GONDWANA
and Other Poems
also by nathaniel tarn
poetry
The Persephones, 1974, (rewritten) 2008, 2016
The Beautiful Contradictions, 1969, 2013
Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, 2008
Avia, 2008
Recollections of Being, 2004
Selected Poems: 1950–2000, 2002
Three Letters from the City: the St. Petersburg Poems, 2001
The Architextures, 2000
The Architextures 1–7, 1999
A Multitude of One (editor: poems by Natasha Tarn), 1994
Flying the Body, 1993
Caja del Río, 1993
The Army Has Announced that Body Bags..., 1992
Home One, 1990
Seeing America First, 1989
The Mothers of Matagalpa, 1989
At the Western Gates, 1985
The Desert Mothers, 1984
Weekends in Mexico, 1982
The Land Songs, 1981
Atitlán/Alashka (w. Janet Rodney), 1979
Birdscapes, with Seaside, 1978
The Forest: from Alashka (w. Janet Rodney), 1978
The Ground of Our Great Admiration of Nature: from Alashka (w. Janet Rodney), 1977
The Microcosm, 1977
The House of Leaves, 1976
Lyrics for the Bride of God, 1975
Section: The Artemision, 1973
A Nowhere for Vallejo, 1971
The Silence, 1969
October, 1969
Where Babylon Ends, 1969
Selection: Penguin Modern Poets, 7, 1965
Thirteen for Bled, 1965
Old Savage/Young City, 1964
translations
The Penguin Neruda, 1975
The Rabinal Achi, Act 4, 1973
Con Cuba, 1969
Stelae (Segalen), 1969
Selected Poems (Neruda), 1968
The Heights of Macchu Picchu (Neruda), 1966
prose
The Embattled Lyric: Essays & Conversations in Poetics & Anthropology, 2007
Scandals in the House of Birds: Shamans & Priests on Lake Atitlán, 1998
Views from the Weaving Mountain: Selected Essays in Poetics & Anthropology, 1991
GONDWANA
and Other Poems
nathaniel tarn
a new directions ebook original
For Janet Rodney
CONTENTS
one: gondwana
Gondwana
two: the stairs at fez
Birds: Bosque del Apache, NM
Romancero (Daoist)
Occupy Santa Fe, Her Afghan Night
Fact Lines
Nerval’s Maidenhair (Fern)
In Love with the Queen of Amherst
Old Friedrich, Sils-Maria, 06.30.1928
The Stairs at Fez
three: il piccolo paradiso
Il Piccolo
In a State
Reading through Sleep
Moment
A Spider’s Prisoner
Veil
The Price
Angels
Thing
Maya
Books Falling
Anomia
Sleeper
Arrival
Heart. Mode Recall
Definition
four: fighter pilots
(Eurydice, Sr. Lt., Rising in Re & To: Orpheus, Capt., Setting)
five: exitus generis humani
e. g. h., i
1. Visitor
2. Torture: A Rage
3. Vital Signs (The Poltergeist)
4. Burial Mound North
5. Divas
6. Lungs Floating, Slick
7. Mammoth Excretions
8. Cold Unmistakable
9. Laughing, Singing, Praying Trees
e. g. h., ii
A. As if Philosophy
B. Responses
C. Hootless at Heart & Flying
e. g. h., iii
I. Paris Old
II. The Homer
III. The Guest
IV. For MacDiarmid of that Ilk / The Passing
V. The Olson Thing / Nihil Obstat? / The Passing
VI. The Promises
VII. Individuality, Solitudes
VIII. Recently Assayed
IX. The Longing & Desire for Justice Condign to the End: A Preseason Sale
X. Die Unendlichen
ONE: GONDWANA
Incedo per ignes
gondwana
ψυχὰς ἔχοντες κυμἀτων ὲν ὰγκάλαις
Their lives / Held in the arms / Of the waves.
—Archilochus, Carmina Archilochi, no. 174, tr. by Guy Davenport
Here, now, as ever, going out again
from Finis Terre, final of earth, or
“end of world” they call it here,
consumption left behind.
Earth fragments—first the big islands
cannot be told from earth, then
smaller and smaller islands among
their channels, trees grabbing soil
with weaker roots, until all’s rock where
unimagination starts, where
tempests flare around dread Horn.
Last inhabitants’ blazing canoes
expose their nakedness to last explorers.
This plot begins and ends with past.
But what we name the future follows on.
###
Earth sinks into mind
sea being mind of earth
in constant movement, constant fretting,
endlessly leaping from thoughts to thought,
waves rolling in from the planet’s belt
greet each other as far-flung kin.
Deep in each trough, thriving unseen,
huge beast obsessions: small
secret beasts; beasts with invading arms
long as your most fearsome nightmares.
###
Sea lifts its swell into whales.
Smallest speck of foam
is a bird paddling along a wave crest
almost invisible in search of upturn.
How fathomless this is!
What is going on down there,
how far do you drop in the abyss
before feeling ground,
before a basis offers rest again, foothold,
security? Meantime ghosts
of the dead at sea:
circling weather’s homeless
tantalize waves with wing tips
as they go round the endless dip and rise,
cruising cool air. May not alight for years.
###
Toward center,
center of center,
where earth-mind turns solid,
whereto a single bird
may fly per annum, attracted by
some odor, some phantom odor,
while most, standing, in glossy caucuses
hold a circumference for access to the sea.
A silence there hard to believe, a hazeless,
dustless air when in the clear: a spot
on the farther side of knowledge
from which all other points are North.
Where is your “epilepsy” West,
your “wisdo
m” East when everything
flies you away from known dimensions
into the stillness? This is no crossing
from a river’s bank to its other side, but
lack of movement absolute,
total attention
to a deliberate deliverance.
The orb has turned all diamond.
###
Birds melting in and out of waves
caressing tip with tip but never touching them,
bird, beast, eyes peeking out—a quick
look-see and gone again. Ice
opens, closes. Length-wise
black lines of sleeping animal,
height-wise gray lines of wary bird:
those that fly in sea,
those that swim in air.
Some that flash snow and bathe in snow
white as the ivory light
roll on their backs in snow at times:
black eye, black beak, black foot
signal a presence over white on white.
Some that are checkerboards in black
and white, set your cold eyes to shivering.
###
The days stretch into years or seem to
for all the world has told us of itself.
Anything new revealed?
High mirrored in a low
has been known forever.
Sun floating here in mid-floe mist
unwilling to climb or fall,
unfurls a panoply of colors.
Mythical grass flashes its green.
Phenomena can all forget forgetting
except the huge electric sea.
Now you imagine days,
similar to days,
days after days uncountable,
days cannot be outnumbered
by any calendric art. They are
a single day—or very few you’ll swear
by lights of the old stars,
and, while innumerable in fact,
these cannot be distinguished.
###
Domain pitches and rolls:
hearts out of throats,
muscles tightened to lock in breath,
backs slamming up against the bulwarks,
“one hand to ship,” one to your life.
A very tender roll,
soft yet relentless, moving us
from incarnation to incarnation.
You would not think such gentle motion,
a whisper in earth’s circles,
could leave even your mind unbalanced.
But mind escapes like bird into mist.
Perhaps this is your coffin
propelled into white fire
out of one universe into another.
###
As you reach the great white
peak of the single color,
emotions have been draining
out of your lives.
Naked you go into this continent
in endless search of cleanliness,
exiled imagination’s only host,
until imagination rots.
Catchword “reality” assumes a meaning now,
breath suddenly leaps fast,
distance-devouring clarity
brings all the secrets of the continent
close up against your eyes.
This is the moment of desisting
from human will. Whatever flares:
slide along sea lanes, whitewash away.
With the... no, not the fear of dying, no—
but an immeasurable depth of sadness
for having such a trifling time
to deal with the one hundred thousand things.
###
[Far back in another dimension,
far as you cannot remember,
all wenches dead, the culture petrified,
dance music curls on flowing flowers:
freeze to the ice of heartbreak and there is such.
Your body may sense it as you move
and step it—yet it’s only dream.
Despised, acclaimed, despised again through over-
hype, you cannot hear it here—
engulfed by silence and immense white air.]
###
They said back then
there was a frozen continent
in those high latitudes encircles globe.
Are you moving toward it?
Sea overwhelms all distance,
spreads out beyond its cup into space—
there is no other explanation
for how long you have been moving
toward no destination.
You can imagine white
drawing in your colors,
all body differentiae,
until you walk as a ghost,
as someone who has crossed
a limit on no map.
It can be described also
as having crossed to the other side
whether this be a river
or earth-girdler’s self. But,
as you know, there is no crossing.
###
Is it possible to be overwhelmed
by landscape? Yes. Engulfed? Yes.
Sparagmatized? Broken into shards? Yes.
Sun so blinding in ice facets
borders fade and you enter
what hunters have known for centuries:
silence of silence. No silence on known
ground outsilences this silence.
What is an individual
so spread over so many miles
eyes can’t encompass them?
Eventually you’ll wear
pelts of all animals
you have come far, at such
expenditure of energy,
to witness. Nothing is heard
of the alleged known-world
you come to donate here.
###
Above leviathan’s songs
can be sensed in your trembling limbs
laments of captive ships,
locked, crushed and,
piece by piece, delivered to the ice—
their dislocated bodies
berthed into other waters than their own.
Everything brought from out. Outside
dissolves. Eyes shut,
the creatures never seem to need to see,
eyes free are globes of melted ice.
Yourself in that beast’s pelt
rests economically on a blue berg,
gazes a moment at the undocumented,
(zodiac pass by!), eyes close again.
Blindly you lead the blind through paradise.
###
Cruising up channel,
whose sides seem to fall in on you,
held in a block of time:
it could be a cage—but these are walls not bars.
No height can be ascribed to the walls.
As in a code revealed,
white veins blink through black stone,
damming your eyesight.
Even on cloudless days, rocks climb on up,
so measureless, they will outlast your sight
and terminate it.
###
Where the initiating bang
unpacked imagination’s jar
emptying it once and for all,
the jar of one named as
all-gifts, all-giving:
how falsely named!
A small meteorite
from our uncounted universes
slammed here, name cruelty.
No thing, no person spared.
Truth that we are at any moment
in any time, in any place,
less than a hair away
from ultimate disaster.
Close as the wrist watch on your
wrist. In this possession,
this epilepsy if you will,
mind unfurls
(like a great banner of its own freedom
while white raises balloons—
the weather’s breasts)
and will accept its fate.
Of all the gifts, kept by an after-thought
hope only held the jar.
###
Coming back to your life, your everyday,
the one they call with relish “normal”
and how you hate it!
Through days of outrageous storm,
ship lolling like a drunk, navel
in throat, brine coating mouth
with its obscene concoctions.
Obsession slides, slits waves.
Not allowed to move
of your own volition
but pushed this way and that discretionless,
day after day though the roll lasts soft
and would hardly seem fierce enough
to move a marble from child to child.
###
Returned from a now known sphere
for the first time completely, and thus
“at home,” the sphere can never be itself
once more. Done to itself in the meantime?
You cannot fathom. You have not heard
“the news” for all the time away. Suddenly
you realize you may not hear “the news”
again. This race in its inhuman sadness
calls itself human still—but holds
no further value. It no longer serves
as yardstick for comparisons.
The robot’s been switched on.
You have seen creatures who, full versed
in every ethic, act with such spontaneity
that they will never judge. You have been
gathered into Eden yet found it full.
Your body as a ship is now at rest,
yet there’s no berth for you to sleep in.
###
Purchased by sea
you will never walk the same.
Lines will never be straight but curve
continually in an attempt at straight.
This beloved earth loses its strength.
Drugs drown ultimate coral colors;
krill devolves into mud; animal
flesh, slashed open to its innards,
washes to liquid pinks: diluted wine.