Crooning to the tilted earth—brevity of the day, lighting candles on that longest night—throwing sparklers—we were a strangely hopeful lot right up until the end. What was that in us, as a people—this collective assumption—that the good would prevail, that there would be plenty of time? Despite all the indications to the contrary. From the severed arms: a philosophy of wings. From the broken heart, hope.
Let us croon to this earth, not entirely in tune, before we fall back into forgetfulness, into nothingness escorted by the president, the silent congress, the senate in evening clothes, into our annihilation.
When shall the next catastrophe strike?
Unlove the world and all its wonders and all its charms (the oboe, the ice age, the invention of writing, the origin of oceans).
Before we are delivered back into oblivion. Let those of us who still can, sing.
From the fragments: a beautiful songscape.
Begin this book in gentleness, dear Reader.
I send Rose out to school through the war and she reaches back to me through the first green of spring. It’s March 1993. She says I will miss you. I wonder if she will need sunscreen today (she will) or a hat. Goodbye. And she turns back one time to look at me—a receding figure in her bright eye.
Rose makes her way down the path to school. She is learning to write. I will miss you, she says, singing as she goes. Promised today at the Winter Bear Montessori School: the ten board, word lists, the pink tower, carrot work, the binomial cube, the movable alphabet, the abacus. She can’t wait.
Mystery Poem
Elaine Equi
1.
I’m compelled to read mysteries
as the murderer is compelled to murder
and the detective to solve righteously
and the mystery writer to inscribe
the lonely night with his existential moonglow.
A mystery is musical, mathematic, precise.
Wittgenstein famously sought solace
from the rigors of philosophy
in the pages of mysteries. But what if
the mystery writer simply got bored or distracted
along the way, and forgot the investigation,
and began to fall in love with the suspect Antonioni style?
A poet is someone who goes out of her way to preserve
a mystery, and can be led astray by ignoring or distorting
certain evidence, while willfully harboring poetic illusions.
Then there is the type that always answers a question
with another question. I confess I’m guilty
of having done that myself on more than one occasion.
It’s an easy way to avoid the stigma of closure and say:
“Let’s keep the case open and see what develops.”
2.
In spring, when trees and gardens begin to bloom
a woman—refined, artistic—a professor I know
licks her lips and announces: “It’s time for a lot of dead
bodies to start piling up. That’s what I want to see.”
I couldn’t agree more. I don’t believe people addicted
to mysteries like to solve puzzles. I believe they want to kill.
At least part of them does, and in order to entertain those fantasies,
they must insure that that part is eventually apprehended
and put away, disposed of like a cheap pulp novel.
People that travel often tuck a mystery or two in their suitcase
(or now on their iPad). What better way to escape the monotony
of a sunny day than to sit on a beach, daiquiri in hand, and dissolve
mentally into the mind of the grumpy Swedish detective Martin Beck?
To follow as he trudges through rainy Stockholm streets, coughing
and sneezing, running down one false lead after another, as if to assure us
crime solving is a job, not a frivolous indulgence.
Such passages remind me of how some sci-fi writers go out of their way
to portray space travel as boring, claustrophobic—time spent
playing solitaire between the stars. Yes, unraveling a mystery is a form
of travel in and of itself. I feel at home in California, having been driven
up and down the coast so many times by the likes of Raymond Chandler,
Ross Macdonald, and the incomparable James M. Cain. During long insomniac
nights, we’d stop for a cup of coffee and ask the locals what, if anything,
unusual they’d seen, then jot down their answers in a notebook.
A two-headed turtle; a three-legged dog; a white sock tinged
with red, forgotten in a Laundromat; what looked to be a skeleton
slow dancing in the corner of a tavern to a popular song.
Wait a minute, these clues are starting to read like a poem.
3.
My heart races. My breath is shallow.
Why do I care about these fictitious lives?
Why sweat as if I’d committed the crime?
The dragnet is closing in with its inevitable inevitability.
I close my eyes, not when there’s blood or mayhem,
but when order is about to be restored—can barely stand
to read the preposterous (and believe me it always is) ending
which resolves everything but hardly ever explains a thing.
OK—it’s finally over. I’m calm, as Mayakovsky once said,
as the “pulse of a corpse.” How finite everything suddenly looks,
moving slowly or quickly toward its own demise.
No wonder I must return to poetry for traces of, if not eternity,
a largeness of spirit and voice—some quality of being
less easily exhausted. Even those who disdain the metaphysical
can marvel at the ability of words to overflow their meanings;
even a rigorous materialist like Oppen was not immune to awe.
From The Book of Spells
Andrew Mossin
THE LANGUAGE
We bleed and burn with thirst, our blood is strength.
—Tristan Tzara
The world is exiled in the name. Within it there is the book of the world.
—Edmond Jabès
1.
Begin somewhere, somehow
Begin “the weight in want”
“the loss the order in destroy”
the way that language folds up unexpectedly
and we’re left unsure how to proceed …
Assign risk to mornings clear and cloudless
empiric understandings that have become habit
the collar of red seen from your last window
the emphasis that “she” acquires spoken silently at the circumference of thought.
To begin here is not to begin there
where yesterday another myself stood, another
imposition of the self that rendered the first
version mute: I was sitting at a table
and through the lens of my left eye saw
a man, not far from me, his horizon
spiritually blank, I couldn’t say what it was
that drew me to him, the way he
hunched over his table and appeared to be
writing, the writing he was doing I
can’t say it was anything, there was a legibility
to his hand, I couldn’t see the words
as they formed, his wrist moving
across the pages of notebook paper
arranged on the table before him
as if light itself had been d
rawn away from every object
leaving only this: a circle, wordless
inside another circle of words.
2.
Is our task, then, like Darwin’s
to find in language expression for what
follows, “modifications consequent
on other modifications”
the virtue of which is to understand
cause and effect in the world
assignations of the natural surface
where we walk without effort
unable to acknowledge
how at odds our beings are
with what is around us, the play
of light in trees that doesn’t
allow us to form words for
the “struggle for existence”
that is, like a hand’s sudden wrapping of itself
around another’s hand,
both portent and apprehensive
grasp of the visible: I moved
away, I saw it was isolation
bordering another form of isolation
the language I was looking for
wouldn’t allow me to say what I needed
to say, one tree
blocking the light, another
affording me great depth.
3.
As if streaming from one
river and the woman at the other
side calling out to us, “Bring us back
to you,” the versions
of a woman’s contiguous being
that acquired meaning only after
she had long vanished.
Is there one calling out to one calling?
Is there a reason
why in the mornings we can hide
ourselves in the prolixity of language
its habits and conciliations
writing in our notebook the very noticeable
difference awaking without one, awaking
in the throes of memory, not oneself, apart
from all who came before, throat and chest
I retrace, finger knots, nods up against
my finger bones, prodding, as they must
go, band by band, into a circle of light
offered again—
A tool like that
blackened, hard-hitting
striking back in language
when it is so often
the other way: formless
grappling for the speech of another
to complete what needs
saying here, black spirals of ink
down a margin: voiceless.
4.
Even pity has been
removed from us, pietàs
that gave us ability at first
to see
not without difficulty
our mother’s body raised epitaphic
above our own. There was always
the dutiful distrust
of language, as if it could
impoverish us all over again
the way Merleau-Ponty
describes that interaction between selves
at the rim of experience
a kind of border opprobrium
encircling the “I” speaking
to the one listening: “Whether speaking
or listening, I
project myself into the other
person, I
introduce him into my own self.”
One can say I was pulled by you
into myself, you pulled me back
from who I was and gave me
back myself
even as the words we give
each other—awkward, banal, bittersweet—
can’t resolve the arrangement
of bodies that must exist in time, mortal, inviolate
sharing one space, then another, a paralleling
like speech itself I came so far to find you
Where did you go? to which one might respond
You replaced me, I never left, it was you that got rid of
myself.
5.
A coming into
language
the book’s effects and enticements
forging a perimeter of feeling that held us near others
and at the same time created border states
nearly shameful
as if we held nothing
private or self-worthy could not
enter the world
to which we were brought
“a world we wanted to go out into
to come to ourselves into”
like mourning the man who’d set us “free”
once set us free there in another
landscape, not this one
its private and spectacled other
to find a way back through one world
back to another.
6.
Who or what brought us?
A cycle of despair a ritual of pain.
Antigone at the borderline between self-
seeking and self-abnegation. An occlusion where her death
mythopoeticizes something we can’t yet grasp—
Where was her duty?
To whom and for what?
The body she mourned dies offstage. Her own
death cannot be rendered
except in the language of the messenger: “Your
wife—dead from knife wounds self-inflicted.”
And Creon’s inability to measure
that death or sustain it in speech as he cried out.
So that in two—mother and son—
there is this sacrifice again
newly made, newly seen. I sat there without
moving I couldn’t say a word. You were right to leave
when you did, the doors had been locked, I waited for you to
be gone, then sure of that I let my own life
run its course without you.
What lives on lives on.
Our exile has led us day by day
away from you.
7.
And to say who.
We are allowed to say it
who killed
who murdered
We are allowed no less
than to say who is dead
beside us who is dying
in words again in death words
like no others she said
no others to us she is saying
in that exchange between us
she is no less than we saying we cannot
undo it
we cannot un-
do death.
“Here we are no less than we are and you cannot undo it.”
No less than we were
than we are
able to say something
started to happen
“the that fact”
“the it was”
“the after rains”
we paused to see them overcoming us
the very possibility of rains
overcoming us
as we drowned with others (this first
sense memory of death shared)
were left with others (adopted
landscape of black Aegean)
not for dead
but for not dead (waking in this body
no other’
s capsized black letters)
I have prayed for everything I have longed for.
8.
One must continue even as others
remain behind
“this cannot be”
One must continue even as others do not
“this must not be”
There is a line isolated blackening sulfuric
in shadows a line
blackening where fathers’ and mothers’
pronounced words do not come back to us
Those who take care of things must be given back
Those who took from us must be given
what they took back
In the name of taking they must be enclosed
again in a landscape of black trees they must rest under black trees
they must fall near the river coursing past black trees
What is the name for what we gave them?
When we have loss who will tell it?
Who will?
We have no name for it.
9.
When each is illiterate, crying
out to be heard, wordless
in an April night
scenes authorized by memory
not memory but written down
to justify to authorize
the one saying it …
Outside it’s April, it’s nighttime
two fierce shadows in a fight in nighttime
One hears them in a fight over who will live
who will die, in a night of childbirth one is
fighting to live, one is dying, the sound of names
being said, not said, there is a night
fight going on inside a woman’s womb
inside there are two being called
forward, there is one nearly light
one nearly dark, they are fighting
inside the woman, her April night
the news that cannot yet be told
One is fighting to keep them alive
One is fighting to let them die.
10.
Astride alight awash …
Not nature of light
Not elements of discontinuity
Not dying early
Not terror when it wanes
Not disappear
But spare things left undone …
11.
I travel with the book in hand
I read what it wrote of our names
on a wall of new days each new day
a wall of words
torn from another’s book
until we speak in unison of our loss
until we feel pain for another without shame
and attend to him in the dark
and hear him where the book has fled from us
in the pillaged and desolate close of day
passing with him through a vault of
incense a shepherded hand passed toward mine