Thinking of that place as an existence.
A woman reaching for the glass of water left all night on the bureau, the half-done poem, the immediate relief.
Entering the poem as a method of leaving the room.
Entering the paper airplane of the poem, which somewhere before its destination starts curling into ash and comes apart.
The woman is too heavy for the poem, she is a swollenness, a foot, an arm, gone asleep, grown absurd and out of bounds.
Rooted to memory like a wedge in a block of wood; she takes the pressure of her thought but cannot resist it.
You call this a poetry of false problems, the shotgun wedding of the mind, the subversion of choice by language.
Instead of the alternative: to pull the sooty strings to set the window bare to purge the room with light to feel the sun breaking in on the courtyard and the steamheat smothering in the shut-off pipes.
To feel existence as this time, this place, the pathos and force of the lumps of snow gritted and melting in the unloved corners of the courtyard.
9. (Newsreel)
This would not be the war we fought in. See, the foliage is heavier, there were no hills of that size there.
But I find it impossible not to look for actual persons known to me and not seen since; impossible not to look for myself.
The scenery angers me, I know there is something wrong, the sun is too high, the grass too trampled, the peasants’ faces too broad, and the main square of the capital had no arcades like those.
Yet the dead look right, and the roofs of the huts, and the crashed fuselage burning among the ferns.
But this is not the war I came to see, buying my ticket, stumbling through the darkness, finding my place among the sleepers and masturbators in the dark.
I thought of seeing the General who cursed us, whose name they gave to an expressway; I wanted to see the faces of the dead when they were living.
Once I know they filmed us, back at the camp behind the lines, taking showers under the trees and showing pictures of our girls.
Somewhere there is a film of the war we fought in, and it must contain the flares, the souvenirs, the shadows of the netted brush, the standing in line of the innocent, the hills that were not of this size.
Somewhere my body goes taut under the deluge, somewhere I am naked behind the lines, washing my body in the water of that war.
Someone has that war stored up in metal canisters, a memory he cannot use, somewhere my innocence is proven with my guilt, but this would not be the war I fought in.
10.
For Valerie Glauber
They come to you with their descriptions of your soul.
They come and drop their mementoes at the foot of your bed; their feathers, ferns, fans, grasses from the western mountains.
They wait for you to unfold for them like a paper flower, a secret springing open in a glass of water.
They believe your future has a history and that it is themselves.
They have family trees to plant for you, photographs of dead children, old bracelets and rings they want to fasten onto you.
And, in spite of this, you live alone.
Your secret hangs in the open like Poe’s purloined letter; their longing and their methods will never let them find it.
Your secret cries out in the dark and hushes; when they start out of sleep they think you are innocent.
You hang among them like the icon in a Russian play; living your own intenser life behind the lamp they light in front of you.
You are spilt here like mercury on a marble counter, liquefying into many globes, each silvered like a planet caught in a lens.
You are a mirror lost in a brook, an eye reflecting a torrent of reflections.
You are a letter written, folded, burnt to ash, and mailed in an envelope to another continent.
11.
The mare’s skeleton in the clearing: another sign of life.
When you pull the embedded bones up from the soil, the flies collect again.
The pelvis, the open archway, staring at me like an eye.
In the desert these bones would be burnt white; a green bloom grows on them in the woods.
Did she break her leg or die of poison?
What was it like when the scavengers came?
So many questions unanswered, yet the statement is here and clear.
With what joy you handled the skull, set back the teeth spilt in the grass, hinged back the jaw on the jaw.
With what joy we left the woods, swinging our sticks, miming the speech of noble savages, of the fathers of our country, bursting into the full sun of the uncut field.
12.
I was looking for a way out of a lifetime’s consolations.
We walked in the wholesale district: closed warehouses, windows, steeped in sun.
I said: those cloths are very old. You said: they have lain in that window a long time.
When the skeletons of the projects shut off the sunset, when the sense of the Hudson leaves us, when only by loss of light in the east do I know that I am living in the west.
When I give up being paraphrased, when I let go, when the beautiful solutions in their crystal flasks have dried up in the sun, when the lightbulb bursts on lighting, when the dead bulb rattles like a seed-pod.
Those cloths are very old, they are mummies’ cloths, they have lain in graves, they were not intended to be sold, the tragedy of this mistake will soon be clear.
Vacillant needles of Manhattan, describing hour & weather; buying these descriptions at the cost of missing every other point.
13.
We are driven to odd attempts; once it would not have occurred to me to put out in a boat, not on a night like this.
Still, it was an instrument, and I had pledged myself to try any instrument that came my way. Never to refuse one from conviction of incompetence.
A long time I was simply learning to handle the skiff; I had no special training and my own training was against me.
I had always heard that darkness and water were a threat.
In spite of this, darkness and water helped me to arrive here.
I watched the lights on the shore I had left for a long time; each one, it seemed to me, was a light I might have lit, in the old days.
14.
Whatever it was: the grains of the glacier caked in the boot-cleats; ashes spilled on white formica.
The death-col viewed through power-glasses; the cube of ice melting on stainless steel.
Whatever it was, the image that stopped you, the one on which you came to grief, projecting it over & over on empty walls.
Now to give up the temptations of the projector; to see instead the web of cracks filtering across the plaster.
To read there the map of the future, the roads radiating from the initial split, the filaments thrown out from that impasse.
To reread the instructions on your palm; to find there how the lifeline, broken, keeps its direction.
To read the etched rays of the bullet-hole left years ago in the glass; to know in every distortion of the light what fracture is.
To put the prism in your pocket, the thin glass lens, the map of the inner city, the little book with gridded pages.
To pull yourself up by your own roots; to eat the last meal in your old neighborhood.
DIVING INTO THE
WRECK
(1971–1972)
I
Perhaps my life is nothing but an image of this kind; perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring, doomed to try and learn what I should simply recognize, learning a mere fraction of what I have forgotten.
—André Breton, Nadja
There is no private life which is not determined by a wider public life.
—George Eliot
TRYING TO TALK WITH A MAN
Out in this desert we are testing bombs,
that’s why we came here.
Sometimes I feel an underground riv
er
forcing its way between deformed cliffs
an acute angle of understanding
moving itself like a locus of the sun
into this condemned scenery.
What we’ve had to give up to get here—
whole LP collections, films we starred in
playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows
full of dry, chocolate-filled Jewish cookies,
the language of love-letters, of suicide notes,
afternoons on the riverbank
pretending to be children
Coming out to this desert
we meant to change the face of
driving among dull green succulents
walking at noon in the ghost town
surrounded by a silence
that sounds like the silence of the place
except that it came with us
and is familiar
and everything we were saying until now
was an effort to blot it out—
Coming out here we are up against it
Out here I feel more helpless
with you than without you
You mention the danger
and list the equipment
we talk of people caring for each other
in emergencies—laceration, thirst—
but you look at me like an emergency
Your dry heat feels like power
your eyes are stars of a different magnitude
they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT
when you get up and pace the floor
talking of the danger
as if it were not ourselves
as if we were testing anything else.
1971
WHEN WE DEAD AWAKEN
For E.Y.
1.Trying to tell you how
the anatomy of the park
through stained panes, the way
guerrillas are advancing
through minefields, the trash
burning endlessly in the dump
to return to heaven like a stain—
everything outside our skins is an image
of this affliction:
stones on my table, carried by hand
from scenes I trusted
souvenirs of what I once described
as happiness
everything outside my skin
speaks of the fault that sends me limping
even the scars of my decisions
even the sunblaze in the mica-vein
even you, fellow-creature, sister,
sitting across from me, dark with love,
working like me to pick apart
working with me to remake
this trailing knitted thing, this cloth of darkness,
this woman’s garment, trying to save the skein.
2.The fact of being separate
enters your livelihood like a piece of furniture
—a chest of seventeenth-century wood
from somewhere in the North.
It has a huge lock shaped like a woman’s head
but the key has not been found.
In the compartments are other keys
to lost doors, an eye of glass.
Slowly you begin to add
things of your own.
You come and go reflected in its panels.
You give up keeping track of anniversaries,
you begin to write in your diaries
more honestly than ever.
3.The lovely landscape of southern Ohio
betrayed by strip mining, the
thick gold band on the adulterer’s finger
the blurred programs of the offshore pirate station
are causes for hesitation.
Here in the matrix of need and anger, the
disproof of what we thought possible
failures of medication
doubts of another’s existence
—tell it over and over, the words
get thick with unmeaning—
yet never have we been closer to the truth
of the lies we were living, listen to me:
the faithfulness I can imagine would be a weed
flowering in tar, a blue energy piercing
the massed atoms of a bedrock disbelief.
1971
WAKING IN THE DARK
1.
The thing that arrests me is
how we are composed of molecules
(he showed me the figure in the paving stones)
arranged without our knowledge and consent
like the wirephoto composed
of millions of dots
in which the man from Bangladesh
walks starving
on the front page
knowing nothing about it
which is his presence for the world
2.
We were standing in line outside of something
two by two, or alone in pairs, or simply alone,
looking into windows full of scissors,
windows full of shoes. The street was closing,
the city was closing, would we be the lucky ones
to make it? They were showing
in a glass case, the Man Without A Country.
We held up our passports in his face, we wept for him.
They are dumping animal blood into the sea
to bring up the sharks. Sometimes every
aperture of my body
leaks blood. I don’t know whether
to pretend that this is natural.
Is there a law about this, a law of nature?
You worship the blood
you call it hysterical bleeding
you want to drink it like milk
you dip your finger into it and write
you faint at the smell of it
you dream of dumping me into the sea.
3.
The tragedy of sex
lies around us, a woodlot
the axes are sharpened for.
The old shelters and huts
stare through the clearing with a certain resolution
—the hermit’s cabin, the hunters’ shack—
scenes of masturbation
and dirty jokes.
A man’s world. But finished.
They themselves have sold it to the machines.
I walk the unconscious forest,
a woman dressed in old army fatigues
that have shrunk to fit her, I am lost
at moments, I feel dazed
by the sun pawing between the trees,
cold in the bog and lichen of the thicket.
Nothing will save this. I am alone,
kicking the last rotting logs
with their strange smell of life, not death,
wondering what on earth it all might have become.
4.
Clarity,
spray
blinding and purging
spears of sun striking the water
the bodies riding the air
the bodies in slow motion
falling
into the pool
at the Berlin Olympics
control; loss of control
the bodies rising
arching back to the tower
time reeling backward
clarity of open air
before the dark chambers
with the shower-heads
the bodies falling again
freely
faster than light
the water opening
like air
like realization
A woman made this film
against
the law
of gravity
5.
All night dreaming of a body
space weighs on differently from mine
We are making love in the street
the traffic flows off from us
pouring back like a sheet
the asphalt stirs with tenderness
there is no dismay
we move together like underwater plants
Over and over, starting to wake
I dive back to discover you
still whispering, touch me, we go on
streaming through the slow
citylight forest ocean
stirring our body hair
But this is the saying of a dream
on waking
I wish there were somewhere
actual we could stand
handing the power-glasses back and forth
looking at the earth, the wildwood
where the split began
1971
INCIPIENCE
1.To live, to lie awake
under scarred plaster
while ice is forming over the earth
at an hour when nothing can be done
to further any decision
to know the composing of the thread
inside the spider’s body
first atoms of the web
visible tomorrow
to feel the fiery future
of every matchstick in the kitchen
Nothing can be done
but by inches. I write out my life
hour by hour, word by word
gazing into the anger of old women on the bus
numbering the striations
of air inside the ice cube
imagining the existence
of something uncreated
this poem
our lives
2.A man is asleep in the next room
We are his dreams
We have the heads and breasts of women
the bodies of birds of prey
Sometimes we turn into silver serpents
While we sit up smoking and talking of how to live
he turns on the bed and murmurs
A man is asleep in the next room
A neurosurgeon enters his dream
and begins to dissect his brain