(oh yes so daintily) to roost, though there is
some strange courage invades the days—
almost as if intolerable burdens were to be
lifted high off the soul and off the back.
That back is an extremely strong, powerful
facet. When enemies consider you done-gone,
plotting on down the bleeding hill—your
back, a traitor to the good, flag, constitu-
tion—those same considerations, with this
so fierce a love for Emily, call down vast
consolation. The back, do not forget, bears
high your arms when the aim is skyward.
All to be knighted, ha, in this “democracy”?
And, since all hope is one, magnanimous,
however many more may share in it: now
that both citizen and nation sink together,
I glory once in this disastrous age, sharing
the bliss with my dear Sister Wife—you
well know who—before dark falls again
over each shattered moment of a day—with
that single exception. Waking to slumber.
old friedrich, sils-maria, 06.30.1928
For P, A, A, I, M, F, B, K, J.
1.
Now to the embraces of the mountains,
high tower ridges naked above the valleys,
rock arms around my life. All dispossessed of
family & friendship, abeyance from disaster.
Was ever more than this... this total isolation
bred into lineage, inheritance, or expectations
regarding futures? Ever a mother?... father?...
siblings? I remember nothing save, rising from
graves, assembling back his limbs, his stature
to my eyes, a man invisible & preternatural
called me to loss. I see the future. And yet
for now, the deep green childhood meadows:
rioting flowers in such profusion no botany
encompasses them all. Moment by moment
on long walks, I re-acquaint myself toward
kind names, their color gradually restored by
this or that re-visit with a childhood moment—
as when, for instance, I had climbed a torrent,
a mighty cataract it seemed to me—my boots
sliding from rock to rock & each rock hosting
a single flower as I now dream this floor. Float-
ing, free of philosophers, historians, artists &
poets, mongrels & mongers of every discipline,
the uncreative, the competently deathly: free of
those whole infernal crowds. Interminable pain
even in a ghost’s limbs—but blissfully at work
through pain to guarantee my universe release.
2. (a & b)
A plenitude of orchids—What! orchids outside tropics?
in the blue-green cathedral under the northing iceberg;
skyfulls of flute-blooms, & trombone-gentians lurking
on walls sunk to a planet’s crust at the sea’s fundament;
among high grasses; larkspur; monk’s hood jockeying
as if you walked on sand back home in broiling desert
for open skies; the purple aquilegia reminiscing Rome
as you did, rapt and fiery, through the helling canyons;
the clematis—star of the alps; buttercup gold aflame:
never have human eyes seen this before, nor ever will
& globe-plants, hoisting will to power over fellows,
enter the kingdom some may call god—but it is not—
mustard & cress; stonecrop & saxifrage; & artemisia;
not god, but distant ancestors who paled at creatures
clover & potentilla; rose; iris; sunspark; meadow-saffron;
so dangerous they fled in panic to the closest shoreline,
silene & willow-herb; foxglove; snowbell & crowfoot;
& slow, from frightful sinews, teeth, maws & tentacles,
fireweed; myosotis (forget me not); campanula & fern;
shrank & moved on into our arms, legs, uprightness,
yarrow; vetch; daisy; edelweiss—heraldic of the only
deities, i.e. our earthly selves, now worth our trouble...
But always a catastrophe to our own kind, so nothing
gained us out of that mortal sea. And rain engulfs the
mountains. Ah! meadows drown! Here beauty reigned,
beauty alone, without a menace, only a dream of fields
lives on—like bird-calls heard where our last, terminal
extinction fades away. Deep in the misted-over jungles
the race has done exploring: all the land’s mapped out.
Mostly, the prophesiers say, our species won’t survive.
3.
My room as simple as it could be, not one item
of furniture de trop, the writing tools on desk as
limited as possible to clarify a mind’s intent. I
work against a head in shards, eyes almost blind,
vomit in throat at any moment, the fall & sink of
nausea, the dizziness, the need unquestioned for
crashing head to floor and float till I can parse
again. My room a box among these wildernesses,
a dream, within a sleep, within a death—that one
to come v. soon is my belief—but “positive!” as
a last flag of this my nothingness. And death a box
within this body, room within room and far too
deep for anger. I have discredited all the external
causes and unsubscribed mankind to all divinities,
all outside help for the atrocious misery in which it
ferments. On the behalf of spirits, mankind has
wasted worlds that it was given, continues trashing
them and will go on idem until they & mankind
enjoy their death together. “Consider a lily of the
field” an enemy pronounced: I love my frenemies!
Consider it indeed and all the tribes of plants &
all the tribes of animals that feed on them, consider
the whole tree, the central pillar: do we not pull it
down? To this proposal I bend my life here, all
my activity. Had we not wasted Eden, all space &
so much of our time, could we not have prevented
more disasters, worked out more cures, dominated
hell, returned man/woman back into their garden,
assuaged the doubts & terrors of our only goddess
—if there be need of gods—this lonesome Earth?
the stairs at fez
For Anna Della Subin & Hussein Omar
Perché non spero tornare giammai nella città delle belleze
eccomi di ritorno in me stessa. Perché non spero mai ritrovare
me stessa, eccomi di ritorno fra delle mura. Le mura pesanti
e ignare rinchiudono il prigioniero.
Because I do not hope ever to return to the city of beauty
here I am back inside myself. Because I do not hope ever to find
myself again, here I am back between walls. Heavy and dull
walls shut in the prisoner.
—Amelia Rosselli, Variazioni Belliche, tr. by Lucia Re & Paul Vangelisti
1.
Stairs, the impossible stairs,
the almost impossible stairs,
killer, leg-breaking stairs,
whole legs cramping at night,
mounting into the privacies.
Shop: high-pi
led treasures,
brought from the distant mountains
High Atlas say—for sullen sale
to infidels in such strange clothes
as monkeys wore once mayhap
at Andaluz for work in circuses.
“I sell you these blankets
made of fine camel hair: young camel
in this band, old camel in this one
and with a simple badge,
black tribal badge, the fine tattoo
worn by our women between breasts
and maybe further down. You buy
two rugs now for the price of one,
you take them home, out from our
family, from the High Atlas,
ruled by the lords of snow—
now you have drunk this mint with us
from the bleak mountains on a blind horizon.”
2.
White air
altogether white
above a plaza so immense
it even swallows up its very city,
as large as country, large as nation,
where East came to its furthest West.
For many thousand years
sky also violent
behind white air. And so:
the air now only slightly blue
against which birds
colorful doubtless at creation
now black against white air, seeming
as heavy as exhausted hearts.
And yet no, no,—no weight at all
against white air, the white,
the white, white air,
the only slightly blue white air.
3.
A memory in time. Such
pictures of a path not to be taken!
How to detect at core of heartbreak
the reason for it. To glimpse a youth:
senses were sharpest. The youth far gone
into another country. Another suffers daily
one entire life the change had to be made
in circumstances. These same set life on fire
and burned it to a scar on a single page.
Blind for so long now, deaf too,
no pleasant odor ever touches nostrils.
All senses dormant, paralyzed,
joy subject to an endless absence.
Now passage from the guilty
to all his others: these animals walking
around, wounding, killing, all other
animals in orgies of extinction,
looked at as animal and not as “animals,”
bring tears to the soul’s eyes. Rise
to the face. Down each side of the nose
warm liquid pearls. Hatred & love
drinking each other. Liquid streams
below the stairs. Marriage should
never be allowed to perish:
cause, circumstance, life whatsoever.
4.
The going up, the going down
of fortune’s wheel,
broken, defeated feet, his own,
clamped onto that same wheel, trying
to keep afloat. A cane helps manage.
She in the thighs of fortune
now taken in, now harried out,
trapped in the stench of everlasting change,
the highs & lows, failure called “life”—
as if this dread concatenation
of our haphazardries
could bear the name of “life...”
5.
Dream invocation:
Do not close this marriage,
nor even try to close it.
True marriage does not die
entombed among the stairs
though it may sleep forever.
Standing above its time,
swallowing all
like a black hole at heart
of this gigantic galaxy,
eats all, drinks all,
of the persisting life,
drinks human blood:
the blood reddens the skies
sunset & dawn.
Follows the anticline.
6.
Beautiful child of the deep stars,
svelte loveliness in bridal night,
food of profoundest scholarship,
parsing the future of this eon:
hover above collapsing stairs
to sing our coming epic. It will
not die. It will not die. And yet,
a hundred years from now Fez
will have gone to seed, to blindness,
melted to desert, unrecognizable—
if not into a mess of skyscrapers
born from the avarice of mindless men.
Opposing infidels will swarm into the sets
of this film unrecorded, into this movie
of our crippled days. Legs cramp at night.
The stairs have not yet fallen. To know
of death, yet not believe in it, this is
the rich commodity men know as hope.
7.
Behind the biblical, much further down,
below Fallujah, below Ramadi, below
Sumer, lower, behind the ground-down
bones of our originals, the first-born pain
of walking up & walking down twin streets
off which all beings, blinded, deafened, broken,
sell out their gross existence to an only bidder.
The you, the you has seen the eyes of this,
and heart, and felt the central core of this:
the you calls for upending
of all this poverty—while the rich flow,
terrace to terrace drinking the mint of heaven.
Now that you’ve left for foreign parts,
try climbing in your sleep,
continue climbing and inhabit us
trying to reach the terraces. The sky revolves
into our revolution, each part apart.
The muscles of our legs unwinding down
to pain, the nightly pain, dreaded paralysis.
The terraces because, from them, only from them,
the visage of the holy city—foundation
primal, most imperial—the city
of a prophet and his laws and, beyond laws,
an ocean of light in the brazen sky. The terraces
now reached at last as the sun sinks. From which we
recognize oceans of light in our own mastery.
The stairs now climbed. Not to be climbed again.
Fez, Morocco, 2014
THREE: IL PICCOLO PARADISO
Wohin wir uns wenden im Gewitter der Rosen,
des Laubs, das so leise war in den Büschen
folgt uns auf dem Fuß.
Wherever we turn in the storm of roses,
thorns light up the night. And the thunder
of the leaves, once so tranquil on the bushes,
tags in the wake of our heels.
—Ingeborg Bachmann, tr. by Nathaniel Tarn
il piccolo
You have made here,
she witnessed,
looking at
the assemblages, a small,
a piccolo,
a paradise,
for us to bask in and,
at this time,
in this here world, right now,
with no beatitude of any kind,
but just these latitudes allowed:
hope or despair
and not a jot of will to help
make sense of it.
The rea
ding mind,
flowing among its flowers
for these—make no mistake—
are volumes of the inner heed
and not of botany
wallows in satisfaction, a small but
genuine satisfaction
to sink in, or remain
at strict attention
where all things you could name
as pleasure, joy, or... ecstasy
have faded ineluctably while
self, in pain, condemned
to life without parole
(the inner/outer wars)
looks out the window of our time
failing to notice, passing by,
that life you failed to lead
when there was time and reason to construct it.
in a state
One (“I,” “You,”)
always present—
not having had
a single moment
even of best
at any time in world
(needs stressing: “best”)
without the tooth
(needs stressing: “always”)
of anguish at the neck—
and everyone on earth
including dead ones still awake
closed in some state
keeps them incarcerated,
cooped in a single word,
repeated “going forward,”
so that:
a call goes out from state to state
trying to break the glass
stronger than any steel however
they use to build the great machines
states can be locked in for the sake of silence
weaving from place to place
and time to time
until no time is left
for any call, for any mailing
to any office, posing as state,
calling as such,
unrecognized behind its flags
“I,” “You,” did not design
not knowing codes or kingdoms’ keys.
reading through sleep
Reading re Revolution
in an ancient realm,
recalling recent ones
even among the flowers,
right here,
under our noses—
and yet no blood
runs from our noses
to pool with theirs—
negating the terror,
dissolving it,
unable to dream it home,
to make the nightmare signify
inside this climate,