The powers have to be consulted again directly—again, again and again. Our primary task is to learn, not so much what they are said to have said, as how to approach them, evoke fresh speech from them, and understand that speech. In the face of such an assignment, we must all remain dilettantes, whether we like it or not.—Heinrich Zimmer, The King and the Corpse
Rewrite P. It was to be the section
Golden with end-of-summer light. Impossible
So long, at least, as there’s no end to summer.
Late September is a choking furnace.
Let lightning strike. The god’s own truth, or fiction,
Blast clean of traffic grime, shudder and decibel
—Impedimenta of the arch-consumer—
Those caryatids’ porch who once in fairness
Held up sky, and now are blind and old.
Plant with rainshoot glistenings the Elysian
Smokefield settled above Pindar Street.
Remake it all into slant, weightless gold:
Wreath at funeral games for the illusion
That whatever had been, had been right.
Revise—or let it stand? Here I’m divided.
Wrong things in the right light are fair, assuming
We seize them in some holy flash past words,
Beyond their consequences and their causes.
Hair-roots white. The blind, sunset-invaded
Eyeball. Lucent spittle overbrimming
Lips wiped of all pretense. And in the ward’s
Gloom the gleam of tongs, clean stench of gauzes.
What light there was fell sideways from a mind
Half dark. We stood and tried to bear
The stroke for Maya, as her cats had done.
The other eye, the one that saw, remained
Full of wit, affection, and despair.
Then Ghédé mounted her. Brought his whip down.
DAVID JIMMY I AM YOUNG AT LAST
WHO ALL THESE YEARS TRIED TO APPEAR SO
MY HAIR IS TRULY RED EPHRAIM IS STILL
A COURTIER SHALL I TEACH HIM HOW TO CHACHA
THE CLIMBERS HERE COUNT & RECOUNT THEIR PAST
LIVES POOR ME WITH ONLY ONE BUT O
I NUMBER LOVES ON TOES AND FINGERS TELL
TEIJI (her young husband) IM A CHESHIRE
CAT ALL SMILES I LOVE MY WORK ST LUCY
The St Lucy? SHES MY BOSS IS LETTING
ME DIRECT SOME AVANTGARDE HALLUCI
NATIONS ETC FOR HEADS OF STATE
U SHD HEAR THEM MOAN & FEEL THEM SWEATING
WE GIRLS HAVE STOPPED A WAR WITH CUBA Great!
How about Erzulie? BUT SHE IS THE QUEEN
OF HEAVEN Oh, not Mary? Not Kuan Yin?
THEY ARE ALL ONE QUINTESSENCE CHANEL NO
5 × 5 × 5 × 5 × 5
AMONG HER COUNTLESS FACES I HAVE BEEN
SMILED ON BY ONE THE SHADES SHE LOOKED WELL IN
ON EARTH MY FADED POPPYBLUSH & UMBER
ARE HERE RESTORED I AM HER LITTLEST FAUVE
The moment brought back Maya in a whiff
Of blissful grief—small figure boldly hued,
Never held in high enough esteem;
Touches of tart and maiden, muse and wife,
Glowing forth once more from an Étude
De Jeune Femme no longer dimmed by time.
Leave to the sonneteer eternal youth.
His views revised, an older man would say
He was “content to live it all again.”
Let this year’s girl meanwhile resume her pose,
The failing sun its hellbent azimuth.
Let stolen thunder dwindle out to sea,
Dusk eat into the marble-pleated gown.
Such be the test of time that all things pass.
Swelling, sharpening upwind now—blade
On grindstone—a deep shriek? The Sunday stadium.
Twenty thousand throats one single throat
Hoarse with instinct, blood calling to blood
—Calling as well to mind the good gray medium
Blankly uttering someone else’s threat.
Stevens imagined the imagination
And God as one; the imagination, also,
As that which presses back, in parlous times,
Against “the pressure of reality.”
Scholia discordant (who could say?)
Yet coursing with heart’s-blood the moment read.
Whatever E imagined—my novel didn’t
Press back enough, or pressed back against him—
He showed his hand, he nipped it in the bud.
Blind spots. A certain frail tenacity
All too human throve behind the Veil.
True, he had spared me as it were a lifetime
Spent in one tedious, ungainly form
NO PUNISHMENT LIKE THAT OF BEING GIVEN
A GROSS OR SLUGGISH REPRESENTATIVE
I though imagined that the novel was
A step towards reality AWAY
FROM IT JM an effort to survey
The arteries of Ephraim’s influence.
With just myself and D to set the scale
What could we learn? I needed neutral ground
LISEZ VOS COEURS SAYS MY NEW FRIEND H BEYLE
Needed Joanna lost among arroyos—
Each the abraded, vast, baked-rose detail
Of a primeval circulatory system—
So as to measure by triangulation
Heights up there beyond the height of self,
Or so that (when the fall rains fell) would go
Flashing through me a perfected flow,
Landscape and figures once removed, in glass
TWICE REMOVED THANKS TO MY COUP DE GRACE
…The point is, I still wake—I woke today—
Between two worksheets. Missing you, Sergei:
From above your basin peered the Noh
Mask of a hermit with brown rice-grain teeth
And close-cropped silver hair.
A clown of dust. An earthen Pierrot.
Who once danced, you stood rooted, moved by fierce
Young men at the pueblo. You no more
Felt the cold than they did,
Though the sun stamped and sweltered in their furs.
Another evening at the Ouija board
(Which only worked when you were side by side,
Fingertips touching hers—
That woman, smoking, auburn-haired, abhorred)
A word from Eros made it all worthwhile:
UPON MY STAGE DEAD HUNTERS DANCED IN TIME
WITH THOSE U SAW BELOW
Leo, transcribing it, looked up. His smile.
And one night playing Patience, having lost
Your own, three-quarters through the novel, rum
Igniting in the dark’s
Uncurtained glitter heat and gasp of lust,
Leo SHADES OF AN EMPERORS FAVORITE
Risen aglow before you, the tinbacked
Kerosene lamp his face—
You’d fling cards, curses, tumbler, all, at it
Then stumbling on resourceful Mrs Smith
(Who settled you in this adobe hell
With just enough to live on,
Who with a kiss flew off to marry myth
Yet still, from the Palazzo Santofior,
Remember
s you with gifts too rare to keep)
Would rip her from her frame
And grandly show the pieces to the door.
Pallid root-threads. A blue sky inverted
In waterglass. The Greek geranium
Snapped off last week unthinkingly lives on.
Forgets that, short of never to be born,
Best is an early, painless death. Its ruffled
Leaf is cool, and smells of rained-on tin.
It neither cringes at my tread nor pines
To join a riot of kin out on the terrace,
Let alone its ancestor who inherits
Maria’s garden, a salt radiance…
It seems to tolerate me, turn to me
For—ah, not strength, or even company,
But coolly, as who have no more to lose
Welcome a messenger from the gods.
Live on—is that the message? Dear Sergei,
It is what we do against all odds.
You should know, scion and spit of the old man
Who nearly twenty years ago, remember?
Bowed across to us from the church tower.
When he was cut down I took slips of him
To set in tidy ballad stanza-boxes
Made, one winter, about Stonington.
His pliant manners and sharp-scented death
Came up Japanese. You came up Russian
—Next to a showy hybrid “Mrs Smith”.
Here you are now, old self in a new form.
Some of those roots look stronger, some have died.
Tell me, tell me, as I turn to you,
What every moment does, has done, will do—
Questions one simply cannot face in person.
Freshening its water, I feel faint
Waves of recognition, my red flower
Not yet in the dread phrase cut-and-dried.
The figure in the mirror stealing looks
At length replied, although its lips were sealed:
“Contrary to appearances, you and I
Who pick our barefoot ways toward one another
Through playing cards and grums of class
Over checkerboard linoleum
Have not seen eye to eye. We represent
Isms diametrically proposed.
You clothe my mowing as I don your flask.
Our summit meetings turn on the forever
Vaster, thinner skin of things, glass blower’s
Tour de force—white-hot, red-hot at dusk,
All that we dread by midnight will have burst
Into a drifting, cooling soot of light,
Each speck a voodoo bullet dodged in vain
Or stopped with sangfroid—is the moment now?
At sunrise? Yet the hangfire talks go on.
Current events no sooner sped than din,
One wand hashes the other. I bring up
That not quite settled matter of a far
Flushed mountain. You clam down the bold fried scenes
Between us. Is it breakfast on death row
Or token of the next fumbling détente?
No more incidents! Admit we have
Designs on the same backwardly emerging
Notion rich in dream-deposits, raw
Dignity, circumspection—all that we lack.
Designs? you whisper with a shamefaced look.
Precisely. Orderings of experience.
From Dante’s circles to Kandinsky’s, thence
To Don Giovanni trammelled in D Minor
Strings, or Garbo in aloof demeanor.
Utterly harmless (though the Third World will
Cry, true to form, aesthetic overkill)
And tit for tat, besides. Need I, mon cher,
Expatiate on how we figure there?—
You in its communes as a crudely colored
Capitalist gorged on oil and gold,
The vocal, comic member of the team;
I in its temples as a slitherer
Tombless, untamed, whose least coalfire-blue scale
The phantom of an infant whimpers from…”
Unrelenting fluency. Sergei
Steeled himself to move beyond its range.
The waterfall that day. Chill tremblings floored
A space to catch one’s death in. Or sun shone
And no wind blew, and soft white inchdeep mist
Crept over dry ice. Wall to wall’s
Reverberation of a spectral chord,
All the white keys at once came thudding down.
The old man’s heart sank. “Eros, if I must,”
He said out loud, “I go behind the falls.
Make him be there, my angel, and alive—
Anything you say I will believe.”
Some later chapter would have found Sergei
Kneeling to drink. And further yet upstream
Scudding, skydark veneer on oak, on aspen.
Bold forms from the hip down overgrown
With ginger sediment, a retriever’s pelt,
Risen above the running, dry as bone.
Stones named on a picnic with DJ
Summers ago, or only yesterday,
For figures—Nebuchadnezzar, Little Nell,
Miss Malin Nat-og-Dag, Swann and Odette—
Pride of (and telling proof against) the clean
Sweep they impel so swiftly they impede.
Only yesterday! Too violent,
I once thought, that foreshortening in Proust—
A world abruptly old, whitehaired, a reader
Looking up in puzzlement to fathom
Whether ten years or forty have gone by.
Young, I mistook it for an unconvincing
Trick of the teller. It was truth instead
Babbling through his own astonishment.
Higher than this I do not, dare not climb—
Too near the end of the unwritten book.
Exeunt severally the forces joined
By Eros—Eros in whose mouth the least
Dull fact had shone of old, a wetted pebble.
Now along crevices inch rivulets
At every turning balked. Joanna jets
Back where she came from, through a sky in flames
(And with her a symbolic apparatus
Requiring that she have been “routed”—how
I never asked myself, and do not now;
Much less ask why my characters had names
That linked them with the four Evangelists,
Plus the beast familiar to one).
As the sun melts an undercrust of snow
Leo is healed. His little boy is born.
An overhang’s thin wail. From my hatband
Taking the wraith of withered pink—Sergei—
I crumble it unthinking. When the urge
Comes to make water, a thin brass-hot stream
Sails out into the updraft, spattering
One impotent old tree that shakes its claws.
The droplets atomize, evaporate
To dazzlement a blankness overdusts
Pale blue, then paler blue. It stops at nothing.
U ARE SO QUICK MES CHERS I FEEL WE HAVE
SKIPPING THE DULL CLASSROOM DONE IT ALL
AT THE SALON LEVEL Done? Ah yes—
Learned his lesson, saved his face and God’s:
Issues put on ice this evening.
It’s late last June, a long impromptu call
(Our
only one in ages) to take leave
Before DJ goes West, and I to Greece.
The atmosphere is easy, unreproachful.
How have we done, how can we do without
Our “regulars”—their charm, their levity!
E quotes Tiberius NO GOLD SO LIGHT
AS PURE AMUSEMENT Here is Alice T,
Maria, Marius—we’ll need more chairs.
Hans, even, from the Ministry upstairs
Looks in to show that all has been forgiven.
Here’s Maya. If one can believe her, Heaven
Hangs on her black Félicité newborn
In Port-au-Prince. To my surprise, all burn
To read more of this poem. Ford and Clay
Look up from the gazette where Section K
Has just been published: POPE SAYS THAT WHILE BITS
STILL WANT POLISHING THE WHOLES A RITZ
BIG AS A DIAMOND I would rather hear
Mr Stevens on the subject—mere
Bric-a-brac? mere Emersonian “herbs
And apples”? I WAS NEVER ONE FOR BLURBS
TAKE WITH A GRAIN OF SALT JM SUCH PRAISE
A SCRIBE SITS BY YOU CONSTANTLY THESE DAYS
DOING WHAT HE MUST TO INTERWEAVE
YOUR LINES WITH MEANINGS YOU CANNOT CONCEIVE
Parts of this, in other words—a rotten
Thing to insinuate—have been ghostwritten?
PARDON ME A GLIMPSE OF LOVELY MAYA
THANKS BY THE WAY FOR GUIDING ME TO HER
U KNOW the latter takes our hands to say
WE ARE ALL BROUGHT TOGETHER BY THE CUP
FROM FLOOR TO FLOOR A CHIME SOUNDS E IS WHISKED
INTO OUR MIDST & THE RECEPTION STARTS
BUT DO U TRULY THINK DEAR FRIENDS DEAR HEARTS
The cup half dancing, Maya no more than we
Knowing, it seemed, what lay in store
OUR PRATTLE HAS NO END BEYOND ITSELF
DAVID PUT OUT YR CIGARETTE NOW PLACE
YR FREE HAND PALMDOWN YES ON THE BOARDS EDGE
—That very palm, in no time, creased, red, sore
As if it had been trod on for attention—
By What? or Whom? Our cup,