Pierrette angry with the moon and universe of flute, viola, harp

  Harmonizing our corrupt selves with the utterly impassable

  Unable to suffer

  Without leitmotiv

  Not to denote absence but to describe in negative terms to capture the fades and sequences

  The equation of peering at the sky upside-down, at Cassiopeia, a sequin,

  Butterfly’s dream, Andromeda

  Philosophical toys contenting emblematic identity

  Below her waist: blue coral

  Cloud’s breath root-coiled to earth

  How matter’s faithless

  Miscellaneity under a simmering cinder moon

  Omen of bones, ignoble, central moods

  Crinkum-crankum frogs congesting trees

  Shaded by a turbid glow

  Bee’s familiarities

  With the mild moon

  Key to the bright world

  Communal & personal aspects of integrating with sound as landscape

  (converted luminosity)

  She sleeps in black and white woods,

  Only when awake do colors saturate

  Habitats of resonance

  Glass splashed with spells, decanto

  Ghouls, fouler wind, and swollen waves

  A passing moon, passion moon

  The sword which lies ready for battle in the open heart, shiny moon

  (A hidden moon scuds behind the broken cloud)

  Or is the Divine Window—apprehension of our invisible body

  Tucked away in the prose closet

  Neck-ruffles of stars and the dones d’aigo

  Sheltered in underground water-falled halls, weaving water

  To gowns, the living mutable spirit of each fountain:

  The Tender Fount, Course Spring,

  Spring of Deceit, Glassy Fountain, The Dried Up Spring

  (reduce amount of blood in body, reduce desire)

  Innermost subtle drops

  Suffusing throat, heart

  Gave speech to bird and wind

  That dance for an audience of one; still swirls

  Of bejeweled tulle pirouette in echoing applause,

  Like the clinks of cordial glasses

  Inspiriting the dark alone

  She is an idiot, walks through the burden forgetting

  What disappeared. Her

  World fell away. A wind, hitherto unknown, physically unanimous,

  All the Devils of Hell cannot pluck a feather from one poor wren.

  Five Poems

  Peter Sacks

  NOTE

  Others choose more solid figures of resemblance but the wind blows from that place

  dividing tissue seed flame unpermitted edges carrying the socket-bone’s

  implicit trial—here bend—here study it—the law remains torn feather scrap of

  tarmac skin you fill it in you plough over the crater lip past argument the certain

  flourish, short-stemmed, reachable with signalling what comes out of the wind

  as an arrest, a feeding precedent, this rapid lifting now you link away drive out

  each thrust upslope above the mark the mortar set you press against more weight

  as for the future peace with gaps a hive a hull white shredding petal wave it will

  not stop the work’s upheaval where the impact shows its vein the unencompassable

  paying out root thread survival-salted pollen knowing other judgment in the

  sideways trace and drag you cast you follow it.

  NOTE

  Had you existed (this world) had you set your own equivalent across the track

  would there have been a further purpose clearing the debris? Or earlier—before

  the call, before the guarantees (the stars of heaven, sand, the wings resettling

  above ordinary slaughters)—was it to frighten us away? How solitary,

  with smoke mixed in, with scrapings. Listen—let the others hear the long

  collisions wrapped in silence. Blank flag of surrender & no writing covers you.

  CURRENT

  The fossil of the fish in candlelight—a dorsal fin

  set wavering by current & the spine more flame than stone.

  Breathe in.

  The words too grow transparent, heard-through, to this end.

  What’s nearest to you now?

  Ungathered sediment, you’re swaying on your stem

  time loosens, thins, through-lit as by an older

  element.

  It knows you as you will become.

  6.12.00

  As dead leaves in the space between leaf-shadows gleam, you could not

  keep from waking further, disentangled from what might have been

  perpetual fear. The core took longer, first whom, then what.

  As if all flesh were punishable proof,

  they had been everywhere, the trees.

  FACE TO FACE

  The sky too fed upon itself

  & hid behind the point where everything takes on

  the sheen of disbelief.

  Justice shivered in its mask.

  The residue of innocence would speak if it had words. Would cry out

  once more for what name? What is its sin, there at the origin?

  Two Poems

  Reginald Shepherd

  ROMAN YEAR

  Martius

  The corrugated iron gates

  are rolling down storefronts

  in paradise, late light flecks windows,

  rain’s acid fingerprints. Motes

  float between iron and glass, sink

  into sanded pavements, weather’s

  footprints, cracked mappa mundi: silk

  tea roses with a fringe of plastic fern;

  grapes, apples, and bananas ripened

  to painted wax: your eyes

  blinking away some pollen

  in wind that says spring’s coming, wait

  for me. Months sometimes it takes

  Aprilis

  light scrolls across an unmade bed,

  we were setting out for Aries

  in paper planes (white dwarf stars

  bright in a wilderness of wish scatter

  white feathers among me, fistfuls

  of light): bees busied themselves

  with the seen, moment’s

  multiple tasks, for the pollen, honey

  in the blood, bees would drown

  each day: from a thicket of nos

  to one sepaled blossoming, all

  in an afternoon

  you thought of bees as summer

  Maius

  Heliotrope gaze has fixed m
e

  in its sights (turning solar year suffers

  sudden rain, grazes my cold

  with vague waves, plashing

  particles, but lightly): lightly

  take this sky, bound up in so much

  loose light, light wind brushes chapped

  lips. Light-footed gods break open

  day to see what it contains: body

  survives light’s inquisitions.

  Juniius

  beside the shale pigeons a dove

  color of old brick dust, the sound

  of brick dust settling: traffic noise

  rides heat-rise off wet streets, summer

  music echoes borrowed air: light

  centrifugal, sent scattering, lost later

  every day: some gold

  against bright water (handfuls

  scattered over lake), unnecessary, true

  candleland waning to wax

  and wick, silver water shattering

  like backed glass.

  Quintilis

  When I was in Egypt, light fell

  instead of rain, congealed to grains of sand,

  pyramidal, uninterred. Uninterrupted waves

  of palms departed for shuddering oases. Why was it

  I spent centuries in that mirage, caravanserai

  of the sirocco stopped, pausing at

  reflection, also called the polished sky,

  and still no fall of shade? The light hung

  triangular, aslant, touched the colossus

  to song.

  Sextilis

  Wanting to understand, not wanting

  to understand, by taking thought you lose it, by not

  taking thought. Watching him run a hand

  through thinning blond hair, passing

  at arm’s length on a lunch hour

  street. Wondering is it good now, am I

  pleasure, and which part is it I need,

  while air migrates too slowly to be seen

  and noon crawls groggy over August

  skin. Then thinking No, it’s too

  and turning back to look at traffic.

  September

  Sudden storm, then sudden sun. Give me,

  I almost said: and stopped, began again

  with your voice, what gets invented by the