In my country, murmured Swann through the
hood, the clock is a dog for time. Time
does
not mean to be listened to: humiliating in its disguises, heedless of
the ocean.
The ocean is the death young men hope for; they who are bruised chimeras
of the poem.
The
poem is an urn, between silhouettes.
The silhouettes are serious and dark, Odette, nostalgic for space.
Space makes a fact of
their
factitiousness.
Factitiousness is a space for forging the truth. The truth, so to speak,
is a problem for
poets.
Poets are problems for the experts of poetry. The experts of poetry
cover their flesh
with
signs and greatly fan themselves with scrolls: they are part of the
weather,
these
papyrus odes exalting death.
Death is a sky to the hopeful young man. The young man glares back
at the sun and
arches
his spine like a young pine in the wind; in my country, Odette, it’s
blowing
a
gale up on the mountain.
The mountain is a gin-clear river, according to a sutra in Buddhism;
you can even see
salamanders
on the bottom, moving their feathery, incarnadine gills. Gills open
and
close; silhouettes become an urn; the river is slow as an old dog: beneath
the
sky
it slowly flows, carrying the moon.
The moon is a picture on a house-shaped clock. The clock, it is ringed
with pictures of
nightingales,
Swann, and when it’s their turn they sing their mechanical songs,
while
the experts of poetry emerge from the clock to drink from the urn.
The urn cares not about its own lubricity: mind is a donkey, words
are a horse; they shall
be
bridled by the grad student. The grad student, denizen of the mountain,
is
heedless
she is the odalisque of the search engine; doleful, in her gunny habiment,
she
whistles a tune, gazing on the campion and its tiny corolla.
The corolla has no scale; like the moon, it is a mind to the clouds.
The clouds billow
up
for hundreds of miles, more power therein than a million Hiroshimas,
and
when
the experts of poetry wake with a start, soaked to the ashes of their
flesh,
the
periwinkled sky gleams like a mosque.
The mosque is a place full of arches to which many people come to pray;
temple of
Delight,
wherein Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine, it is an urn to the
silhouettes:
the forger steals the flax and lays it on the altar of the experts of
poetry,
who move their feathery, incarnadine gills deep in the clear water of
the
flowing
mountain. The mountain slowly flows beneath the helicoptered sky.
The sky is structured like a language, with machines, wetness, weather,
and phosphorous;
it
is like clock work: bodies pile up like phrase hits in the ward. A ward,
Odette, is
a
place to which many people come to pray.
To pray is what children did at bedtime, in the early 1960’s,
wearing pajamas with little
helicopters
and missiles, rubber soles on the booties, like those of my brother
and
me.
My brother and me, like, once we were kneeling there by the bed, and
I was
five
or six and he was three or four, and I looked over at him beside me
there, his
little
hands folded and his eyes shut tight, his lips moving, and I don’t
know why,
but
I unfolded my hands and I lifted one of them up and I slapped him as
hard as I
could
across his little face as it prayed for all the other children of the
world, and
he
fell over and started to gasp and weep on the floor, but I don’t
remember
anything
after that, just the gasping and the weeping.
The gasping and weeping of people inside a sky that is structured like
a language is very
boring
in poems, for poems should be abstract and should give pleasure. Pleasure
is
a violence from within that protects us from a violence without, said
the expert
of
poetry.
Poetry should not be about, he said, for to be “about is the
old taboo.” The old taboo is a
problem
for poets: it thrashes about impolitely like a grad student on phosphorous
fire,
clawing up the acclivity of the desolate fell; something huge and metallic
inscribes
white signs overhead, annular and abstract, on the sky’s blue
page.
The page is ensorcelled, Swann, torn from its incunabulum. The incunabulum
was of
Modernism,
looted from a museum: huge, helical skeins of subfusc and papyrus,
bound
by withe, smolder in the deer park.
The deer park is a pleasant place for the practice of Buddhism. Buddhism,
purporting to
counter
narcissism, is increasingly connected to position-taking with a vengeance
in
the American literary field.
The field is covered in acanthus and ailanthus; deracinated wisteria
withers in piles along
the
runway in the New Jersey sun. The New Jersey sun is warm in the
documentary
about the Geraldine Dodge Festival; the sound of jet engines and the
sound
of the ocean are edited from the film.
Film viridescently covers the ornamental pond. The pond cools symmetrical
bundles of
long,
metallic rods; it is early spring.
Spring is coming earlier, Odette, and getting warmer. Warmer is what
you get, my
Swann,
when you have a “political poem” in hand, and you’re
near the bottom of
the
donkey, stumbling, with a hood on your head.