— when we were children —
          weren’t we
always asking: is that sleep
          she is sleeping

or is it a slide toward death?
          What is it
to be always in fear,
          isn’t that ridiculous,

that one’s hug
          or one’s moving too near
could hurt?
          Isn’t that hurtful?

Don’t these thoughts
          pend on a life
like a painter’s heavy impasto?
          Don’t they distort

what he paints,
          bending it from one
understandable realm
          into the fearful next?

Seeing her in the chair,
          her head atilt,
or lying on her bed,
          the child’s eye

inevitably trailed
          away from her being there,
followed the lines
          formed by the drapery of sheets

or by the downward flow
          of hidden limbs,
— gravity pulled at the eye
          and fated it.

And isn’t this why
           Kossoff painted
a bright red blotch
          just below his mother’s left hand

— nothing structural
          in its being there
— nothing in the image
          or design to fix it,

— red blot
          of a child’s anger —
formless,
          homeless —

didn’t it wander
          like a loose speck,
like an errant cyst
          in a teary eye?

I’ve been here before. Last week, at poolside in Boulder, a man lay on his back
reading about spiritual themes in the poems of Wang Wei. But that’s what’s done
in Boulder. A young woman dove into the pool, breaking its placid surface only
to rise from that surface again exclaiming:“I’m angry; I’m enlightened; I’m….”
(she dived under again). Boulder. Where Air Force jets wing south to the
Academy and the tile edge of the pool is bright red, the lip of Maya’s basket in
which world, sky, trees, woman, contrails ripple invitingly. That was Boulder.

*

antistrophe

And we visited the Great Stupa in the foothills where a gilded Buddha sat.
Thoughts of Du Fu walking amid temples and pavilions, remembering he “used
to write of such things, wielding my writing brush.” And that evening before the
morning when the towers in Manhattan fell, from our motel window in the
Springs, the lights of NORAD on Cheyenne Mountain flickered. What was
antenna? What was starry night? The missiles ticked in the mountain’s depths.
The monitors’ green tracks descried the movements of small nocturnal animals.

*

epode

Who speaks in Horace: “good to lie under some ancient oak, or deep in the tall
grass”? Or “Rome wrecked by her own strength”? Who writes, “and now, I’m
alone in the Sangrés. Blue and distant are the surrounding peaks”? Here the jets
wing north to the Academy or NORAD or Fort Carson. I’m dreaming away the
afternoon reading about the kudung, the relic body of the cremated
teacher—bone and ash, being and non-being intermixed, the words leaving this
world untouched but for a faint shimmer. Hot today, and I’m nodding over my
book. If I were to doze off I might dream myself a bird or the eye of a pilot
banking over Boulder.

and put a graven image by,
and add the sacrifice’s flesh
and add the altar on which
its throat is cut

and add in circumstance
and add up circumcision

What stacks up time in the diaspora
free from paradise, unfree from paradise
for a creature unsheltered in the open,
a creature like one’s self

The word is wedded,
the word proclaims itself
a bridal canopy

Mars is not near you.

Mars is arrayed on a skyline
as though waiting for dark.

Mars is up there, neither accepting
nor barring.

For all we know, Mars has its visor shut.

Mars — so many for Mars, all we could ask for.

Mars, Mars, somewhere floating over mountaintops.

Soon we will see Mars. We will see its light,
blood-tinged all the way to Sheol.

the way religion follows a soul
and tries to contain it.

Did the one who suffered
come into a place

where a thing belonged neither
to Caesar nor the Sanhedrin?

Not the physical object itself
but what it gave off

or what it meant to us,
and why therefore

someone owned it.
Was there, in that martyred life,

some surcease, some pause?
And earlier, did Socrates

admire the hemlock-filled cup?
Why did we stand

before the firestorm in Tiepolo,
seeing it burst over worked-in horses,

chariots and reins     clouds scattered —
no, shattered — by light from the sun?

How did others’ immense suffering
tutor us — those blinding rays

that streamed as background
to the picture’s paraphernalia,

illuminating our blessings?
Was it knowledge of an illusion?

Those who made art
in the death camps, only to die

— what did they leave us?
So much were we given:

the obelisk in the faux garden,
an amusement, a painter’s

whim of juxtaposition?
We were being given artifice

and asked to embrace it.
Thus, the life-sized swan-clock

in the glass case carried
implications of destiny,

but was also a joke,
its hammered plates “afloat”

on watery ribbons of silvered metal.
A key was turned, sound

came out as from an organ
and the space was “filled

with Mechanism beating Time
with its beak to musical chimes…”

The whole shimmered
and all clapped hands at the ingenuity.

And nearby, Goya’s Interior of a Prison
lay somber and flat,

a series of increasingly diminished arches,
light darkening as the eye followed curves

back to where Time had stopped beating,
to where Time was not.

And so the images followed us
with their baggage and hope.

The graven became sacred,
became as a shelter

— the man on the cross
and the jew in the pit —

these were given as ours to contain us
in paradise and in dungeons.

            The lines for stamps, circling around pillars, crossing other lines, wove in and out of various doors. I collected my letters from my postal box, among which was the usual yellow slip informing me to claim my bulkier mail at the pick-up window.  

            As I sliced through the spiraling stamp lines toward the window, I noticed that, though the line for one’s mail was short, it was not in the usual place. In the confusion of the day, people, instead of lining up between the two velvet-covered chains which mark the line, had, mistakenly, lined up to the right of one of these chains, the one farthest from the stamp lines, leaving what was the actual pick-up line seemingly empty. Aware of what had occurred by accident, by confusion, I too joined this misplaced line.

            While standing there, lost in idle thoughts, I heard behind me, over the everyday mumblings of people waiting on the various lines, a disturbance. It was a woman’s voice, but gruff and raspy, piercing in tone, asking someone (probably on a stamp line) where to pick up mail. The voice arced above the chatter, bounced off the vaulted ceilings and descended, as though from on high, like a rain of angry pebbles.  

            I minimally comprehended the words (that is, I could have looked them up in any dictionary), but they over-carried, they shot past, they abandoned me; they produced a sensation not unlike discovering at the far end of one’s subway car someone talking and acting like a madman. I then heard another voice, nervous and distinct, anxious to placate, and probably on one of the other queues, saying that the pick-up line was between "the two velvet chains, over there on the right."  

            Shortly, a large woman wearing a white nursing gown, a shocking red coat and beret, torn stockings and scuffed shoes, waddled down between the two chains, passing by the six or seven people who were standing on the misplaced pickup line. Was that dull white bracelet on her wrist metal or one of those printed strips hospitals used to identify their patients?  

            The woman stopped to wait near the little space from which the clerk, with a curt "next" would normally beckon. There, she let out a deep half-anguished sigh, stationing herself on the two square feet of marble flooring she occupied as though it were her private piece of real estate.

           Now, with each labored breath, with a certain concentration of herself into herself, she physically radiated possession. It transmitted itself out from her like a metaphysical etude. And the space around her seemed to pull back, as though trying to form a cup and isolate her in a kind of vacuum. You had to be sensitive to it, but it was there, a barricade, a refusal to intermingle.  

            Almost immediately the people on the line on which I was standing began yelling, "Hey lady, the line begins back there…Hey! watcha tryin’ to do, huh!"  

            At this, the woman turned around and said, in a voice which sounded as though a car were rolling over gravel, "I’m pickin’ up ma mail, an’ this here’s the pickup line."   People on the misplaced line continued shouting, "Oh no lady. The line’s here. Get to the back." The woman passed a withering glance over the entire line of people. "I’m no child!" she shouted. "Don’t talk to me like that. You talk to your children like that. Can’t you people read," she pointed tothe pick-up sign right beside her. "You’se in the wrong place."  

            However, she turned from her spot, and, as though raising the very anchor of her being, she started toward the back of the existing line, slowly and with great dignity. "Why don’t you go back to Europe," she said in a harsh voice as she passed by the people standing in the row. "Maybe dere dey talk like dat to a grownup. Too many Europeans," she muttered loudly, only partially to herself.  

            At that moment, a young man standing in line in front of me lit a cigarette. The woman whirled furiously on him. "Kill ya’ self, but not me! I don’ hafta smoke that poison in. Just like knifin’ someone…"

            I looked back to see her shuffling to the end of the line, where she turned again to the front, her face a surface of broken features, to gaze like an ancient monument on the people before her. I could see that her cheeks were streaked with lines of red, stony and jagged. She stood not more than a dozen feet behind me exclaiming to herself, "Damn Europeans, whyn’t dey go back where dey come from! Ain’t got no manners an dey don’t know shit about where to stand."  

            She kept this up for the time I stood in front of her waiting my turn, about ten minutes, my neck hairs bristling while I waited on the misplaced line.

 

 

a

light

enters

the

body

falls

into

shadow

 

 

 

 

a line

   in the grass

     under shade

          a movement

brown ants

          wind —

             acres of it —

dry fields

 

 

 

heat gusts

muscles ache

a day’s walk

a clearing’s

clear shapes

 

 

 

sun

 seeks

 deep hollows

runs

down

  bleached hills

into the limb joining trunk

and the rock

          
beneath thicket

and the bone

          
beneath skin

 

 

 

a line moves into what it will wake into

                                 sun glint

                                
on carapace

]]> http://www.culturalsociety.org/texts/poems/a-light/feed/ 0 http://www.culturalsociety.org/texts/poems/sentences/ http://www.culturalsociety.org/texts/poems/sentences/#comments Wed, 29 Mar 2006 16:00:59 +0000 Michael Heller http://www.culturalsociety.org/?p=2039 You want so much to know
when knowing is nothing,


when you are the one
I least know.


You want a name.


You want a word,
and with that,


the word returning
to cancel nothing


I know.

]]> http://www.culturalsociety.org/texts/poems/sentences/feed/ 0 http://www.culturalsociety.org/texts/poems/two-tone-landscape/ http://www.culturalsociety.org/texts/poems/two-tone-landscape/#comments Wed, 29 Mar 2006 16:00:31 +0000 Michael Heller http://www.culturalsociety.org/?p=2037 Stopped once. It was a little strip
of building by the road, Midwest.


Midwest, mid-sex. In the middle
of America, antipodes. Poplars


flanked the street. Yes, the street
had tree-lined flanks. Dry poplars.


And in-between, a view, sky blue.
An American here backs down,


backs back, stumbling into a sweet
pea-sized infinite. Withers


to the height of a grass blade,
to seed asleep in form. Roots


will grow and conform and reach
the alum-tainted water and those doors


with their polished sashes. Air, dust,
lust to phantom a low orange moon


hanging in the sky, another rock.

]]> http://www.culturalsociety.org/texts/poems/two-tone-landscape/feed/ 0