Gondwana Read online

  to thank whatever maker

  you can serve up

  to your imagination,

  to change all visibles,

  make beautiful a manifest corruption,

  hear, speak, sing, paint

  beauty

  into every equation,

  to elevate your taste,

  update the swallowing

  into a Paradiso

  Flag of the nameless.

  For three, death is impossible:

  witness the music.

  For two, idem:

  witness the music,

  For one, possessor of a name,

  it can be done.

  2012–14

  FOUR: FIGHTER PILOTS

  (eurydice, sr. lt., rising

  in re & to: orpheus, capt., setting)

  In memoriam Lydia Litvyak,

  Heroine of the Soviet Union

  one

  One day these talks with my dead husband will be written down and published. I walk and talk with him every day she can.

  Ghost in these forests near the battlefield. I imagine he is coming to fetch her. But he is the live one in the mind.

  Perhaps I did not know I loved him until the day he died.

  Pilot poet: not many of those. Sky mourning over Stalingrad.

  I find it impossible to believe in those who write “off writing” and not off—what? What should they write off?

  The red-rose-cities-half-as-old-as-time are being written off all over many planets

  and I can’t see anyone rebuilding them. Or even planning to.

  Someone has notified me that he is living half my life. I would be easier to persuade were he a she.

  Or, by immaculate conception, an it.

  What are earth’s possibilities when hope has melted like a cheap date? Losha dead in a stupid accident.

  Or cheap ice cream cone on said date?

  Something you wouldn’t normally eat this side of Hades.

  Now I sit in this forest, reading texts on Practice over and over: but to what benefit?

  I keep the flies off my crotch lest my hand wander there.

  Every now and again allowed such a walk. Which comes in devilish handy.

  Perhaps, tomorrow, I can hike a while. In Siberia’s direction.

  Cosmology. Walking is difficult now with a broken wing. It trails behind me impeding progress.

  Did she survive some say? prisoner? exile? mother?

  I think not.

  two

  In her days as a racing pilot, she invariably believed she would kill myself whenever I read a story of a fatal crash.

  More than any I know it made her height-sick.

  The inconsequential nature of his consequence was that he won every race in which he and I competed.

  How can so great a conqueror have reckoned without the Russian winter? (How can two?)

  First solo memento on shirt-back showed my runway’s number and the plane’s.

  Racing is an unforgiving sport, turning a glorified lawnmower into a killer within seconds of an incipient misjudgment.

  There was the heaviest willow-snow out of Novgorod that year.

  When he said her breasts were golden cupolas against the blue.

  Writing is in a state of conquest. There is no defeating writing. The problem is its death.

  A poet never gives up on poetry.

  It has taken over all of communication theory and practice. Numeracy is no longer at stake.

  The mark of a true poet is that she is invariably killed by his enemies—

  Some three kilometers from Dmitryevka.

  And that in every known case those enemies are my true friends.

  three

  She was not flamed at Auschwitz, nor downed in Bosnia, Syria, Cambodia, Tibet, Iraq, or Afghanistan—

  yet lives in inferno all the days of his life and wonders how to continue walking.

  It is because of a nameless cruelty whose face I know but hardly dare reveal:

  because life would become impossible (technically) if she did reveal it?

  Men come with music in their mouths... and poison in their coming. I used to watch it spurt from time to time when I held them tight.

  To her breasts they loved it.

  This is where Losha crashed while teaching his student tight turns.

  Her husband cannot fetch her again, I must stay down. He is singing to the animals and the animals lie quiet.

  These very large leaves on which all is written—save her particular pain.

  This ocean of pain that has lost its scripture.

  So many years ago he left and only yesterday. Forgiving he goes, begging forgiveness.

  They will miss her, Y’all. In the end, miss me.

  Snowing above the Soviet in a far distance. Irkutsk? Kursk? bygone Borodino?

  Ask how they ever possibly could have left me out.

  Grease it in.

  four

  It is a condition of our attachment to this earth that we suffer small matters acutely which—

  cows lick their battle wounds in the field nearby and bellow out the eon—

  seen from a star’s perspective, or cosmic time’s, are beyond absurdity.

  Cows weep scalding tears for misbegotten children.

  But how else could we be bound to this life? Or take it with any degree of seriousness?

  Novgorod: peeing in a whirl of willow-snow and huge mosquitoes. Poor tail-piece!

  For if once we were ever truly to see with a star’s eyes, perhaps a million stars’ eyes fixed on us as well, we could never breathe a single breath again.

  I admired every one of her manifold cathedrals.

  At the top of each steeple, doves open their beaks to sing. Did you say “sing”?

  Rapt as we would be in another time, another space—and unable to continue this ridiculous existence.

  Nearby too, stallions are dancing gracefully, reluctantly, waiting to leave for Petersburg:

  it is because we are always leaving that I am here at all.

  The Siberian Express is alongside ready to fly. From Leningrad they call it now.

  Sit quiet for a little while before departure: a healthy custom.

  Without departure, there would be no stay.

  five

  Hand over cockpit door, just below shield, bracing herself.

  Chest heavy with medals, ’chute harness clumsy over dress uniform: clearly a propaganda picture,

  sees move toward herself, looking at it as if for talking (face to face), an image of woman looking very much like herself,

  as if angels had been picked up in deep sky and ordered back down with the squadron.

  All books on the heavy shelf fall down on top of me—shelf too: a woman killed by knowledge.

  What is this to him if she is the presence within those letters, within the message of that intelligence?

  His smile beatific, looking up, ideal-typical hero—as if smiling at the remaining angels.

  And she the grace of all configured things, in perfect landing patterns.

  That red star on her fuselage: heavily painted, outlined—as if contained thereby—in ivory,

  not unrelated to the golden star she’ll wear in future as decoration over the rim of her breasts...

  And that Nazi Niemyets ace I downed who kept on saying

  “But it is not possible! Dear Madam, just think of it: a woman!...”

  That we speak face to face is miracle enough, being nothing more than one completeness.

  Which they ignore completely between Atlantic and Pacific:

  Lord, how dead among the stars the story of our young Republic

  (which Russian Fall turns absolute to Winter)

 
when she was full of courage and a sweet daredevil among the fearful nations!

  six

  The killing continues in Guatemala (where my young man once worked), Ukraine, Poland, Germany—

  as it once continued in Guatemala, Cambodia, Burma (where my young man once worked), Biafra, Kurdistan—

  as it still continues in Guatemala, Rwanda, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan.

  Serial names often misplaced down here. These dead forget. Many moons ago. Many floods and much-much blood ago.

  Day by day as the earth turns and with exactly the same unavoidability. Same haze of ignorance inside which we consume our consumptions.

  Lest we go into the hills to forget that the race was ever imagined. Or neglect to observe

  the paramount leader set over us as a certifiable moron with considerable dyslexia.

  Humanoids become stick-insects while their brothers rob, sell, and profit from the food sent by other humanoids to relieve the stick-insects.

  The revolutionaries kill the dictators and then turn into dictators.

  I shit blood in my dreams and my uniform turns from saffron to dark red.

  Can one live completely without hope? Never that surge of excitement, momentary heating of the pulse as something is “looked forward to”?

  As if it had to do with the one greatest possible excitement of all human excitements: falling in love?

  As if we had eyes in front of our heads instead of at the back of them?

  Guard your back!

  Is it all blind momentum, equivalent in faith to absolute inertia?

  At an angle of attack too critical to log, I once soared out of these golden mountains:

  quicksilver bird built to prey on those who would prey on the holy people.

  It was dangerous in his young travels: the car door could be opened at any moment—and you, shot.

  I saw Ulanova dancing once, the Assoluta, on one of my furloughs.

  She was as lovely as a bird flying,

  Oh, my mother country!

  seven

  That building stood in a small street in Smolensk, very close to this street’s intersection with a major avenue—from which it could clearly be seen.

  If Paris was the Capital of the XIXth century, which is the Capital of the XXth?

  Conceivably the Third Rome?

  In no way could it ever have been said that they had tried to hide it.

  Men in black hats and thick side-whiskers cannot be missed in a crowd. Cattle wagons await them.

  Because it was not her name, she hesitated every time it came up in conversation, almost exclaiming “that’s me!”—and then holding her mouth abruptly.

  Now, the two of them are standing on the rim of the circumambulatory path of the great golden stupa Shwedagon.

  They are photographed, safe in their saffron robes—so very different and far removed from the ancient red.

  Every time you see such a monument, I am supposed to think of the Founder’s teachings.

  It is my favorite color of dress when flying with him. Under the uniform.

  But what you cannot help thinking of is the thousands of imprisoned rebels.

  All is presence.

  Behind that presence is an absence so old, I have forgotten its name.

  It went Elo...., something like Ad...., never meant to be photographed, but certainly always recalled.

  He had said something like: “In those days, her name was... And in this moment she is called (name) and tomorrow it shall be (name).

  Which may concern me, or not, but reveals.

  Long ago, before kinship ruled, I adored him.

  eight

  From a distant desert at the center of the mappa mundi, a city calls relentlessly day and night to its inhabitants who no longer live there. The nuclear plant blew up and they left.

  It is way past bedtime so that all species should be extinguished.

  Even to that last mouse in our rain forests, that last ant eating its carcass.

  So that you should finally return, should you so desire.

  The invitations never got printed. His animals keep dying.

  Like the great October call, now rescinded, it was addressed both to the people and to the peoples.

  I spent decades wondering whether or not my father would call. Before he died. My mother before. My husband before. My children before.

  Where the harps hung on trees, everyone waited.

  It was felt that there should have been an invitation, some kind of indication that one was wanted, one’s presence was required, personally,

  that it was one, oneself, that they wished to see again.

  And he would go back, expecting to see certain signs signifying that the right individual had in fact landed.

  For of something should be born something—not nothing.

  Or so it seemed to me, for a very long era: until I saw that nothing is also born of something—so that not even nothing is nothing.

  How desolate the olive trees must be on those ancient hills!

  This city, this forest, burning.

  How empty the great white house in the city center!

  A voice shouting: “Lion of God!”

  The beast long since perished.

  nine

  Out of the most beautiful childhood imaginable, I walked from the palaces of the kings into this existence:

  immediate fame was mine the moment I appeared in the window, or doorway, or cockpit.

  The syllables of that language run on the tongue like honey, soft as the whitest snow our willows weave.

  There was no question of my even meeting myself on the path: she was immediately the self that all men recognized, marked out among all beings for love.

  No one, in that time, ever loved another without some secret sorrow that he, or she, was not in love with me.

  The city was so wide—tall buildings seemed very small by the side of its avenues.

  It was endlessly cold there and the only blues were those of river and heaven with shards of gold from temple domes cutting into them both.

  I linked all work with that epoch through my own work: it was as if I had come on earth to bless every conceivable kind of labor.

  My profile rendered the time in hours, minutes, and seconds exactly.

  In all memories, I shone from then on like a white rose; the rose that, among all roses, had given the gift of vision.

  Some say, of my fuselage, not a rose painted there: a lily. Some say no flower.

  Some say flowers in the cockpit trashed by male pilots. Unhappy that women flew. Legend.

  Walking like that, among princes, popes, bishops, great commanders, decked out in plumes and feathers—but as a human and not a god. How did he do it?

  The Emperor died. The whole lot shot.

  ten

  It was I in a long black gown with a slash of sky-blue at the hem, the perfect replication of his anima.

  Far off under the trees, her voice soared over a game:

  a game as sophisticated as a divine child’s, a little sharp.

  Black quilt of cloud half the sky’s size, rain fringe at either end.

  He had felt many times the planet trying to fight him down like that erstwhile angel—and now: that it wanted to kill him.

  The voices rising in chorus as if to bring all the planet’s quarrels once and for all into one universe of discourse—

  though every voice could also be heard of itself and reasonably happy.

  A noise of delicate shifting as of cloth at the elbow of a sage when he has comforted you.

  Oh that my heart knew music like hers and I could teach it to my fluttering mind to bring it into steady flight!

  Overwhelmed—and drowned out entirely—by the luminosity.

  And tha
t I could finally land this aircraft on a manicured field.

  Dead as well as alive he will never cease to be my husband. Losha!

  None other than those skylight nights of Petersburg ever produced conversations as intense as this. And I never cease to be wife.

  Which is how she flew, at the end, right into the mouth of her ultimatum. Three Niemyets fighters caught her among searchlights.

  Like the birds at St. Lawrence Island, on the world’s other side, going round and round like the ghosts of the other dead—

  (those who had not been fetched and would stay below, those who had never flown)

  as if they were exiting a western star and entering into an eastern one before returning to the first.

  When her wing rode high, shadowing the blinding ice below.

  Of wisdom which is the world to come and of flight—which is this world.

  Making herself up by little increments.

  For it follows that, if the attention be evenly divided, all things must return to having the same flavor.

  Kentung/Rangoon/Mandalay, 1959—Suzdal/​St. Petersburg/​Kiev/​Novgorod, 1992—Santa Fe/​Los Angeles, 2010

  FIVE: EXITUS GENERIS HUMANI

  Angenommen kann wohl mit einiger Berechtigtheit werden, daß sich das Nichts-als-lustig-und-munter-Sein die Zivilisation zu beeinträchtigen eignet. Zieht uns das Ausschließlichliebliche nicht hinunter?

  It can no doubt be asssumed with no small justification that never being anything other than jolly and merry is well suited to compromise civilization. Does not the endlessly endearing drag us down?

  —Robert Walser, Microscript Text 200, tr. by Susan Bernofsky

  exitus generis humani, i

  1. visitor

  i)

  Today, in a passing moment at the rear garden,

  sees, hidden back of chamisa, a golden seedling

  of the dead, something he had not ever planted—

  ambassador from light—a newborn sunflower.