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  ii. the homer

  Black Widow clambers up this bucket against a

  stream of wet insecticide, long black legs waving—

  as if to gather prey. What manifest multiple eyes?

  Poisoned mouse, bucketed to drown for faster death,

  scrambles in vain against a fall of foaming water. In

  a historic town, sunk in a foreign land, Beggar roused

  from his lethargy by passage of a Homer, intensifies

  his pleading to a rim of tears. The desperation: deep

  eyes in jet-black circles; a “Help me!” “Help me!” almost

  screams and scatters pigeons, scalding heart: for real?

  for theater? No way of knowing. Open scar pulses, the

  never-healed inside the Homer’s heart, also yells “help

  me!” to itself—as Homer and his Beggar flood one being.

  And sun then rises above eternal winter (ice not abating)

  warming our blood & spirits. Homer walks into it, his

  armfuls stretching out toward it. Sun’s ivory rays, as if

  bright limbs of some promised salvation, honor, salute,

  wrap him, forgive him it might be—if such conceptions,

  floating above black skies, our boundless provinces,

  still sign and certify acceptance: some vast imperial grief.

  iii. the guest

  In memoriam Ernst Bloch

  i)

  A new guest in the body, foreseen, yet unforeseen:

  for the last lost control has to be unforeseen. Do I

  equate somehow this novel visitation with the final

  run, as I foresee it, of the collective? I do not think so.

  Futures and Pasts cannot hold up examined by the

  mind and, as for Present, that mighty Present all talk

  about as the one only thing to do, or see, or think—no

  I don’t think so. The verbiage masters have talked of it

  as the sole enemy of the destroyers, but they themselves

  are this destruction too, a loss of language. In the interior

  the forests fall and all things in those forests also fall,

  a famed diversity gone in that fall, like languages. Just

  now, just one ago, last speaker of that given language,

  unknown, barely recorded, barely understood, fell into

  silence and the whole span of human history for you

  fell also. “Idiots, I die for you!” said a Resistance chief

  to Wehrmacht soldiers about to shoot him. A Marxist.

  Masters, I lack the calm to navigate the giant ocean of

  your writings (masters!), the nerves to hack your noise,

  you that fill agorae with noise as loud as thunderstorms

  over civilizations. I have gone deaf. I am going blind. I

  feel no part of any thing in all these limbs extending

  like some eastern god’s multiple arms into all space.

  The guest takes time, his time, her time: what is his or

  her gender anyway? Lies down in body, gently questions,

  thus endlessly—never awaiting answers, but questions

  on—until night falls over the failing forests and the host.

  ii)

  This book, divided, reassembles. A wave, broken by

  islands, regroups and follows on. Inside such waves,

  vast whales move forward on the deep to reassure

  my ears. You have heard those songs. How I wish I

  heard them! The exile deepens, away from records,

  away from words, away from understandings. (“I’ve

  never read this book.” Open the book finding my notes

  from many years ago.) A mind floats on this giant wave

  and never homes, never can home. Since memory is

  severed, quartered, hacked apart—like lab brains.

  Dissolving is the law: all matter breaks on wave and,

  feeding it, abandons us forever in traceless afterlives.

  Stop for a breath one moment: where is my book?

  My book where shall I find it? Shrink said, one time,

  with ferocious glare: “You do not even read your books!

  You fail to recollect your books! You have no sight of

  what they talk about!” Most true—but I am going blind.

  My books grow in a jungle like blind trees without me.

  iii)

  Time for departure is assembling: the caravans drive

  off with planet’s libraries of books. Leaving this garden

  far behind in which all lands are just one land, all nations

  just one nation, now borderless, now passportless, where

  vegetation bears same fruit, and where all creatures

  work one same purpose. The walls are locked up now:

  there is no homing. We break toward a future none will

  see. The guest falls into sleep among our thriving sinews.

  iv. for macdiarmid of that ilk / the passing

  We will not have no war! No! We hate war!—yet when

  these men in scarlet, black, dark green, for the most part,

  descend our little local stage, pretend it is the hollow

  Boreraig—where for ten generations M.D.’s “Great Music,”

  the now lamented, was learned and practiced, we fall fair

  victims to illusion. Come the Argylls, and Sutherlands,

  and Royal Scots, and King’s Own Scottish Borderers, Black

  Watch and Royal Highland Fusiliers (I’ll give them six

  on five for rhythm’s sake) yet now all pressed into a single

  wedge—the “Royal Regiment of Scotland.” The Army small-

  erized! The Empire drowned, an island smallerized that was

  so small already! How hold “tradition” when thus pressed?

  “No prospect of eternal

  life; no fullness of existence; no love without betrayal;

  no passion sans satiety.”

  Feathering drums as gentle as

  Spring rain enamored of its flowers; the nearly angry

  shriek of pipes, roosters after their hens; the swirling of

  all cloth, from a cock feather tip to the sharp knife pleats

  under, and, there, over a hill, the “cavalry arrives” as we

  would call it here—god only knows we love these ancient

  enemies of the republic in anglophiliac glee—standing,

  ovating, smiling with the wide smile of pleasure music

  alone can grant ears deafened by contemporary wars!

  Over the hill, with antecedent whispers of “Great Music,”

  they follow down (as if they did not have to curve on the

  small stage and re-appear); the thin red line of triumph in

  our memory waves forward to the ultimate conclusion of

  this time:

  “Look! is that only the setting sun again? Or

  (is) a piper coming from (so very) far away?”

  The man

  wrote he had read me dead in an obituary back in the old

  country. I told him no, I’m well away in these far deserts.

  v. the olson thing / nihil obstat? / the passing

  “the body itself as, by movement of its own tissues,

  giving the data, of depth”

  Bombarding depth through past and future—often mis-con-

  joined—to rankest abolition of the now. The now become

  invisible. That done therein: invisible. Unrecognized. Flutters

  of little pasts and futures furtively recognized by contrast. Oh

  those parts will b
urn! What do you know beyond the latest

  bellowing you’re pleased to call our time’s great “music,”

  the latest hip-sway, latest grimace, and finger-pointing at the

  empty air: Homer? Virgil? Shakespeare shaking his spear from

  the old country you deny knowing as what established you?

  Death of this empire amply provided by universal ignorance.

  Way back beyond desire to live, the windows of this submarine

  are dark. The complex depths have blackened them completely.

  Tissues are frozen by such depths: tissues to burn. Great forms

  of deep: the mammoth octopus, the dinosauric whale, have lost

  their power to move. Will burn. Only at farthest down, in ever

  deeper trenches, sulphuric vents throw up diminutives with life

  inscribed in them, to further history. Men of a brighter day—if

  such there ever is—remember darkness for it will come again!

  Kingfisher-bright, a love of blue & green conjoined brought all

  of this to bear. How can one bear? Bare bone will tell for flesh

  will not achieve a recognition, be sung into the grave. There was

  Propertius, oh, dear Propertius, the man with the one song he

  burnished all his life, claiming this song would save him from

  oblivion. No fear! Don’t count on it! Quintus Horatius Flaccus,

  oh, dearest Horace:

  non ego, nobelium scriptorum auditor, et ultor /

  grammaticus ambire tribus et pulpita dignor?

  Sumer undoubtedly held out the similar.

  the greatest

  present danger / the area of pseudo-sensibility / anything

  goes or / all is interesting Or / nothing is. Opinion / has

  replaced all such.

  A love of deserts, icefields, oceans—where presents can be

  recognized and futures plotted. A love of jungles:

  the intermediary, the intervening thing, the interruptor, the

  resistor. self.

  Soul. Action. Home: These are identifiable among the foliage.

  Kingfisher flash, zigzag along the creek, rampant with snakes

  and caymans. This, and then Morpho butterfly: O great winged

  god-dess—these last to furnish blue identity with bliss. A-men.

  vi. the promises

  The Head of State sleeps, dreams, plots, prophecies

  and lies. The sky above him/her bright with pure light.

  Head of State’s consort dreams, plots, prophecies

  and lies. The sky above him/her bright with pure light.

  Chief Minister sleeps, dreams, plots, prophecies and

  lies. The sky above him/her bright with seraphim.

  The other Ministers sleep, dream, plot, prophecy

  and lie. The sky above them bright with blue angels.

  The judges, generals, servants civil and military

  sleep, dream, construct & deconstruct, plot, prophecy

  and lie. The sky above them bright with its rainbows,

  planets, moons, meteors, stars, satellites & storms.

  Lightnings as well. Comets & asteroids as well.

  Bankers and corporation CEOs so wholesome all,

  sleep, dream, plot, prophecy, collect their bonuses

  and lie. The sky above them bright with blue ptero-

  dactyls. Media producers, talking heads, celebrities,

  announcers sleep, dream, plot, prophecy and lie.

  The sky above them bright with its commentaries.

  The common citizen thinks he or she exempt,

  safeguarded from this woe but sleeps, dreams, plots,

  & prophecies & lies. The sky above said citizen bright

  with promises. O crammed with futures, dividends &

  prizes! All will then turn toward the Revolution, kill.

  vii. individuality, solitudes

  In memoriam Paul Mus, Buddhologist

  i)

  Our small, low, tidy bushlings of the desert: hardly

  can they be called by name of “tree”—each one

  lone individual, not merging in the mass, into the

  indivisible. Used to such trees by now, used to

  such trees, unable to enjoy tall trees for very long

  in other climates. At the same time, a terror of our

  trees, an overwhelming fear of their aloneness—or

  rather of division: for self into a multitude cannot

  be joined together in discourse or in thought. Fear

  of a sole, an absolute desire a tree faces from seed

  to drought (which brings it down so black) under

  relentless desert suns! And such as well the sight in

  any crowd, a dagger in the chest at such a thought as:

  how is, say, just one being in this crowd able all

  by itself from livid dawn to tarnished dusk, from birth

  to death, tentacles out, tentacles in, now, now & then,

  second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour,

  and day by day, hundreds, thousands of days—how

  can it be itself out there and nothing other in the dark,

  that dark—whether of day or night—unending dark

  night of the body philosophical? An unrelenting dark

  of such a solitude as no known thing, human or animal,

  kin or affine, parent, child, lover, friend can ever put an

  end to? How this great crowd of solitudes speaks at

  our solitude, or does not speak, most times unwilling or

  unable so to speak, so that we perish at the very final?

  In a distortion only grows, never diminishes and—

  choking on thoughts of its own break—sneers even at

  the vastness of the skies, interminable marching of the

  galaxies, the furthest stars, most solitary stars, moving

  along their paths and out beyond all knowledgeable end,

  horizon to horizon, orb to orb, into a definition of infinity?

  ii)

  The solitudes are set to grow and to distend until they

  eat, devour, digest all thought we know to be our own

  (amended & expanded by the prophets we’ve matured

  with). The empty brains of children rattle in their skulls

  grown dry by much exposure to the sun. The sun, we

  know, will harrow these poor minds until they prove in-

  capable of any further good. O mio ben, the agathos, the

  good: no serenade, no aria, no song can ever bring to life

  again that imageful potential... The daffodil has rotted

  in the earth, the earth dried in the pot, offered too long

  to the relentless master planet. No matter how we move

  against the stars, escape will be repulsed, frontiers will

  never be erased, no ship will home in these demising seas.

  viii. recently assayed

  For Hölderlin

  i)

  On the left hand: chatter. On the right hand:

  chatter. At center, the perfected stem. Ha! A

  mind? society? (No: pseudo-Greek gymnasium

  rancid with chatter.) How come the left, on

  my own side, leaves me so still, so silenced;

  the right catching at every word and a huge

  wave, as if avernal, sweeps over all of mine—

  tears rush to outsource rivers from my eyes

  (tears yet! these adult tears!) since I will never

  hear the end of it, never attain the goal of

  peaceful, primal, unarchitectured ga
rdens and

  a perfected (rose?). A climbing, rising, flying

  rose—to wreathe immortals. Attainment never

  dreams of the attainment—attainment’s moving

  mountains, load of harassing effort: satisfying/

  being satisfied, the one holding the other back,

  the other holds the one, the joint outreach of

  ecstasy’s maternal cry never attained at once.

  ii)

  You ask me where I travel now. You assume

  I know? (space). I travel to the islands of the

  blest summoned by men one-time called angels,

  (led by one model, the unhistorical, the mold)

  where the heart’s ship strives now to anchor,

  after les vagues inouies. Finds harbor close

  by sullen caves those once called friends haunt

  in their sleep. No one on earth numbered therein.

  Long tunnels in the caves lead to... “eternity.”

  Don’t write. Do not attempt, in any form, commu-

  nication. No calls, no telegrams, no e-mails, & no

  texting to demand response: there’s no one here

  for you. (Here leave a space for new technologies

  to come.) Only the hollow dream of our dead ocean

  stretching around the world, its tribes of albatross

  in non-stop fall around that world (but separated out

  in solitudes can hardly be imagined by the likes

  of us); the algae trapped round and around giant

  Sargassos; the sharks extinguished, who’ll never

  eat your legs, caught in among them, (last few, last

  few); together with all forests, drenching gray sweat

  and perspiration, your own blood dying red the rain.

  iii)

  Illuminated heart, ancient of centuries, emitting

  passion like the firefly—hot, destined, dedicated

  as they say, to its own species: how did that hold you

  through the domains of life, each realm of those a

  different horror to be overcome by the unquenching

  phosphorescence? You rose, boy in old man, stood,

  with prerogative, launched the one likely compliment