Poem w/ the Color of Television Snow Inside It
Poem w/ Divinity Smiling Out Loud
Gerald Said to Me, Don't F the Muse
1968 Pontiac Bonneville (Monique Jean's Car)
St. William Of the Artists Studio
Contemplation on Dissonance
J, an Elegy in 20 Lines
Some Cows & Angels, Talking to Me
The Recording Angel & the Angel of History (an email fragment)
Lou (A Fragment)
Hearse
Chasing Names on Nameless Water
Poem w/ the Color of Television Snow Inside It
Who was there, in me, leaning enthusiastically against the Irish girl
beside the 80’ Lincoln Continental, the cream-tone color of iridescence –
his arm – mine – scooped around her sloped right shoulder while she leaned
her flat hip – a hip unnecessarily real & made of something that
doesn’t answer its name when anyone calls to it – into his rib cage –
& this would have been just after she stood up on a simple tip-toe – 19 years
old, & her suspicious eyes aiming to find what parking lot he’d run to – &
she kissed me hello, because she wanted me, wanted me to want her,
& the sky, like heroin inside a spoon, blackened. Who was there?
We held white jasmine flowers, fragrant snow. Caught silk moths.
Who there, in the taut clatter of roaches cutting through palm tree fronds?
The tickle-ripple of the lazy canal, flayed alive by all that incessant rubbing.
Who there, in the twilight blueprint of fish – just lazy gar – shadowing the
surface of the silk canal so that, one by one, the summer stars, so restless,
bullied the torporific fish until only the maddest stars, like over-turned
crosses of light, rode the backs of the fish down the wrinkled terrain
of the canal until the rural currency of the water discolored itself … who?
&, to explain a life – then – meant drinking, touching one another, &
listening to the radio. & who was there, smoking . . . & staring at us
while we astonished one another, smoked in the fragrant wind . . .
while the hard headlights of cars electrified the darkness in the park?
~
Once, I saw a man shooting a pistol at the stars, just to use the revolver
as a way to . . . wolf a rosary . . . up to God. That’s what he said.
Sleeplessness is an appointed official, trying to write a poster –
I thought about this once, while handcuffed in a squad car –
& the poster is a gradual patina of who we think we are, defending against
diminishment.
Once, at a motel, I heard a man scraping the green smell of the ocean
across the apricot torn walls. He was using a paint scraper. Drunk as light.
He opened the wall into flame. He was pissed off, I can tell you that,
because he wanted to be the sea in his own voice, not imitation.
& a woman in a manic state – she was a nurse – told me she was gravity,
soaring with longing. Her face like a wild horse. Inflatable dust.
~
We inflate to be the dust.
Who felt that love sickness that is a jukebox, playing to tranquilized stars?
Under the stars, sitting on a box, I remembered the beach as defiant.
The tips of the waves resembling snow, crashing into inconsolable falling.
The waves defiant – not giving up until, like in a gray bottle, dawn drowned
them into a flat nothing. Ironed paper. A tapestry of defeated wings.
Some other voice comes back to me: a man on the beach in a torn gown,
hung over. Vacant as a house. Angry at me. At the sun. At the salted hotel.
Melancholy is cheap. He must be starving now. He must be bankrupt.
Who was there beside the boy – new skin inside a new language –
as he threw his right arm around the Irish girl, just after she kissed him,
her hips flat against him &, in the darkness of the photo, one or two
white specks of snow – photo lab errors – floating there. St. Petersburg.
Impossible. The Continental, like a mound of white snow behind us.
Then: I was drunk in a hotel in Forsyth, Georgia. Dialing through the TV.
Can I confess that we sizzle into the static-drizzled snow-light on a TV?
~
When she cried, the spinning loom of her life seemed impossible. To me.
So I left her crying. There was no surprise in the dark moment. Just me.
It wasn’t my life. & I began wondering about God. Nothing begins
in its own voice I heard it say & I didn’t want to hear why nothing begins.
~
I was a nameless snow falling in Marquette, up north. I waited until it
stopped. & when it was done – everything white – she wasn’t crying any
longer, & Del Shannon, Runaway, it was there, on the radio. I turned it up.
Everything cuts through the ferry boat’s wake in a kind of thirst. I took the
ferry into a small harbor. & I drank with a man who stared across the street
at a woman trying to fit a small coat on her toddler daughter, & he mumbled
to me, that girl there, you see her coat? It’s like Irish sheep. She’s snow.
Beauty falls asleep & it lets the sky jigsaw a clutch of crystal-white stars
across soft water. . . & the living & the dead are the same in a photograph.
~
Who answered me, later, in the mountains when the wind turned the spines
of trees
into black tar sludge? The crickets chirruping, like red light down a ravine.
Who is the lonely boy that hungers inside a tea spoon? Without history.
So I heard shrieks & screams. & I threw stars all around so I could plunge
headfirst down a weedy gulch & land in a mound of tuneless white snow
& be dissolved & love something at the same time & still not care.
& be invisible inside TV static, snowing myself into something that isn’t.
~
The snow is enchanted in its own story; it is salt & its always cold, & the
little girl is a sheep & so the woman, her mother, must close her eyes & wipe
a table clean. & serve coffee & toast to truckers – highway men – on rest
stop breaks. & obviously, the loom is in the lane anyway, & there’s nothing
you can do about it, it’s just the way music, climbing through parking lots,
softens the shot at the same time as the fatigued aftertaste of it all amplifies
us to get up from a sprawl & try again for the reach into the wild light that
soars with a pensioner’s longing. & the snow is blossoming cherries anyway,
it’s faith in a sheep’s clothing & so you can fit yourself into it, just to get a
handful of it & never stop trying it out. & I couldn’t explain it to anyone, so I
read the paper, drank, & listened to my own breath filling up a dark house
with a bankrupt official waiting inside it, counting out the letters of his name
until dark smoothed it, made it soft like a bed worthy of sleeping silently in.
& outside a smallish apartment, church bells will ring & say, it is all wrong.
What I did or I didn’t do. & to become TV static white snow is to be what’s
already gone. It is an empty chair. & who was it, beside me, smoothing out
my name?
~
What I remember isn’t what I thought it would be. Not one bit.
I think stiff tears – silence – guards a tuneless snow, falling in a window.
A window in Cheyenne. Or Roanoke. A hotel in Pittsburg. Or Delaware –
where I held a boy as he tried to kill himself with a camping knife.
We were by a river, & he was pasted over with rotted leaves & sweat
& high on too much of a substance I couldn’t get him to tell me about,
& all I could think of was going up-town to score some minky.
It’s tuneless. The snow. & it has brown or red eyes & a ruined dress
& it says,
Walk away Renee.
The song is tuneless, I’ll tell you that, & it hides inside the snow. & it’s a
blueprint for something that’s always missing.
& that’s what I saw when the Irish one was crying, something was missing.
& I couldn’t will myself to find it. It hid in a song. & my eyes didn’t dare.
Poem w/ Divinity Smiling Out Loud
When the light in the market place fell across the oranges
& burnished them fire gold, I saw someone alien move
over the fruit pile like perhaps an intoxicated, leaping
ballerina or a falling trapeze artist on a self-immolation
mission with crucifixes on her ear lobes, but I’ll tell you
about all that in a minute. I know that the light was free.
& it was infidel & very unconcerned w / holding fast to
anything, & so it couldn’t even be named by a witness.
& so, that kind of light is a feeling. & it has no start & no
ending because it is formless. Startled, I fussed with the
oranges, I re-arranged them to suit a geometric form, & I
looked quickly back to see if I could relocate the trapeze
girl, the aberrant self-immolating ballerina inside my pupils
but whatever she was, she wasn’t anything I could catch.
Long ago, before all this, I was privately alone in a dank
college town rental flat with a fellow student, we were
in college & working on a project about Audre Lorde’s
essay on female erotics. & she was a brunette w / an
unruly bohemian style of dress & she was addicted to
uppers, &, partly naked, & preparing to lay down w / me,
she undid a necklace she’d purchased in Boston. & I took
it from her & I gently laid it down on the floor, & she
said, “I want to be on top.” & I consented & she stayed
there until we were done. & Eros is a stripped naked hunger
trying to inhabit a form so it can stretch beyond restless
impetus, & also a certain held ground. & it is costume for
a while & it liberates like a whirl of cosmic light & she said
I don’t want to see you again because you are neither too
pretty nor too ugly, & I want to recall you this way. & so,
be a sport. & be a witness to how light is enigmatic, is
intensity, speaking inside time. & the naked, triangular
light that rose, abided & dissipated over the oranges
at the market stall was unknown to her husband, this I
know for a fact. & I tasted its juice all day, light w/ out
form. Oranges taste like sex smiling out loud.
Gerald Said to Me, Don't F the Muse
Oh God, she’s strolling up the walkway, her skirt full of birds,
a light in her face. I took a photograph of her looking at me.
It was all I could muster with my blurred vision.
It was all I could do to stop the lyrics of old songs, tormenting me.
My mania. It’s for sale. Do you want it?
It was all I could do to catch the happiness in the freezing rain.
It was the most I could do to stop history from acting so hysterical.
I believe she was wearing radishes in her cheeks again,
spring flowers in the way her mouth said, come fuck me.
I think she was pulling feathers from her hair again.
I saw the birds flapping in her skirts as she walked down the avenue,
looking for me. The sidewalk, a rusty, rosy river.
Roland Barthes said each photograph contains a sign of one’s future death.
I took a gray picture of her on the Seine. We shot another photo in a booth.
Here I am, lord of light, of sound, of dance rhythms ricocheting off the salon
walls. I’m a little demented with sorrow, but dizzy with hallucinations of our
time on a couch. Can you hear me, woman woozy with birds?
Here I am, remembering that night of love, you in your leather boots.
The sound bottles make shaking the side table.
Even the fingers, blunted, fool us because they start with feeling –
and end up like starfish do in the pink fortress of what you are.
Even eyes go blind in magnolia skin.
I might even be sadness but my eyes spider web looking into you.
I took a photograph of you under a still life of dead flowers.
It has nothing to do with death, but Gerald said you never
Fuck the muse. And I screwed up. I did it. I fucked the muse.
And we took our picture in a photo booth, which made history go crazy.
And it’s not my fault that history is so hysterical.
We are a happiness no one else wanted.
1969 Pontiac Bonneville (Monique Jean's Car)
Corrine never seemed to drive it, only Monique.
Alpine Blue. The word Bonneville writ
across a horizontal, segmented & pinched,
quite typical, quite exaggerated Pontiac grill
that resembled a kooky bird beak on the front end.
& the rear end: rectangled rear taillights fit
into a horizontal & then a vertical line. An L shape,
so that the long bar of the L rode straight-fast & then
it fell into a bottomed-out L, flat fit against the side
of the rear contour panel. Whitewall tires too.
The word Pontiac, repeating again in a bragging
print across a metal sheath. & god, we kissed
in the front seat of that car one night so much
that the universe we were so afraid of, burst,
& she wanted to find a non-violent way to over-
come fear & self-injury. & so we clutched at
something we could feel as the truth, understanding
that, when you have done this, have found
a light only god is supposed to understand, you
are tossed into another time, another place,
another day forever; & the disorder of one’s life,
somehow, is not a blue print, no. It is freedom.
& her eyes were so wide I could see distrust, fear, hurt,
worship, desire all in there, & all at once.
& mostly we held on tight & even tighter
in the light of a fight for why
attention is only on the living thing –
it’s only on the body, & so it happened.
& it felt so right she laughed & cried.
& she wanted to leave me. To go away forever.
& so I played her
that song, Bridge over Troubled Water –
so that she could try to hear that lover’s sweetness
in the fullness of an I love you, forever.
St. William of the Artists Studio
I see him usually in a corduroy coat and pulled cap,
disheveled, unshaven, unruly, his coat pocket
filled up with a bottle of Kessler’s whiskey.
Take notice of him on curbsides, in desolate
structures of town where the shoddy pool halls
collect weather-strewn patrons, sorrow’s fools:
women who have loved too much empty promise –
who hold impregnable hopes that mark nothing –
and men whose lives resemble broken tables;
just piles of violent uprisings, tumbled to floor.
They refuse the rule of the intermezzo where life
could take them into a sweeter emotional salvation.
It’s as if they don’t uncover the Universe’s true way.
I am shocked when he speaks in such symbolism.
They become a fundamentality of their body only –
he says to me, his eyes bleak with beauty and longing –
like great, gross anatomies of angst they do weep.
He tells me he paints these people, like bodies
without souls, or like flowers lost in factory smog.
Tells me he becomes libertine to address semblance.
That he’s shaved his head for the leaving and he’s
reading Jean Genet. His colors resemble Soutine.
That art is the process of detachment from the actual.
I see him at his easel, in a studio, oil painting
that ballerina again beneath a lime green archway;
she’s his divinity symbol, his statuette of time’s
ineffable sovereignty; and I watch him erase her,
start over again with the moss green tutu, her angel
wings rising like triumphant arches from the expanse
of her small body – heavenward – like she’s igniting
skyward into a supernatural moss flame of divine rapture.
He leans inward toward me, whispers you cannot
experience art – this representation of semblance
without losing yourself in it; and I answer, I have
not found it, this sovereign symbol like you have –
this special icon of magic where art salvages you;
this small ballerina whom you adore, falter under,
equivocate into a greater and lesser semblance,
and, finally, distribute in a sentience of glowing,
on a stretched canvas. He says to perceive freely
is to court abandon, the disruption of the senses,
which of course is Rimbaud, and at the edge
of the bar where we visit, he draws on a napkin
the figure of the ballerina, and tells me she is stolen first,
and then she is appropriated to image and then,
after she is painted with moss and mauve, is his
molecular woman, the she he is trying to become.
I tell him this is Jung, the anima in him and he laughs,
abandons me to his drink of whiskey, and he retorts
to camouflage is not criminal, nor is his attraction
to becoming not human settled only in the icon,
the ballerina he is painting over and over again,
but, in fact, is settled in something more mysterious,
the urge to transfigure, like suddenly he himself
is dressed in drag, a figure made of soft rouge
and lipstick, eye liner, and his delicate fingers
raise the cigarette up to his pursed lips. Inhales it.
Blows a series of zeroes into the thin squalid air.
Lays his hand on mine like we’d solve the problems
of the wide world. Tenderness being the heart’s
true way. Something in me is transfigured then;
I am attracted to him, want to be with him as a lover,
even though I am as heterosexual as the evening
is long; to which he says is but the way we all pass
between the sexes and the ages inside us – those
corridors of being – and he offers me the lit
cigarette and I inhale it. Love him forever.
Sometimes, at four am, as the stars so sacramental, shine on, I leave my bed,
I gather to me a small incremental blanket, & I roll myself in it, in a sad heap
in the park, & I stare up at the checker board of night sky as the restless
clouds blur & bandage whole open spaces of the universe until the slag-heat
of one star, palpating, burns another opening into the galaxy & I see it –
the one star – & I try not to believe in it too much for fear of losing it,
later on, as the drunken, unconcerned sky bleaches itself over again
& the forlorn transport trucks, so loud, down-shift & thunder-roll
across roads made for the restless, who race to escape.
& once – alone there & whispering to myself in the soft, confessional
prayers of one who is baffled & alone, heart-sick & within himself –
I felt all the immanence inside me, leave me, & I was, for the moment,
in dissonance, like a fog-mood, & I was emptied out of words, like a cup
of drained bleach.
___
&, in the third act of one’s life, when all the years slur on & we lose sight
of the ballet we’ve lived & danced in, we start to look real good & real hard
at who will hold us when we grieve a loss, or we cry, or rage, or fall alone
in a room or try to deny that the symposium is almost over, or maybe just
beginning to ridicule the curtain.
& that’s just the climate of death we feel, a cold chill rounding us at our ankles.
___
Dissonance, she said to me, is like a brief hibernating. We hide –
especially when all the feelings overwhelm us. &, in the bathroom mirror,
in the private treachery, we see whole birds abandoning our face,
whole stars suddenly bleached white by sudden clouds, whole
pastorals darkening. & the memoir, the nostalgic reflection, lampoons us.
& we hide: we shrink away from it all.
___
Don’t be afraid of the dissonance, said the stars. & don’t ever hide. Don’t.
___
& don’t be afraid to take a surreptitious sip – just a quick one mind you –
of the sweet whiskey, tucked there in a suit coat pocket, the poet Stephen Dunn
whispered to me at a poetry reading – this is all true – &, when I touched his
long-suffering right shoulder, he confided in me, “I’m really quite glad you’re near,
I really am,” which I didn’t fully comprehend nor understand, other than
that he was old, whimsical & a little bit tired by the hoopla, & somewhat dissonant
as the society ladies in fur coats bullied up to him, one-by-one, so he could
sign his Selected Poems. & he blinked a goodbye wink at me.
___
& don’t be afraid to enter the fog at this point in your life, I said to me,
tucking my neck into a coat collar. The dissonant hooded figure you see
in the fog brings to you your final naming, where the flourish of an ending
– yours – visits you. Sets the table with a peacock hen. A string of balloons.
It celebrates every moment you sipped a whiskey against a night that
forgets you; or worse yet, a morning that only recalls what its immediate
mouth can name.
The Future mouths the names the dissonance will find in you, she said to me.
Look at it, this hooded figure you see in the mirror in the hallway, looking itself
straight into you. Look at it every day so it will give you a name.
& some of the names you’ll receive are truly epic, they’re quite conceivable,
like, for instance:
“Pilgrim Kissed Awake in the Night by Lonely Itinerant Gypsies” or
“Angel Unfolding its Wings as Pearled Dragonfly Across Moonlit Water”
or this:
“IAm the Revolutionary Uplift of Vapor, Fuming Freedom From Fire”
or how about this last one:
“Wisdom Mirror: Luminous, Clear, Bright . . . Liminal & Empty. . .”
Names that search, in the end, for the author’s true intention, it says.
&
don’t be afraid to let the silent dissonance over-take you; it’s fine;
night or day always carries a fatal murmur that stops mid-word.
Your mouth a soft o.
&
it lights three candles on a cake for you, sets your still heart to flame.
&
when she stretched her skinny hand through the air
to meet mine,
I saw the real murderer, the head hunter hunting her
& a pile of skulls
that represented her, afterwards, after the drugs
&
the suicide with mistaken identify, which was her anorexia
telling her she was an angel bride to hunger,
yes to hunger, she said . . & so, I write to you, to recall you
to the misshapen afternoon
where we watched the eclipse &, later, sat along
the cement wall of the building so you could tell me
we kill an enemy, anyway & anyhow; & some of us
venerate our victims she said to me, didn’t she? So do it,
venerate me, she said, smoking, smoking, smoking,
love angel of the strychnine kind, the formaldehyde
in your body now.
I miss you, though, & the hunger that was your soul,
blurring into me.
Some Cows & Angels, Talking to Me
We were talking and she was telling me of the cows
that her sister and her husband would talk to, back,
when they were trying to conceive that baby they lost,
as if the cows, like something supernatural, were
somehow sacred, or of divinity, like some special
four legged totem. And she was telling me that
when they were bored they’d get up early and go driving –
especially after they’d made their morning love,
and they’d brewed coffee and fed the two dogs.
And they’d feel the land rising and falling under their tires,
out along I-94 where the farmlands were gray dew,
and the morning’s foggy mist, flooding the spindly trees,
made the trees resemble ruined cathedrals, something out
of Monet in France. They’d see sharp pointed spires
reaching out toward the light, and she, who was telling
all of this to me, said that her sister would think she saw
strange angels out there, rejoicing with the cows;
and they stood like tableaus, out there in the mist.
And it’s because she was pregnant, she was awake to new life.
And she was also afraid,and elated at the same time –
bringing new life into the world will do this – because the soul vine,
reaching between here and oblivion, carries within it all manner
of outcome; all types of becoming and unbecoming…
Sadness is a form of eternity, she said.
Well, if you must, it is the form life takes when it’s time to
end something from its habitual grip on becoming,
that is, from its insistence on staying in a form –
and I can’t remember if it was her or me saying the rest of this –
can’t recall how the conversation shifted to the world –
and you know this last century is a sadness into chaos,
it is the form God’s taking to end something –
all the wars destroying the cities;
all the world’s unrelenting famine; its disorder;
all this savagery that ignites into violent passion;
and the fact that the dust bowl out west
is forever haunted –
it’s full of graveyard ghosts,
is what John Steinbeck said in that book –
and the water-cut gullies of our bodies,
dusting themselves down to dry little nothings.
“It’s all so very terrible…this deadly silence…”
Her or me now shifting in a chair, her lighting a cigarette –
collapsing a dry hand through hair.
The small ticking of the clock, distractible really –
because conversation is invasive to time’s quiet drum.
And you see it in the paintings of bathers at the rivers…
All this emphasis on the contrast of bulk and ether,
and also in the repetition of soup cans lined on a shelf.
Marilyn Monroe’s face – everything, all of it, so sad.
The transience of existence so dazzling: the lights of Paris prostitutes;
sadness in the bathers at the river, in the echoed silhouette
of the cathedral at Rouen,
and how the church itself evaporates – is actually swallowed
by the mist, because Monet saw it that way, it really was that way.
He was only telling it the way he saw it – the way it actually was,
because nothing, absolutely nothing created by us
is guaranteed de facto life; we’re all pre-ordained to vanish –
all will vanish, and be absorbed again into the foggy meadow
with the sad angels and the groups of moaning cows.
For she was telling me this,
was saying that when they’d lost the child –
their one and only child –
when it ceased in her womb
and was cast away like a lone pebble dropping all the way down
the long funnel where birth and oblivion
co-exist as the twins of existence,
there’s just no turning back –
the young couple explained it to themselves
that it really was the cows, so mournful and dense
and grazing out along Interstate 94, that had decided it –
had decided that they’d lose the child.
And now her brow furrows, she’s blinked something back,
I’ve no idea what, for she’s corrected herself –
it was the cows with the angels that’d decided it.
Something in them that we must bear what we live.
This is what the young couple told themselves.
They concluded it as they drove back home together
from the hospital. Sipped their cold coffee at a kitchen table.
It was the only meaning they could give, to losing their child.
For everything in a pair carries this kind of well, sadness, she said,
this grieving,this joy and sorrow –
or: this image of the Rouen Cathedral we see vanishing
in the mist before it’s gone.
And for a moment – it was fast – I could see it,
I could see that little apartment we were in, my young lover and I,
all those years ago in the summertime heat.
And she was telling me that she’d become pregnant, it was mine –
the dumb little thrombosis of flesh, the miraculous spark,
the orange little light in her, glowing…
shimmering there like a slice of bright citrus…
And how it was we lost it –
gave it back to wherever time truly is
when the living beings, the ones we make, choose oblivion,
and return like an otter’s flayed body to the fire
on the other side –
that fertile pyre of reckoning within;
that is, when the space inside us, all that we might bear,
is not ready yet, for all the rest.
The Recording Angel & the Angel of History (an email fragment)
…and what of that Mizocz Ghetto & all those murdered women there, stretched dead like greater snowdrops flowers in the cold ravine; it’s so malignant, this evil, conducted under the auspices of war….Yes, the Angel of History returned; it’s catastrophe they’re after – because of the ego’s fascination, it’s preoccupation with shock & awe… & oh yes, that recent murder of a Black man, George Floyd, in Minnesota… 9 minutes & 29 seconds with a knee to the neck… amazing how killing is organized as suppressive recipe…it’s the spirit force they’re after…that, & a banal personality cult of law & politics. . .Yes, the Angel of History said… & the Recording Angel wrote back: it’s a pernicious covetousness that appeals to them, when they are in their darkness….and isn’t it just the Apparatus, that bureaucracy so very evident to those whose oppressed lives live underneath it? the Recording Angel wrote to the Angel of History, and in those countless wars – militarized, politicized, legalized, economized – waged by those who will be chief beneficiary – the elite – isn’t it just the faux appeasement of a race, a class, undaunted by its will to power? And isn’t it indeed – in the end – just the slipknot notes of a peace without moral purpose or human interest? Wrote the Angel of History back; And The Recording Angel went on: The Imperial interest always wins; yes… and then they try to re-write you in their graven image; yes? And, oh do I remember my endless wandering – like a torn nationless flag – through the rubble of Cologne, Frankfurt, Essen, Hamburg, Dresden; and what I saw there – amidst the collapsed, blown down buildings and the mish-mash of torn bricks and bloodied bones – was that what was made was just a convenient “peace of gold, shining inside oil.” That’s Archibald MacLeish, the poet, correct? The Angel of History wrote back, yes. Those bombs created a heat vacuum that burned the history out of whole roads, out of whole bodies; and bodies are the currency of human wars & human suppression, wrote the Angel of History; all wars utilize the body as currency; what they aim to pervert is the spark of Spirit; and what is aimed for is a stealth of precision – a precision emulating a poisonous dot on the raging arrow of greed. And the Recording Angel reported further that ….what they aim for is the appropriation of the holy chimera, which is only the Spirit’s to create; but they cannot help themselves; it’s as if the burning of bodies, ie, the saturation bombing of others by uranium, by plutonium, by napalm, by false vainglorious patriotism slogans and by that sin that has no name but for here and now I will name it as the grandiose deed, is the means by which they can produce the chimera imago – the sight of a holy body; but it is a body made and usurped by atrocity; a hell seedling; It’s as if they’re conjuring up a malevolent death…by acts of unrepentant evil; It is as if they fail to understand the nature of their own causes & effects. And they utilize Politics & Religion to make a “faux rationalized intelligence” of what is, in the end, an unintelligible mystery. The movement of Spirit. Oh, and Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hanoi, Sarajevo, Baghdad, Damascus, Belfast, Gaza: these were cities infernalized – is that a word? the Recording Angel asked; and yes, wrote the Angel of History: destructive chaos is what is ordained – by and through that which they consecrate in the name and purpose of a politicized faux heroism; it masquerades as valor; and just that, alone, marks them as makers of atrocity; and Klee’s Angel Novus, have you seen it? The Recording Angel asked; Yes, that absurd floating angel with the scrolls for hair, wrote the Angel of History back; Yes: it is Me. I am history, floating abjectly against a timespell that forgets itself as it is lived and unwound like a string that never ends; I am a function of space and time that cannot contend with itself except by-and-through the pre-given devotion and brush strokes of a consciousness that yearns to be transcended in it… [pause] & …the winds of change push me into the zone of memory and forgetting; but what of hope? What say, of Anne Frank? the Recording Angel wrote back; [pause ] …Yes, regarding hope, wrote the Angel of History back; I was there; I lay my body down in the Prinsengratch canal; I was its face for a while / I stretched my arms out to her as she was a trade wind entering my body; but hope; yes: Time destroys the temporal; and loving acts re-write pained memory; …do they know this? … [pause] … memory is the coin I drop into the fountain of eternity; … it pays the deed and toll for all the forgotten actions; [pause] ….the sin they make of time is that they tell themselves they we will live forever; & that something of their improperly understood willfulness – some egoism in them - will never die…; / they are a brutish lot that believe only what a rub of impulse tells them; would that they would listen to us / …. it is a spiritual forbearance that wills a lemon light – / that sweet divinity of the soul in its vertical and horizontal urging – / that directs them in our direction; but it can take so many insufferable years of being entranced / and enchanted / and overcome by Illusion to ultimately compel them from there, to here, to us …Yes: The Recording Angel answered … It is late and the almond trees here are blooming but I must tell you one more thing, The Recording Angel wrote … [pause ]… something of it was made like a sad mustard seed in St. John’s wood in 1965 when a boy wrote out a simple love song for humanity – alongside his bed as he strummed its etheric body to life on his guitar; and he called it – that famous song he wrote for them – Yesterday. …. Yes, it is that recurring preoccupation that they hold with reminiscence… / wrote the Angel of History; this nostalgia that stirs them into and out of the sleeping dream they live of themselves…. / What did Wallace Stephens say to his readers in that poem, Esthetique Du Mal …. What did he say? / Ohyes, answered the Recording Angel…. / I wrote it for you …. on one of the scrolls of your hair, the Recording Angel answered back; [pause] …. Stephens said: “It was the last nostalgia; that he should understand…” / Yes. True, said the Angel of History. They must understand how nostalgia (homesickness) seduces them; how it tumbles them backwards into false sentiment, so that all their ideas of time end up being nothing more than resemblances in a reflecting mirror, which is illusion… By the way, what did Deleuze say? The Angel of History asked? And the Recording Angel: He said, “Lose your face: become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation.” And in that same vein Deleuze wrote that “History is made only by those who oppose history” …Yes, Yes, true, the Angel of History wrote … and this is always the problem with Greed, with Gain; …and it is also true that … with … the politicization & the revision about the outcomes of History that we see the deceit-making in the causes & effects of all their outcomes. It is as if they don’t know me….it is as if the Victors put a shade upon the truth; upon the actual…but the past, you know, the Angel of History wrote, is a conjurer’s talisman …/ its face is writ on mine and it is made of purity; it has within every crease of it the actual; and that’s why it is pure… [long pause] …. and despite themselves; despite their attempts to climax their implosive arousal with bombings and distractions & 1.6.21 insurrections and law suits and fake news that re-writes it – the past – as if it were a stage play bent like a nylon scroll that could be re-narrated and rolled up & down like a child’s simplified eroticized dream & penciled over with the slogans of the victors …. [pause] …and alchemized by that lot of those who wish to create the chimera body because they don’t even know they are lonesome for what’s already been degraded into the full measure of their secrecy from themselves; despite all this, they will be called by affliction to awaken and to see; …. [pause] …. It is written here already …The Angel of History wrote…and like a nylon scroll that they could simply open and close because they were uncomfortable with it… – as if it were a child’s eroticized dream – unfortunately, they must awaken in the shuddering of it… and they will be forced inside the nightmare that always follows reprobation; …. [pause ] … I don’t mean them any harm, the Angel of History wrote…. It is an enraged dream that guides them in and through their stupors… & it is a namelessness on nameless water that they seem to be vampired by… & they seem to chase it & even make it true in their science-fiction dreams…even those willing or able to see…. & It is a love supreme that they are born of; a light most glad of all that ignites & gifts them with the cosmic-continua of all these musical cries of egoism & appearance that, in the end, become liberated, no matter what … & in spite of themselves & despite all their ills & sorrows ….[long pause ]… It’s just that this… this one thing…this immeasurable light…is what they’ve come here to finally become lost in, to fumble through, to understand, & to see …
Something flickered in his eyes for a moment & then it was gone, he told me, later, in rehab, endlessly smoking cigarettes, his face scarred, ugly, with crinkles & cracks running down from his eyes, his chin, his brow. & his mouth – a cynical slit trying to escape or argue with his angular, rigid face & rough tangled hair unruly from the beginning, & a thin cruel finger holding the cigarette, the guitar pick, the guitar itself – telling me he’d write again on just a perfect day when he was touched or burned or tormented by a street punk or an angel or a junkie whose eyes were hollow mica pieces. & maybe he’d shoot up again in the back seat of that trashed 54’ Dodge like he used to in the Village. & walk that wild side scoring heroin & doo-woppng to those old 50’s songs & thinking about it with Andy’s people, oh fuckin sweet Jane, but those are just pale blue eyes staring me down again, he mumbles, lighting another cigarette & another. & I’ll be your fuckin’ mirror, he says to the orderly prepping his afternoon pills & the man who marries will batter his child & the woman, sadly, will do the same thinking it’s proper & the truth is that they’re happier when they’re in pain & that’s why they got married. & when I’m gone you know they’ll all remember me as some guy who said out loud to the empty room & to the microphone & to the new love standing there watching him step naked in front of her like a tree, I accept the new found man, & so I set the twilight reeling. I do. & sometimes you arrive to this place as a beggar junkie poet or as a bi-sexual tai chi holy priest.
We pull up to the cemetery in a big black 51’ Cadillac Hearse. Willow trees & sycamores & tulip trees. Big sad graves. Stone markers hidden under daffodils. At the burial site the priest says ‘don’t make Heaven your final destination, make it God.’ And the little kid, held in her father’s arms asks him, ‘Who is God?’ And the priest says aloud that God is a unity that we rise into – through a shattering – to reach. I think he’s referring to CS Lewis. & the girl cries for her mother whose death was three days ago, on Halloween. Beyond this, we see another hearse, a 67’ Cadillac, & the pallbearers unloading the coffin from it. & Lucinda is singing, “some think a fancy funeral will be worth every cent . . . but don’t buy a fancy funeral it’s not worth it in the end . . .” & a Polish mystic told us that absolute unmixed attention on the divine is prayer. & she slowly starved herself to death as a method of deliverance so that she could withdraw into her body, make it a hearse that carried her unmixed attention to the gravity inside all pure grace that would then be, infallible possibility. I think I felt her gloved hand caress me once in a church & it felt like a silk moth felt. I think there was a silent crying in it, almost like a whimpering coyote pixilating in the moonlight. Like maybe grief is a bomb, draining itself of noise. I think I heard the Polish mystic in the outer pine trees of the cemetery & she was a mourning dove. I think she hid herself in a sanitarium room so she could allow death to rip the walnut leaves from her body. & once her identity – because it was impoverished now & lacking in the dress & style that would suggest her enriched belonging at a fancy funeral – entered the full tranquil awareness of emptiness . . . & she rose through the lacy curtains of the sanitarium with the desire of a lily of the valley, or that of a small crystalline angel who would then shatter within uninterrupted prayer, she became the one available flame-orb that lit a pure fire in the young dead mother, so that the dead little thing with eyes like palmetto berries gone black could rise. I’m talking about the young mother being driven in a hearse in this poem. I’m thinking we better not fool ourselves that the body isn’t a hearse. It is.
Chasing Names on Nameless Water
– after Robert Hass
& other riddles, he joked with me, cutting fruit
& spreading the jam over the cut wheat. The seeds
peppering the jam. & do you believe in magic?
he inquired. You, who’s spending all these hours
writing your verse? & me: magic is spirit’s play
of form into formlessness & back, I answered,
& when I write, I apprentice to it, I added. & he
became distracted – polished his old black boots
with the left-over tea in his cup – & returned to
his inquiry. Language fails, though, just at the
point where what you call Spirit arrives, yes?
& me, yes, it’s a wordlessness that sobers, yes.
& it’s a silence that demands attentiveness to it.
& that is the magic of it: this activity that stops.
& all I know of the hyperactive hands & the ink pen
is the recognition that we’re chasing after something
nameless on a nameless water. & it’s nomadic…
& the body’s made of so much water we’re
drunk on it, at most points in our life, & that’s
no crime, I said to him while he chiseled out
a scrawled face on the over-dry earth & applied
a kind of hieroglyphics to it so I couldn’t read it.
& the violence we do to one another is just the maimed
effort to find a God inside a density of skin that resists it,
this God that is a latent absoluteness in us. & so
we must destroy all the skin on it just to find it,
& it is because we are lost in the crying naked need
of spirit. & the cry consumes us until we cleanse it.
&, because the blood-water in us is so nomadic,
we conclude the cells in us are a company of words,
but cells are just permeable, borderless aeons, I
said to him. & he nodded, while yawning at me,
& I can’t find my way through the web I’ve
created with my own pen. & he said, yes, we make
the web that holds us for a calendar’s folly –
& then we disappear into it, like a drunken fruit fly,
& that’s the aim, isn’t it, in the end? Violins
now playing in the cherry orchards for a wedding –
& the bride & groom, young as two apricots,
stepping forward into one of the webs that is
a celebratory name on a nameless water that’s
called a wedding. & he to me: nuptials prep us
for the outcome of the poem of the self, which
is an emptiness; it’s a wordlessness on a page; or,
as you like to say – in the title poem of your
latest poetry collection – the chasing of names
on a nameless water. & it’s true, we follow the violin’s
sounds just like names on a nameless water –
& the practice is to let go of the nostalgia, the
names on a nameless water we feel to think
to know. & I think I felt what he was talking
about – when I heard the bees in the orchard
leave the honey combs suddenly, like I don’t
quite understand it yet. & the sounds they made. Yes.
Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist from the Detroit area. He is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, best of the net nominee, winner of the Liakoura Prize and the author of nine poetry collections. His new book, The Light Most Glad of All, was published in 2023 by Kelsay Press. Other collections include: Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance (Kelsay Books: 2022), Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020), Mortal Lullabies (FutureCycle Press: 2018), The Drunken Sweetheart at My Door (FutureCycle Press: 2015). He was the featured poet in the movie: Detroit: Tough Luck Stories, by Mary Sommers. He has work in Rattle, Crab Creek Review, Concho River Review, San Pedro River Review, Panapoly, Sheila-Na-Gig and The MacGuffin.
