A Poetics After the Fact

Poetics is a prediction after the fact, one of those prophecies arrived at in the sudden gloom of history; not simply has the poem gotten there first, but it will continue to get there first, arriving from the future as it has arrived from the past, for it is a prophecy before and after the fact (what fact? Of those beasts, Spenser’s “blatant beast,” time, and Plato’s “great beast,” the social order [1] ); an uncanny historical embrace by past and future of a moving present, an embrace that keeps arriving (or almost), for as long as the poem works.

A Story “In Lieu Of”

After several days of tunnels and trains and buses and cars and vans, a visit to a friend on the outskirts, and finally arrival in the main city, he climbed the hill behind their rented room, a bald knob of brown grass “sure to green soon in the fall rains,” as the woman who rented the room had told him. A weather observatory, from which he saw no one come or go, crowned the hill, and at its feet 5 or 6 people each walked 5 or 6 dogs. Several charged at him, trailing their leashes, as if the “solitary walker” needed to be driven from their ideal city.

Looking out, following the roads, vibrant and three-dimensional with traffic, like a map come to life in the mind of a child, the city seemed to radiate (and this was only partly an illusion) from the tunnel that ran under the bay, the bay bridge, which seemed a shadowy, ethereal projection of the mass of earth above and below it, and the whole city exposed as an inside-out snake whose inner workings had been figured elsewhere and deployed/displayed, by a sickening force, on the hills and valleys below him, and later, while walking home from the newly reconstructed museum, a main feature of which was the cleaving of the volumes that comprised the galleries by gardens, giving the copper walls the appearance of having been folded back to reveal, as the rest had been folded out to cover, what actually continued to occupy the site: rather than being akin to a body, the museum was the gaps in the body, the acute angle between the chin and the throat, the nodules that allowed the lungs to fill, an opened mouth which the cleavages acknowledged could at any moment snap shut, at which time the space of the galleries would disappear like the structures of a pop-up book when the page turns—the folded layers of rock he’d seen earlier between two row houses had seemed to confirm this—, as the whole city could be drawn back into the earth, not by the shifting fault of expected cataclysm, but by a final intake of breath that would withdraw the life that was an emanation of the dark matter inside it. He thought of the poet standing “long ago” above another valley, his thoughts interrupted only by a dog, belonging to the Shepherd, his guide, who had “roused” a hedgehog, the same verb the poet had used to describe his own awakened thoughts, before he came upon the “universal spectacle” which, no less than this view of the city ringed by an ocean like a table (or the stones in a Japanese Garden) and brown hills, was the “Imagination of the Whole.” And wasn’t he “roused” to think (as wasn’t he thinking in his own “Imagination of the Whole”) of the sexual dream he’d been having of being penetrated by the woman, as the poet’s chasm, “a fracture in the vapour…through which the homeless voice of the deep dark waters rose” penetrated the poet’s raptures at the “single glory,” like the man’s inverted city emerging from the tunnel, or the galleries at the de Young (as the museum was called, like a parody of youth) were by the hard fact of open spaces—trees and crushed stones and the edges of natural light which “Fell like a flash” like the cold air rising from the tunnel, the seat of the imagination being a rupture of the writer/walker/viewer into unity, the poet’s own thought sunk into him, as the woman into the man after he’d thought it, and, turning into art his thought, turning out to be what is “wrought” upon him, an “endless occupation,” as the city sunk back not into the-earth-its-opposite, but the earth itself, an “end of opposites” that had already happened, by the thought of it wrought upon him?

—Richard Meier

[1] Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson conjoined the two in my mind.

Various Configurations

It’s the beginning of a novel, the deckled edges green and silver,

the oily brown center of a drab March cornfield seen close up

but in motion, from the seat of a bicycle. Next the child

begins to shake his head in a ballad

by Dexter Gordon, a strange music to offer

as the mother cross-writes in a letter, conserving

herself in herself, as she gave it to him, years earlier.

But that wasn’t what had happened. Maybe it had,

but it wasn’t here.

The cornfield remained drab because of March,

but that wasn’t its essence,

and the child shook, and the music played,

separate as her pleasure in the color from the tractors

and man with a gun, the small pout of shot

with its sharp echo, and then a pair of crows drawn

up in curves as if on strings out of the wood.

It didn’t amount to the whole when the parts

weren’t deficient. The music stopped in the expectation.

It was like a sound that rose up out of objects

when you looked at them. The tin can of the silos

or the booming of the open railroad cars

as they sat in suspension at the base of the hill,

seeming to absorb the suddenly brilliant southwestern clouds

into a previous hour. One thing was always dragging

a foreign perception out of another, he with she,

or she with child. It was hard to be so transfigured.

And yet, for all the lines, there was the air and a body.

Even if you couldn’t say which was which.

The little mountain of the snowbank was blotched

with veins of dry grass and leaves. They seemed to cover

and muddle the still white snow. It was gradually failing

until the grass and leaves were to be what was

revealed, before any other renewal. He would be grown before

they understood him, or knew each other, and the thing

they’d wished away, to better see, would remain

in all its purity. It meant to be loved forever.

For Obscure But Convincing Reasons

The essence of a thing goes on and off like a switch.

Eventually I don’t believe in figuring things out,

and I just know there is a problem without that benefit,

however dubious it must always be. It’s part of

the way I sit down on the couch, part of the pattern

to make his fingernails scratch against the fabric, a damask

50/50 furniture garment on sale last summer.

That, too, is a kind of seeing. This one particular minister

or official was blind and nearly run out of the government

for, some said, not seeing another woman. I put that

on the form in the place set aside for a brief biography,

including education, awards, experience, and

as if the motion in the string of lights was genuine and not

an impossible to resist flashing order.

I was half way to the post office to burn my draft card

long after I knew I wouldn’t do it when I saw

what I see, the boy everyday coming home from high school.

The conjunction prevented anything different,

and I was heading home before I knew it

when the ground began to sing beneath the mountains

of corn beside the corn factory. It was my independence

I questioned, was it still desirable in the face of these marvels, the eye in the knotted

plywood table, and the dancing to unheard music? No.

Answering You

Abracadabra. You return from exile and enter

blue, barely concealed beneath night and a bathrobe. The shape of

comfort is the title of a book never published, consequently

defying non-

existence. The definite lines of a tree in

fog forget hiding in exchange for a flood of space

God calls you. My

harangue continues like, was it Mary Pickford? on the

ice floe heading toward the waterfall. The birth of a nation

jumps floe to floe to save her dark eyes just in time for her

kindled gaze to strike the camera.

Longing for you I thought of her, proving

multiplicitous all singularity. Well,

Nuncle, the morning is dark as night behind these eyeshades.

O won’t you lift them and grant me the

placebo of waking on a flood plain to flood warnings.

Quiet. The last copies of

radical love lie burning in the novel.

Somebody said it didn’t exist. It was you

telling me you were still sleeping, like a crocus

undoes winter’s blouse until it shivers, both of them

violently.

Why

Xenephon chose the high ground? To come down to

zero.

Her Theory of Catharsis

A white circle spray-painted in the grass

and filled for rabbits with poisoned corn

or an operation of chance or some other means

to which I was not privy. I followed the white arrows

of the cross-country course between the woods and crops

where the tractor moved imagining I too

was being compelled to finish before the companies

began to collect seed patents after world war two

and more and more the strains of families vanished.

The two looking back saw only trees while to those above

the contact between them and the intimate mood

were hardly avoidable. Why had we come to the hotel

was what I thought as I held my arms out

as though I were one of the characters in the book who kept

asking that. These rural streets had seemed like Paris

listening to a song and looking up into blue clouds in the evening.

I was anywhere, having solved the problem of moving,

and the characters would simply speak their lines hanging laundry

or in the grocery store, unifying place by action,

so that later in a dark room I could assemble them.

Evening, Various People

I.

Raised behind the pages of a book

and a hand-drawn map it reproduced

I got more lost in the more I knew

the doors of the houses and the woods laid flat

in the fields to be seen were looked up through,

you won’t mind if I talk about my personal life now,

a pack of lies started circa night

when you forced a path between waistband and skin—

space appeared where there had been none,

a hand to occupy it and then the space

became material whether something had been

taken or removed was like a man

“of white turned upside down

became his hat and berry-brown.”

II.

Desiring this order when there are others—

the fox trots through the tiny town,

a branch that has stolen itself and the fire,

and the breasts of the wet nurse fill up suddenly,

she hefts them left and right and offers an opinion:

it is now the baby must be suckled—

and ascends like Crusoe to his cave, that marvelous book

from which one can look out finally

and find the answers.

What’s Entailed

It was the only time he mentioned his father. We were pruning

the gooseberries when the thought struck him like a billhook

but he left it to bleed away and die for what had been done

to his sister, the only girl he’d ever loved to death,

half-sister or astral cousin, whatever she was when he whispered

in her ear, keep walking, OK, and

don’t look back. Following his own directions,

we weren’t allowed to see what course she’d undertaken.

The fox in the foxtail reappears at the bottom

of the town pit, a blaze of orange-red with a white tip

marking the trail back to the previous

love of the future, and would have you too,

an amazed and eye-shaded peer at the horizon,

a new power not to turn myself away

or others at the border.

The Platonic daemon came thus through a window

I shot a hole in, in the form of a man, a shadow, perhaps in a mask,

striving to be perceived in the yard where we struggled—

that it rained all night erased any question of footprints—

and he promised to return and may yet have done so,

to end my agitation on behalf of others,

and those needed here to maintain the tidewall.

I am too nervous to speak of it now, and beg you to understand

I remain convinced of whatever happened.

The External Ear

And there it was, like a storm-surge or an ornament

half-inflated by its gizmo, not frighteningly human.

We recognized ourselves in that deception,

the one true like a table tilted sharply

until the bowl in the dark stars below the pears is visible,

pitted and grained and nothing falls off but the scales

are folded and put away, for that single use only.

The thought I suggested you had stays with me—

I attach so much importance to what I’m given—

a man with a hooked knife paused from pruning.

Embrace was a word first used of forts,

until the one body fell down inside the other body, and was lost.

Losses and Compensations

I went into the other world. A little at first,

a finger in the occult, for now we called it that,

and then the whole body, the spirit, disarming

the paradox of the phlox and brown-eyed Susans

and wild carrot clenched first or pinned and coiled

intermixed with open palms and Queen Anne’s Lace

as if being in two worlds at once was just such

a subdivision of identicals, at different stages, as a field of those

differences seemed beside a bedspread or bolt

of cloth unfurled for purchase. It may need to be cut at first,

so later it may be whole again. By then

the paradox had diminished to the point I looked at a tree

with a dazed expression on its face, nowhere to turn

or spend the placid, leaf-still afternoon,

and the boys slowed down to see you breastfeeding

in the dry ditch, and sped away too.

I wonder if you felt some sense of loss, looking

at the tree that way, as if having slept with a man

or a woman you must resign yourself from the double world,

and so be left with nothing, the two overlaying each other

like sun in “a bucket of clothes-pin” at noon.

Without That Inside You

                                                  There are birds and flowers

and green and growing things also. One branch hangs low

as the wind has fractured it. But it’s the past you look forward to:

just today a hummingbird flew from the center of the road,

leaving an empty space where a bright green leaf had lain forlornly.

I don’t think I can say it more plainly. Then I lost it in the corn

which by this date in May had its final proportions.