Hum Read online

  tit for tat avarice of an already X-rated

  schedule

  personal story told at dinner among

  strangers.

  Memory comes also

  came along with

  youthful impertinence

  as of a boy sitting on a grave singing his one two threes

  shot through with doubt.

  Science came along only to aid method’s imperative

  those cruel and those careful

  scribbles, tears

  hours

  hunky-dory tryst later a refrain too easily stated

  habitats of real time as opposed to

  routine

  the boy turns to tell his secret—

  Hamlet’s affliction

  sweet or imagined now

  as sweet.

  FRAGMENT (AUGUST)

  Look to turn more quickly toward it was fetched a remembrance

  and the pervasive hinge

  a salutation thunder, or betrayal, the lesser gods

  as uneasy as the greater, their saga inconclusive, their minds

  unmade up.

  The greens hung

  lofty, low—

  It was not a city to be known by heart.

  It was not a small town.

  The sea was elsewhere, crashing up against dunes.

  It was merely an afternoon

  contaminated on either side—

  HARMONY

  Truculent thing

  why missing from these premises?

  Stuck in abstraction, in the coiled hand?

  Why feeble as you jog along the streets?

  Why almost touching?

  Are you Socrates, to be written

  into the season of robins and suicide?

  Is your pose characteristic?

  Did you inherit the magenta ring

  or the trees’ wild seizure,

  the rival architect’s house

  hardly built but shining?

  Toddler call, at variance with icons,

  are you indifferent to sorrow?

  Relic of mismanaged risk

  newly made, are you,

  have you already been forgiven?

  COUNTRY LIFE

  And lived differently, in a crude cul-de-sac,

  with the mangy fox and his id

  a clown. Another old horse, this one

  made from plastic and wire, trudged out

  to find a mare, not aware that war was immanent

  and he would be asked about his expenditures

  in the star-cast anthem of restitution. The kids were

  out of school and on their motors, tearing through the brush,

  hell-bent on speed, ignoring the gold birds and their song.

  They would never ask who the girl is in the poem, the one in which

  Stevens intones a greater mystery, they would not want to know

  about mystery. They would want to ride until they won.

  And the old clown would want to swoon.

  Desire comes and goes and comes,

  as if wings on a stem in late summer. The wind came

  pretending to be spirit, its largesse vaulting day

  and leaving twigs scattered on the grass. That was a good sign,

  in a time without signs. It was hard to say, given that no one

  read signs any more, except Children At Play and

  Stop The Plant. The train was famously remote, and beautiful in its

  roar along the river’s edge, hooting and dragging its hoot through air.

  And still the issues arose urgently, unlike the night, ever calm.

  OPPEN’S WAY

  A small table is not a vacancy.

  I promise to avoid quotation.

  Look what you have started.

  Is there another word for Patrick?

  But she is singing again!

  How much was the farm in Vermont?

  To the right is a landscape in Iceland.

  My grandfather’s ketch was called Hawkbells.

  The forsythia screams on the hill.

  I am trying to drink more water.

  I see the bell but only by looking up.

  Now everything is wet.

  If I change my ways will the way change?

  He sailed with his wife, Mary.

  Memory is a form of forgetting.

  I am talking a lot in my sleep.

  Clarity in the sense of silence.

  Now I have done it again.

  to Patrick Farrell

  SIGN

  Beware of accidents, they will bring grief to paintings.

  Beware of the shrub, it will grow into bronze.

  Beware of the young, they will leave your food.

  Beware of those who take notes, they will cancel your silence.

  Beware of red lace, it will turn into film.

  Beware of the father, he will teach you to build.

  Beware of the brother, he will answer in jargon.

  Beware of the mother, she will ruin the meadow.

  Beware of the sister, she will dig up your shoes.

  Beware of the lover, he will abstract your love.

  AFTER MAHLER

  A thousand minutes came out of the tottering state.

  The bed of thyme moved within its bearings like a dream.

  He answered, tomorrow.

  Someone else was screaming on the radio; people laughed.

  The cat has been dead for some time now.

  The wedding party’s bright joy looked strange from the streaking jet.

  Meanwhile persons are moving around outside. They have decided to

  foreclose on

  options pertaining to the new world. Instead, to allow themselves to

  live in a world

  neither new nor old, but which abides as in a balloon floating

  untethered above trophies and noise so that

  wren-shrunk

  Pentecostal shade

  harp rubbed under Mahler’s tent (his abundant farewell

  to Alma’s rage)

  after all the part that was said and the part that was done

  the conductor in his care so one was forced to go

  back

  to how it might have begun after all

  the century that leaks its tunes into the summer air

  refuses to call

  to call is to ask break a silence but the

  music

  after all it is music song-spiraled

  and the landscape detained across a field into a night in which we

  learn only the pornography of sight

  its ocular target

  see see see

  from above the tents and the persons milling about

  in their robes

  they are the disciples! silence them!

  And if they are merely birds flocks rising in circles

  like smoke without song see see

  we cannot hear the tremulous strings nor the soprano glittering

  in the heat of the tent

  the conductor mouthing her words not that.

  Sun, making its way east and east and west of the river

  where the ivy is not poison and the trees not weeds. And this or that spins into

  the final cycle, its systemic will. Do not butter the toast, do not come

  like a ghost without shame, a promise adumbrated

  against the cry of any nocturnal creature.

  All against one, and the philosophical questions

  on a far continent like so many markets.

  Not that either.

  Conditions above the smashed agora with the cowboy riding sunset on his

  mechanical cart, his small mouth and child’s

  incontinent whine. Casinos in full play, paying for

  assault, moving to the rush of coin. And still we did not speak, did

  not know to whom to speak, muttered at lunch, gave each other

  proofs of care, one to

  one, bu
t did not come to the table to hear our fathers, they were dead, our

  mothers, they were busy, our neighbors, they were elsewhere, our lovers, they

  were not listening. Listen. This is a lullaby. Listen.

  to Leon Botstein

  OPERA

  Logic, for example, skewed from mooring.

  Boats adrift but loaded.

  Anchors away! This way, says the captain,

  this way, says the mate.

  That said, the small grows

  into film and an audience forms to clap.

  For the good guy.

  For the wounded under a halo of sand.

  Bands play. Flags. Aromas.

  The blackened fields ready for grafting,

  seeds incapacitated

  in the nuance of tragedy

  stripped to its bone—

  disinclined to repeat

  unworthy of sequence.

  A monotone of commitment.

  Thus illogic disguised as logic.

  Thus Faust through the ages.

  And the heart’s munitions

  cooked down to devotion, seared in a pot.

  Pot of melted weaponry.

  The margin called to from afar.

  Speech acts.

  Massive audience turning away in tears.

  The nonmoon followed by the nonsun.

  Two

  IMPOSSIBLE BLUE

  STONES(THE COAST OF TURKEY; ROBERT SMITHSON)

  1.

  Forget that version, gist’s

  truncated eruption, stone

  placating heat, avenue luminous but forbidden

  up the steep assault. She of glittering rings, of the swollen

  intricacy of faith, sinks into dust, frees an icon from its

  distillation—unction of tears, waxy scent

  of a remnant nave. Out there, things ride their riddles

  like toys in space, an agenda gap on the morphic tide.

  Here, the soul pivots on scripted discs

  curving away from the story

  we thought we would always tell.

  Bird, halo, gust,

  Poseidon grass and impeccable weave

  (silk on silk) young sailor with one leg raised,

  the bride stalked, red beads

  hurting her throat.

  Now a veil

  is thrown clear across the disturbance

  across the domestic stage

  to the circle’s wet edge.

  I can see through this, and this, I can see

  the dispersal as if it were tomorrow, hinge of arrival opening—

  how it goes, adage after adage, through the sanctuary,

  the nave’s arcade,

  dipped pigment and last trace

  trespassing over a bridge onto a continent, the increments

  bewildered by detail—

  searching the site,

  mouth, thumb, foot,

  stone angled across the processional

  where they climb to stare, the him and the her,

  black goats bleating from the cloister

  passing something on.

  Single plaintive note, little redundancy.

  2.

  The arcade leads

  from sacred to secular, carrying the relic

  overhead, architect

  hammering away at bedrock, swallows

  igniting air’s scripture,

  sediment extended outward and down—

  nudity of the example, its accumulated rite.

  In this space, glyphs

  transcribe scale’s precision.

  This or that step

  falters at the bazaar,

  postcards fall through the mosque’s vaulted diaspora,

  releasing their images from history’s

  crude hideout,

  mistakes and dead-ends

  in peripheral vision—men hugging each other

  while another, bloody scrap on the road, is perpetually beaten.

  There was the illusion of purpose, the illusion of content,

  as if we were responses annulled by our norms.

  Hired old dame weaving,

  raw wool pulled through

  a tourist economy,

  its itinerant, spectral, real.

  A false god has a greater reality than the true,

  and so extensions of the Cartesian mind are carried to the most

  attenuated points of no return

  babbles the anthropologist

  as a young man wraps a car in cloth

  to mourn the contemporary, his desire

  kept under the revolution’s chronic restatement, tour guide

  speaking in third person, bus of strangers

  importuned with tea.

  The impure surface,

  iridescent purple, green and silver surfaces,

  these surfaces disclose a cold scintillation,

  sight is abolished by a hermetic kingdom of surfaces.

  The surfaces of the reliefs are definitely surfaces,

  the surfaces in Scorpio Rising,

  or California surfaces, the

  brilliant chromatic surface—Thanatos in aqua,

  surfaces that look mineral hard. A variety of surfaces

  from Saturnian orchid-plus to wrinkle-textured blues and greens,

  the inside surfaces of the steel sites,

  every surface in full view.

  3.

  Comatose vision

  etched in a mirror

  sleep extends its tale

  deprived of solace

  the dream’s epithet

  profits us not

  sweltering veil

  veranda backlit

  and her hair

  measured for afterlife

  the Sultan’s concubine

  kept in a cage

  heat’s fiasco

  forensic pursuit

  huge jewels

  perfectly arranged

  the dialogue stymied

  at the mark of lost faith

  4.

  I saw a young boy in a row boat but he did not see me.

  Chaste catastrophe of a broken mast

  men holed up in the mountains

  to travel as lightly as snow

  to fall

  upon fact

  Already a tool’s coercion

  reels with annunciations

  of some one or thing. A yellowy

  dross fades into apertures

  whose program is scuttled—

  diadems for children

  made to fall apart.

  O spiral of light!

  The petals fall, water

  dull scum. Once

  among these you thought

  shadow nerves would come alive

  but the body is a fetish: all its moments sealed in a box.

  Perhaps the sculptor’s last nobility

  gives something back, like the moon to a landscape.

  The old knight, there in dark garb, peers at the abstinent blank.

  We can make things look natural, but that doesn’t mean they are.

  We had told the story of

  restoration, pasted the new leaf on the tree.

  A belated significance forecasts

  its currency, as if among figments

  we might enter the glare where history collapsed,

  catalyst dispersed as the unremembered,

  one ruin much like another, one choice

  for a better tomorrow: mass appeal, filling station, chorale.

  And the hostage figure—transference and mechanism

  caught by intention’s blind noise, site newly animate—claims its form.

  MEMENTO MORI (BERLIN)

  Kept or held in help me position

  and she

  to whom the cry is cast

  is dead.

  Wheels on gravel.

  Dog.

  The season with a hole in its side.

  Intercepted, hand out

 
as if one could know, or come to know,

  in the city, walking among lit staves

  among young girls with silver flutes

  playing snippets of Mozart, gilt embellishments of the castle,

  dust along water’s edge, pool

  of fat children, vicissitudes of gray

  in the crypt, the new museum’s

  horde of old art,

  the rip, breach, wound and

  the hope

  to make it up or rebuild or draw

  in the day the things that belonged to the night:

  cartoons, scaffolds,

  tones massed in the bell tower, ruin

  at the intersection,

  walls picked like bad skin,

  things literal or not, so

  you think sign,

  mechanical thing,

  and the angel on the plinth

  its geography faltering like a compass

  circumventing distance

  in the place of the double moon and the silent skiff

  impasse clustered over the kiln,

  bony intervention, Darwin’s worms impeded,

  and still the light

  still the harpy comes blistering out of the crowd

  to interrogate the boy,

  to ask for papers, name, occupation

  let me not forget.

  So this is the zone of lost calls.

  Or the allegiance to the gymnast

  under the hood of the BMW, or

  Wagner’s immensity.

  There is a squirrel in the birdbath, the evening

  broken in branches of maple.

  Of things barbaric, ideal.

  IMPOSSIBLE BLUE

  The blue there are no slippers phoned from the street

  the countess a walk across the bridge finding a dress and shoes

  the black shoes transparent raining on snow

  the birds to be ready for the dance the second wife

  came back sailing the blue

  the bridge in gold light

  the birds in snow

  you telephoned

  I said I would I

  did not the blue after crossing

  And that the obscure would approach

  in crystal sheaves

  accumulating but