Grasslands

The way the world sways. Every leaf left
in place, its stance chiseled to each blade,
an iteration of time; each tassel of seeds,
thy bread, thy handmaiden;
as breath on the brink of disappearance,
becomes a wave become water; proportions so
large so as to stagger the seasons—
one winter questioning another.

We listen. We listen as if musical crabs are tracing a
giant sine wave across the dark mud flats.
We watch it as if a rotted rowboat, its oars like two hands
at prayer, is signaling a gesture
of permanence towards the sky. The grass
has turned from gray to blue to green.
The tide washes in. A bell is rung.
It’s as if the merry-go-round has turned it’s calliope on.
What Lao-tse has said is true.
The earth is a bellows. Use it.
The grasslands bellow and glow.

On Island

Child, do you see anywhere that I could sit,
either on the common ground or in the groves
belonging to the god?*

For your eyes’ glint, green is not of land, but of
Anselm’s famous assumption that greatness
resides in existence—like salt water in the sea, say,
or fantasy’s strange struggle with what is,
after all, simply a child at the edge of the ocean.

Idle eyes can be like a crown
you wear to mock the idylls of a king.
They can be a story of a wedded existence—
its laurels, its pride—here on this island, where we
can be as a bride saying her nuptial vows.

Or they can reveal only the darkest of shadows,
that which there is  none greater than, more like
a crowded movie theatre than an empty cave
and when its monuments are an illusion…
why, we should not be able to see at all.

That which there is none greater than—
like the breaking crests of the waves forever,
some from the setting sun, some from his rising,
and some from the place of his midday beams,
and some from the northern mountains of night…*

…must necessarily exist. And so
the swell of water becomes a rising of the evening air.
Poetry resides in its existence.
My name is Anselm.
Child, please find me my chair.

---

* Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus

Anselm’s Island

Puppetry Redefined

The curtains part as if inside a river in the snow.
We’re sitting in a fancy Chinese restaurant to see a play.
The waiter brings us wine and waits to take our order.
On stage an ancient erhu, shown in silhouette
behind a hand-painted screen is set to play (I read
from the program) ‘the music of Swallows River’. A shadow play,
in its ancient Chinese form, always begins in tears—
a child’s tears. The tears turn to rain, rain to river.
You will need to love them more
than you might ever think, the poem begins.
For even if misery is all there is, and all we know
is like an empty stage, full of empty chairs,
the river carries the children into the new life.
We can’t think that they are alone there. Perhaps this poem
is a kind of congregation of our selves, a place to gather
all the shadows that we need to keep alive on stage.
Our poetry is thus made for puppets redefined…
The room grows dark. The chairs remain empty.
Swallows River flows across the stage and into the snow and sea.
I order the General Tso’s Chicken. Brown rice, please.

Such Riches

Should you be interested, the relevant passages in Proust for ‘I am falling asleep…’ can be found on pages 162 -169 in the new translation by Lydia Davis of Swann’s Way. Penguin Books. The USA edition, 2003.  Such riches indeed.

I am falling asleep, Marcel says, taking a young girl in his arms.

There was a time when he was always taking long aimless walks, but today it’s different. He has a goal in mind, a date deep in the Combray countryside. The landscape expands as he travels. His parents have returned to Paris in preparation for Madame’s gynecological appointment (though Marcel did not know this), so he’s not pressed to return home early; in fact, he’s rather inclined to stay out for the afternoon, find a spot to settle down in, and read a good book.

He has The Stones of Venice to read, he has his umbrella in case of a sudden downpour, and he has his spyglasses, a neat pair that folds up and fits comfortably in a side pocket. In his novel, Marcel rather forgets to mention how often he kept a pair of opera glasses on his person; how often he used them, peeking across the low hills at lovers in the woods, spying on strangers and casual friends, intimate friends and at times his own lovers. You learn to forgive the great artist his little peccadilloes…and he would tell you he was studying the landscape, the birds, the wind in the willows,  that sort of thing…but Marcel had a bit of the voyeur in him, even at an early age.

In Search of Lost Time tells the incident this way. Marcel has walked out to Montjouvain, the house which was once owned by M. Vinteuil and is now occupied by his daughter, Mademoiselle Vinteuil. M. Vinteuil had recently passed away and his daughter is in deep mourning. Marcel portrays himself as nonchalant about visiting the area: he was fond of the reflections in the small pond next to the house; it was hot; he finds a shady spot on the hill above the house…oh, just with a view into the sitting room window, that’s all…and falls into a deep sleep. No one is around; the countryside is sepulchral.

Untitled

St. Lucy’s Gown

Becalmed brides, sisters, speech
so faint the spider, who
can only know land as a wave
of webs, could hear their voices
only as the distant, fallopian sounds
he always heard at human birth.
The tension in his eyes
was like a wake of cold water,
as if the sea had parted
and gravity had brought his web
to rest against a bucket on
the frozen floor, too cold for life.

How I do love you,
Little Betty Bo Peep.
How I do care about
your lovely, lonely sheep.
And you too Miss Muffett,
that such a king should play bo-peep,
and go to fools
while grapes hang frozen on
your vines. I might
have explained the clouds to you.
I might have found the great breath.
Do you see this?
Look on her: look, her lips.
St. Lucy’s gown forever fits.

Polyhymnia Disinterred

If Polyhymnia could be
a winter afternoon’s great beauty,
or night, as it fills the moon’s girth
with still translucence restored from earth…

If Polyhymnia could be like the sleigh
we got for last year’s Christmas day,
not so  hot for winter’s snow,  but good once spring’s
trapeze and high wire act started up…

If Polyhymnia could be a spider moved
up from creation’s mold to sewing skirts
for dandelions… Polyhymnia, who likes shedding gowns
for scales, who never sings, who never clowns,

who never tempts the winter’s night with a serenade—
Polyhymnia, disinterested, disinterred, delayed.

The World Made Up for Us

The brides have passed all of the sentence tests
that Polyhymnia wanted. She asked
them to teach us how the earth became
a sullen crib. She thought the brides should sing
of nightmares and miracles, not freedoms.
If we have come to know our strengths, she said,
then perhaps we have come to love our failures
too much. Write it. This is a test.

If Polyhymnia, then nothing is transitory,
just the vast ebbing out of what always flows away.

As Polyhymnia is, there is no sentence here,
just the quiet susurration in her lips.       

Of Polyhymnia, her stone lips breathe silence,
for espousal has always been a poem to awake to.

For ancient, aimless, almost airless Polyhymnia,
the courtier of our language,

the world is made up for us. Always.