Odes by Hölderlin: The Courage of the Poet

{Second Version}

Are you not allied with all there is that’s alive?

     Does your allotment not nourish you in service?

          So only the defenseless

               Walk through life, wholly fearless!

Whatever occurs, all is sanctified to you,

     To be turned into joy! What then would be able

          To antagonize you, heart,

               And come between you and your role?

For, since the song that breathed forth peace was ripped away

     From mortal lips, pious in suffering and bliss,

          Humanity’s melody

               Has pleased our hearts, so we're the same,

The singers of the people, willingly among

     The living, for many things join here joyfully,

          Each one sweet, each one open,

               That’s the way our ancestor, the sun god, who

Begrudges to rich and poor a happy day, is

     In our ephemeral age, the impermanent,

          Erected on a golden

               Cord, as if to hold children, lasts.

Wait for him, and when the time arrives, receive him,

     See his purple flood of tide; go to the noble

          Light, versed in transformation,

               Like-minded spirit, down the path.

And evanesce as well, when it's time, for nowhere

     Does his spirit lack its due, so our happiness

         Dies once in life’s earnestness,

              Gorgeous nevertheless, the death!

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Dichtermut

Sind denn dir nicht verwandt alle Lebendigen,

     Nährt die Parze denn nicht selber im Dienste dich?

         Drum, so wandle nur wehrlos

               Fort durchs Leben, und fürchte nichts!

Was geschiehet, es sei alles gesegnet dir,

     Sei zur Freude gewandt! oder was könnte denn

         Dich beleidigen, Herz! was

               Da begegnen, wohin du sollst?

Denn, seitdem der Gesang sterblichen Lippen sich

     Friedenatmend entwand, frommend in Leid und Glück

         Unsre Weise der Menschen

          Herz erfreute, so waren auch

Wir, die Sänger des Volks, gerne bei Lebenden,

    Wo sich vieles gesellt, freudig und jedem hold,

          Jedem offen; so ist ja

               Unser Ahne, der Sonnengott,

Der den fröhlichen Tag Armen und Reichen gönnt,

    Der in flüchtiger Zeit uns, die Vergänglichen,

         Aufgerichtet an goldnen

          Gängelbanden, wie Kinder, hält.

Ihn erwartet, auch ihn nimmt, wo die Stunde kömmt,

    Seine purpurne Flut; sieh! und das edle Licht

         Gehet, kundig des Wandels,

          Gleichgesinnet hinab den Pfad.

So vergehe denn auch, wenn es die Zeit einst ist

    Und dem Geiste sein Recht nirgend gebricht, so sterb

         Einst im Ernste des Lebens

          Unsre Freude, doch schönen Tod!

Overheard at City Lights Bookstore

“Excuse me, could you point me in the direction of Jack Kerouac?”

“Of course, ma’am, he’s covering the dry martini waterfront now

Asking the tourist planks ‘where are the squeaking docks,

The rotting crabs, the green ropes of my city? Home of sad

Laundromats, you’ve become as humorless as your emojis!’

He grasps like that at forbidden straws

By the bay’s still turquoise grays,

Storytelling training for the homeless nearby,

And nothing you can do but leave.

“There’s some satisfaction in that, you know,

Like you’ve actually accomplished something.”

Stevens Textplication #46: Two Figures in Dense Violet Light

Two Figures is the third in Stevens’ trilogy of poetic inspiration poems written as he prepared Harmonium for publication in 1923 (after To the One of Fictive Music and Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks). The poem’s suppleness and open-endedness attest to his growth as a poet, sounding more like later, greater Stevens than any of the poems we’ve covered in this series. The artistic problems at the root of this instruction from one mysterious figure to another become, in fact, indistinguishable from the problems of love we all share – specifically the difficulties and possibilities of communication. Holding both meanings in mind when reading the poem deepens its impact:

I had as lief be embraced by the porter of the hotel

As to get no more from the moonlight

Than your moist hand.

Be the voice of the night and Florida in my ear.

Use dusky words and dusky images.

Darken your speech.

Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,

But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,

Conceiving words,

As the night conceives the sea-sound in silence,

And out of the droning sibilants makes

A serenade.

Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole

And sleep with one eye watching the stars fall

Beyond Key West.

Say that the palms are clear in the total blue.

Are clear and are obscure; that it is night;

That the moon shines.

The poem starts with an quizzical bang: “I had as lief be embraced by the porter of the hotel / As to get no more from the moonlight / Than your moist hand.” The archaic literary term “as lief” is not in there just to be obscure, but to serve up the first of many double meanings the poem juggles in order to deepen its connotative impact. The speaker here (presumably a female, as the porter presumably is male) would not only readily (the primary meaning of lief) get intimate with the porter rather than be denied all but the “moist hand” of her unresponsive lover, but would view the porter as her true love (the secondary meaning of lief as dear/beloved). The normal human relations are disrupted in this short sentence not only in that a paid servant in a temporary lodging can be seen as essentially equal to one’s permanent beloved, but that what causes the lack of human contact (only a sweaty hand rather than any genuine love) is beyond-human, simply the moon, that ancient cause of love’s suffering, poetic or otherwise.

Hand also has a neat double meaning here, in that porters “lend a hand” to get your bags into the room. The equivalence of the porter’s and figure’s hands suggests that the poet (who also works/toils by hand) did not get as much of a hand in his transformative efforts by the effects of the moonlight.

To mitigate the distance between the figures, the speaker urges the other one to embrace and even channel the extra-human influence: “Be the voice of the night and Florida in my ear.” As a lover would tell her beloved to speak softly and naturally, so the poet tells her muse to bring the music of nature, what is now silent, to her recording ear. But not just any music. The speaker, turning more directive, throws in another double-sided literary term: “Use dusky words and dusky images.” Dusky primarily means “dim,” as at dusk, so the plea here is for poetry that can’t quite be perceived, that can’t perhaps be explained (as we are trying to do here). Alternatively, dusky means “dark-skinned” (often as a pejorative term), suggesting an exotic kind of beauty, as Florida would appear to have to a Northerner, or of a kind of aesthetic beauty (then untraditional) that shows the darkness as a deeper kind of insight into human nature. “Darken your speech,” the speaker concludes, a linguistic if not a practical possibility. The sense is of sunset, where the things that occupy our minds have vanished and the unsayable persists in a state where anything can happen, because that is the nature of the walk through the great mystery the night represents.

“Speak, even,” the speaker continues, “as if I did not hear you speaking, / But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts, / Conceiving words.” This is both an embodiment of perfect human love and an impossibility. The key term is “as if,” for the speaker does indeed hear, yet finds the other’s attempts to make themselves heard to be somehow excessive, because they want so much to be understood. The speaker (who is, after all, doing all the speaking in the poem) is asking to be permitted to speak for the other, but without promising that it will be an accurate presentation. Indeed, it seems accuracy is less than desirable. What’s desired is some undefined spark of creation that generates words. This is a direct appeal, in other words, for inspiration. The speaker is asking above all to be trusted in the transmission, as if there is still some fragment of human agency that she could hold onto in the onslaught of creation represented by the other.

The speaker compares herself in this process to the night, which “conceives the sea-sound in silence, / And out of the droning sibilants makes / A serenade.” People don’t generally consider the night as creating the sound of the ocean, of course, but it is easy to think why it could be so, since the lack of sight (the duskiness) magnifies the effect of the ocean’s sounds. More to the point, the poet, in carrying the sounds heard, actually creates them (at least as humans perceive it). Note the double meaning here of the repeated “conceive,” create and perceive. The poet does both, with the implication that it is darkness and emptiness that allows her to accurately capture and render the sounds that comprise the poetic experience.

The next (and next-to-last) stanza is even more assertive in its directives: “Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole / And sleep with one eye watching the stars fall / Beyond Key West.” Puerile, seemingly used as a noun but actually a modifier describing the figure addressed, means “childishly silly and trivial.” The speaker wants a particular, child-like kind of experience from her muse. The killer detail of a carrion-eating bird (symbol of death) sleeping on a pole with one eye open on the stars may be a banal, “random” event when experienced, but it can take on in a poetic representation much deeper levels of suggestiveness.

The final stanza, in contrast, asks for a more general truth – and in so doing becomes stumped. “Say that the palms are clear in the total blue,” the speaker asks in apparent confusion, “Are clear and are obscure …” as the reader senses the mind once again kick in to try to define what is being seen, “that it is night …”, even the most basic statement becoming problematic, “That the moon shines.” And we are left where we started, the moonlight, and the ineffable feeling that cannot ever be quite described – what we call poetry.

Taken as a whole, we see the apparently deep communication and connection between the two figures as completely problematic in fact. One doesn’t speak, while the other asserts an exacting set of conditions to speak for the other – or at all. There is intimacy neither in the beginning nor at the end, despite the stated wish that there would be. The situation in fact gets worse, as the lack of any response from the other figure causes whatever spark was there before to be whispered away in the mysteries of moonlit night.

On the other hand, the already present imposition of the other on the speaking figure – the wrong speech, the strong light, the moist hand – allows a more balanced form of interaction – between the lovers, between the poet and the muse – to occur. The one, in stabbing out at only silence and shadows can fill out the picture herself in a kind of communion with the other. What is asked for is, ironically, what is being given. The distance between them becomes then not a cause for despair, but a necessary condition for solitary being to commune with solitary being, things of earth to commune with heaven.

We’ll never know how much a work of art is the sweat of the artist, and how much a gift from the skies, but asking the unanswerable question can be, as here, poignant, sad and sweet. Stevens will become in time a master of wringing all the poetry out of such occasions.

The Beauty of Abuse Amnesia

The fog of what never was
Rolls through the afternoon

The words she used
The gestures she made

My spellbound, powerless rage

It's as if all the thrusts
Were just defenses
With no need to justify now
When the silence is construed as peace

The smoke, though, never cleared

We were as armies called to command
By the orders themselves
Correcting each other in concentric circles
Thinking that any advantage gave power
Instead of more distance

And the reaching to understand
Only an offer of goodbye

I gave you what we shared
The sycamore trees
Greater for being lost to me

Your pictures from the trading post
At the continental divide
When you decided as the snow fell
That the rules didn't suit you
Arrived a century too late
With a last gasp postcard
Of what life could be
If unnamed mistakes weren't made
Decisions unwound
Visions unseen:
An endless ocean
With all the sand I gave you returned

As if with nothing there
I could find you

The thing that you withheld
Now real
Because the mind that created it
Finally believed
You were gone

Political Poem

RIP Jen Moore

The earth is ruled by Titans, who maul and eat the children.

We call ourselves guerillas, who’ll win this war somehow

By staying alive, despite the countless ways they have to kill us.

Everyone is an enemy, everyone. Every channel of public

Communication exists to promote the dismemberment of infants

As the highest embodiment of being human. If, like us,

You disagree, you are shunned, if lucky, or snuffed out, if

Luckier still, or, more likely, dragged through shame parades

Where the entire planet gets to taunt you, even the priests

And rabbis, ministers and imans, who’ll take a break from raping

And sacrificing little boys and girls to say we will go to hell

If we don’t believe their word is God’s. All our friends and families

Have long since turned their backs on us, we are not welcome

At schools, workplaces, restaurants, coffee shops, if we ask, as we 

Must, how many missing children’s bones were found inside the 

Tunnels between the party rooms that honeycomb the cities,

Rescued into slavery by CPS, or bought by the Red Cross, 

The tax-free foundations and the charities that play for pay 

Upon our last human sympathies. Our neighbors may try, out of 

Kindness, to correct us, and say the world is ruled by Satan, 

Haven’t we heard? It’s quite allowed to saw off the face of a girl 

And show it to her as if it’s your own. That's the least, if you want

To be great, that’s expected of you; have you ever even drank

The urine of a rotisseried baby or did you just enjoy the meat?

The blood, the blood, we say, the martyrs most pure and innocent, 

Then the laughter that we are insane, not worthy of community,

A danger that must be medicated with heavy metals, pacified 

With fluoride, watched by the eyes we can't see. We're taken

To therapists, who ask us to say why we feel it’s so wrong

That the people who give us our opinions, the ways we spend
Our money and time, the influences on our young, are themselves,
Through continuous torture, controlled to the final hair of their 

Souls? Why would such a thing even matter to us, they ask,

Is this really only about that man at the library stacks, who

Expressed his love the only way he knew how, by putting his 

Shaking hands inside my pants when I was a boy? 

We don’t have the strength anymore to deny our beliefs,

To go along with a world that treats children like snacks, and

People as extinguishable waste. The Resistance the holds the last

Candle for the dignity of the human race glares at us with disgust
That we exist, as the deepest disgrace, as the force that renders

Life meaningless. But still we must talk – as I do now – something 

Deep inside insists on being perverse, at putting its own survival

And sanity at stake in order to draw more wasted breaths

For a world where to kill is to live.

Late Sun in Ojai

The golden grass shines as if from the inside.

The leaves dance to life. A strange woman greets me

With “back again?” at the familiar place

I’d never seen. The dreamcatcher medicine

Hangs in the courtyard with sentient carvings

And cushions of stone. The stucco walls glow

As if all things will dissolve soon into light.

Every embodied ghost who floats through

Carries with her so many more she might just as well

Be invisible, the turnings of her mind so

Inaccessible, the material just a shell

Like the postcard barber pole, the sourball emporium.

For behind the colonnades, in a greater world

Hierarchies sit by marble pools, and slowly turn

Their boughs of eucalyptus. The sunlight honors

The empty streets, makes the closed Playhouse marquee seem

A gateway to another realm, turns the liquor store

Into a painting. It’s like the luminaries

Have convened inside this silence and stillness,

Which throbs with a promise that the infinite virtue

Of patience will resolve like a mighty chord.

Soliloquy on an Empty Stage

Compassion always pulls me away from the greasepaint
Every sad face in the audience
Needs help to walk the way back

The poetry muse is quite jealous it turns out

Clouds Over the Stacks

Where there's smoke
     there's ocean's
Mocha foam

The hint of flagrant sun
     below
The hyena fur now covering
     the county

Sending holy taupe
     and then the red
Sun descends unloved
     and filled with shame

Stevens Texplication #45: Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks

“Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks” was one of the last poems written for Stevens’ first book of poems, Harmonium. In fact, this 1923 poem was one of only seven (out of 74) that made their first appearance in that volume. As such it has been commented on, with its obscure first-person narrative and obviously poetic symbolism, as an expression of Stevens’ poetic vocation. However, none of the commentary (that I’ve read, at least) captures what makes the ideas and symbols contained in it worthy of expression in a poem. Below, after the poem itself, is an attempt to delineate what makes it uniquely a poem.

               In the moonlight

  I met Berserk,

               In the moonlight

               On the bushy plain.

               Oh, sharp he was

               As the sleepless!

               And, "Why are you red

               In this milky blue?"

               I said.

               "Why sun-colored,

               As if awake

               In the midst of sleep?"

               "You that wander,"

               So he said,

               "On the bushy plain,

               Forget so soon.

               But I set my traps

               In the midst of dreams."

   I knew from this

               That the blue ground

               Was full of blocks

               And blocking steel.

               I knew the dread

               Of the bushy plain,

               And the beauty

               Of the moonlight

               Falling there,

               Falling

               As sleep falls

               In the innocent air.

Readers familiar with Stevens’ tricks will recognize the blue moonlit nighttime as indicative of the imagination (particularly poetic imagination), and the red sun as representative for the too-harsh intrusion of ordinary reality. Thus, at the most basic level, there is a conflict enacted in the poem between imagination and reality, in that the fear evoked by reality almost but not quite ruins the vague but beautiful nighttime world of the imagination.

The real in this fable is a figure named Berserk. Some commentators have noted the Old Norse derivation of this word (which came into English from poet Sir Walter Scott in 1822), beserkir, as the crazed state of frenzy Vikings drove themselves into in order to be ready for battle. Few if any have noted the etymological significance of naming the figure Berserk:

It was anciently believed that the persons who were liable to this frenzy were mysteriously endowed, during its accesses, with another strange body of unearthly strength. If, however, the Berserk was called on by his own name, he lost his mysterious form, and his ordinary strength alone remained. [Thorkelin, "Notes and Queries on the Kristni Saga," Dec. 28, 1850] 

The narrator does precisely that, identifying him by name on his initial meeting. Thus, the supposed power Berserk has is immediately reduced, giving the narrator the ability to see him more clearly, despite the dimness of night. The speaker notices he is sharp, red, sun-colored, polar contrasts to what otherwise populates the night: the sleepy, the blue, the moonlit. More than notice, he bravely confronts the threatening figure by asking him why he stands out so much in the dark.

Berserk’s answer is unexpected: “You that wander … / On the bushy plain / Forget so soon.” The accurate observation of the wanderer/seeker is, in fact, an illusion, created out of forgetting what he once knew. Oblivion created the netherworld of imagination. We may perceive it as real, but it is (as similarly detailed in “Hymn for a Watermelon Pavilion”) nothing more than a dream state, where our only perception of the real is as a dim force opposing us, like the distant sounds of alarms in sleep.

Not to worry. Berserk has a felicitous solution: “I set my traps / In the midst of dreams.” This warrior won’t confront the enemy while sleeping, he won’t even enter the battlefield, but will instead lure the hunted to their doom in their own dream. In other words, reality will track down and kill any attempts to escape by way of imagination.

The remainder of the poem is a reflection on that disclosure. “I knew from this / That the blue ground / Was full of blocks / And blocking steel.”  Certainly the knowledge that undetectable traps were lying in wait no matter where the speaker goes changes his perspective. Reality could at any time destroy the imaginative world. Thus the speaker “knew the dread / Of the bushy plain.”

But he also knew how, as Stevens put it in “Sunday Morning”, “death is the mother of beauty.” The threat made imagination, because more fragile and illusory, more valuable. “The beauty / Of the moonlight / Falling there, / Falling / As sleep falls / In the innocent air.” It poignantly continues to exist, despite living under constant existential threat.

This narrative arc puts the pieces into place in a more-or-less satisfying way, but many troubling questions remain. Why is the real portrayed as a figure of such violence? Why did it enter the supposedly mutually exclusive world of dreams in the first place? Why does it try to sabotage the world of imagination, seemingly for its own good? How is the speaker the only one who seems to know imagination is doomed? And what should we as readers feel about imagination’s defeat?

Answers to these questions emerge when we color in some detail to these shadowy tropes. Berserk is not simply a representation of the real, but of what can be termed the poetic real. Obvious similarities, in the word berserk, to the frenzied state of those in the throes of poetic inspiration have led more than a few commentators to see Berserk as a symbol of poetic abandon. As opposed to the muse of To the One of Fictive Music, he is the wild man poet who imposes his will on the imaginative dreamscape to produce tangible works of art. Without this protean figure, the real world of poetry would forget every epiphany as soon as it woke from its dream. The comparison to the bloodthirsty Vikings, and his calm admission he hunts the sleeping are indications that this poetic presence is complicit in all manner of violence. Imagine that force animating, for example, the poet trying to put together his first volume for the world’s approval: How the words said would subsume those unsaid, the poems written would trample on the ones that came before, the poets who are read would deprive the others of air. The very act of asserting one’s authority is an act of war. That Stevens’ refers directly to the act of publication can be found in the strange term “blocks.” This word has many distinct meanings, of course, but what if it meant a specific one: “a piece of wood or metal engraved for printing on paper or fabric”? Taken literally, that would mean printing one’s poems would be the “trap” that threatens the truly poetic.

This reading localizes the subsequent passage (about knowing the dread on the bushy plain, and the beauty of how the moonlight falls there innocently like sleep) to show – rather than merely say – the value of the poetic state of mind (as opposed to poetry as a form of expression): How vulnerable it is to the outside world, how innocent of human ambition, how it always falls from our understanding as if its truth must escape any encounter with our rapacious minds. The world is full of poetry, as Stevens so often noted. Actual poems and the books that contain them, on the other hand, don’t get the same honor or attention from him (he claimed at one point, in fact, not to read any other poets). This poem beautifully captures Stevens’ wistfulness towards a time when he was not a “working” poet, when the world was free to express itself truthfully, without his trapping filter.

For the reader, it is the sense that true poetry must be invisible that allows us to feel at last how it animates everything. It is of the essence of poetry – preserved poetry that is – to note how the most profound beauty is that which is lost, denied, or behind a veil. The Prince of Peacocks may grab attention by strutting poetic colors, but it is only in the private dark that the beauty can transmute to the divine.

The Sudden Red-Eyed Sun

For Richard Hugo

Now you say you love me, 20 years too late,
When all the brandy snifters have been loaded onto crates
And the fire sky clouds are as yellow and as gray
As your beard back in the day, when you were one
More nonjudgmental, disaffected intellectual
Snoring in the park, and speaking of the white Christ
Paradise where the homeless are the otherness that unites
In gangsnark screaming the differentially equated mean,
But it seemed you were too busy digging
The distinguished indigenous geniuses
Empirically pick through the empire's receptacles
For disingenuous treasures. Who was I?
Just another unhappy suburbanite trying to pretend
My backpack was as worthless as hers,
The woman with the orange hoodie.

But you did kiss me full on the lips, and hugged
Me with all of what little strength you had left,
And I, as unfeeling as a gypsy, walked diagonally
Away, pleased that I let you come that close.
The streets are too soft, the lost too forgiving.
There was nothing in it for me to feel, then,
But the shame you bravely refused to display.
A million steals and a million tales later
I still can't distinguish the real from the true.
Better that than believe nothing means what it says,
That the plans that are made in advance are as foolish
As asking a rich man for change.

Lines for the Lion's Gate

The bee has found

          the weed

so the codes seed

     minds

thoughts seize

forms

that live beyond

     their conceiving

there’s enough of a touch

     that memory is

           freedom

     it must be

captured as if

           for the first time

the circle turns

     when seen

the wheel cleaned
     for the clay

     and set

always for

     its seeming:

the passion of birth

the sadness of leaving

makes everything

     in between

accrue meaning

The repeatings seem

     in pulsings of time

unique becomings

that beckon the spiral

          to climb

past what is known

     what is everything

the familiar strangely
     seen

with always more waiting

     in how we respond

our new ways to see

            and feel 

            and say

            and deal

that is the force

that grows continually

what is real

     follows

the dreaming

in an inevitable

     course

For the sense is contained

     by the voice

           within

of what appears to be

     on some other side

when recognized

     as a choice

somehow hidden

     to learn what you

     already know

            again

there’s always a first time

     for stars to align

and for the brightness of all things

     to shine

as if destitute

in the blacknesses

      of space

to privately occupy

      its place

these islands we

             reach

the untangled facts

      the forbidden maybe 

what we long ago

      refused to see

the swirling of our being

in the ravages of sleep
            instead

the sprouts appear

     one at a time

     or maybe more

depending on the

            feeling

     needed

Noises are all around

     we call them

what we know of God

      a junkie on the nod

who stares at peeling

      ceilings while

the ants play deadly games

as if no change

      was ever needed

and the pain was for

      the best

what seems 

      a gross injustice

to the proctors

      of the test

who find no

              mediation

save the conscience

      and its foe

their path is torn in fire 

      from weary eyes

as if to somewhere

the strings to what is not
      cut

the urge that prods us on

      unknown

as the home we

      hammered 

             burns

and eyes so filled

with smoke and light

we don’t know how

we wounded them

     yet we’d do it

     all again

to lose the thing

     that wasn’t the lord

everything we touched

that turned

     to gold

it becomes a running from

     this perverse form

     of faith

these hopes that what

impels us

will be

     explained

justified even

     as right

though we never

     had our doubts

even as the city

                   darkens

                   far behind

The light neither
      beyond nor ahead

      stays with us

as if we’ve

reached

      the end

even as the return diminishes

      extends

away from our wishing

      to transcend

the blunt mechanics

      of our actions

the clear and present malice

      in our minds

to love what won’t

      stand still

to grab what won't

      take hold

perceive what can’t

      be seen and
think what can’t be known

      is what’s important

our discontent is as

     feverish 

as our dreams

but do we need

     redemption

when we’ve left the shore
     behind

when the foghorn of
     another world

     starts calling?

The space between

keeps widening

until it seems

     the oceans

are as limiting

as the pavement sheen 

     around the island's edge

The particular’s allowed

to run in a sea

     of particulars

all espousing the

     general order

by denying it

             all enslaved

in bitter motions

to survive on

     theft of blood

while the larger world

stays peaceful

            underwhelmed

the wind billows

     how death is

            overcome

in each fresh

     moment

judgments form

and lapse without

      a witness ever
            leaving

just the changing

hues of shoes

     as sunlight

            moves

The light can only reach

     so far

     inside

before the pit of

     what is not

can no longer be
     by transmuting fantasy
     applied
and we are left a bundle

     of handles

and buttons that don’t lead

     to actions

the blackness of seeing
     with blackness

fathoms pulling

             down

with every independent

shadow playing away

from the central sound

which is silence

     all around

something’s missing

from the invitation

     the RSVP is

     too implied

the need for others

supersedes their

     reality

for when we are

     lost
     in ourselves

we are only thinking

     of others

how there’s no other

     self than

     what is seen

            in them

as hollow and as pale

as the motion picture flickers

     that stay inside of us

long after the people

have peeled away

and left you still

     not alone

the thing that you

     must never say

that you are not alone

     (are you insane?)

all the voices somehow

     realer 

than the words that people
     borrow

that just refuse to mean

    when clarity is not

              what’s needed

    when inside your

              separate brain

intention is known

              actions are clear

all things that

     one can never see

inside the eyes of

     others

whether you are

              right or

              true or

              sincere

the mystery of you

     hangs like a sheer

              and blows like a ghost

through the iridescent

     film

of what appears

It is this that

     resists the light

there is no illuminable thing

just currents

     flying free

like lightning chaos

     in the hold of

     central sky

there’s nothing but the feeling

     in the moment

nothing else

     can satisfy

and all the flows

     go into that

like lines of silence

     move

to destinations

it all flows through

     open gates

there are no walls

              to obtrude

only the illusion you

     connect

to what you’re

     not

your sight is

     so conversant

you thought your life

     was otherwise

than the plying

     of dimensions

like equations

                on a mind

     experience to solve

     solutions to experience

     ambiguity to salve

in endless strands

of phenomenological

     popcorn

for as long

as the movie

     spins

so what you create

     never ends

                or begins

It merely holds

     for the picture

of what you used to be

by what you are not now

what you've gleaned

     of infinity

                or of the bee

a way of seeing

     what

in being retrieved

cannot exist

     completely

the sky pours

     its quickening

to feed what sense 

     that you possess
to find and name
                what once was
                part of you
not to reclaim
     or make
     anew
but gauge your mind
     as it runs along
     the grooves
the spirit catches
    on the nuance
    hooks
for that is what
remains intact
                the witness
called back
     to gather
what will be kept
in holy permanence
     the final report
of a journey
     blind
                 through light
     the way you learned
to know yourself
in something else:
     the mind of everything
     the heart the king

Some Timothy for Monsieur Lapin

The terror of love is that it makes you not want
         to exist.
When water is flowing, what need for a throat
         to receive?

But it is only those without such swords
         who'll speak such words.
The others have drifted off
          into oblivion.

There's hope someday they'll reach a shore, or rather,
         that they won't.

Odes by Hölderlin: The Blind Singer

"He shed a half-hearted mockery of Mars" – Sophocles

Where are you, youthfulness? That always wakes

     Me in the hour of morning, where are you, light?

          My heart is awake, but night holds me 

               Always in holy, banishing magic.

Otherwise I’d listen for the twilight, otherwise I’d

     Wait for you on the hill, and never for free!

          You never deceived me, sweet holy

               Envoys of the skies, for always you came,

Came bearing blessings down the usual path,

     Won’t you come now, beautiful? Where are you, light?

          My heart’s awake again, though banished,

               And the infinite night always hinders.

My trellises would otherwise be green; and

     The flowers would illuminate me, like my

          Own bright eyes; my face not far away

               Would be incandescent, lit from above

And around the woods I would see the wings of

     Heaven wander the sky, as when I was young;

          Now I sit here silent and alone,

               For hours upon hours, and shapings

From love and grief of the brighter days create

     For my own pleasure now a thought, and there I

          Listen in the distance, whether or

               Not some friendlier savior comes my way.

It’s then I often hear the thunderer’s voice

     At noon, when he brazenly comes near, when the

          House shakes and the earth pounds from under

               The ground and the mountain reverberates.

I hear the rescuer in the night, I hear

     Him kill, the deliverer, restoring him,

          The thunderer, from sundown to the

               Dawn, and he follows along with his sound,

You my strings, follow him! It lives within him,

     My song, as the source follows the stream, and I

          Must too, wherever he remembers,

               Follow the mad road to the sure result.

To where? Where to? I hear you here, there and there,

     Magnificent one! Around the earth it sounds.

          Where do you end? And what, what is there

               Over the clouds and oh what will I be?

Day! Day! Above the plummeting clouds! Welcome

     My being! For my eyes will flower for you.

          Oh light of youth! O luck! What is old

               Returns anew! The spiritual flows down,

To the golden fountain of your holy cup!

     And to you, green soil, peaceful cradle! And you,

          House of my fathers! And the dear ones,

               The ones I once stumbled on, O come close,

O come, all of you, for yours, yours is delight,

     For you are the ones whom the sighted consecrate!

          O take, so I may endure, this my

               Life, all the godlike away from my heart.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Der blinde Sänger

Ελυσεν αινον αχος απ᾽ ομματων Αρης

Sophokles

Wo bist du, Jugendliches! das immer mich

     Zur Stunde weckt des Morgens, wo bist du, Licht!

          Das Herz ist wach, doch bannt und hält in

               Heiligem Zauber die Nacht mich immer.

Sonst lauscht ich um die Dämmerung gern, sonst harrt

     Ich gerne dein am Hügel, und nie umsonst!

          Nie täuschten mich, du Holdes, deine

               Boten, die Lüfte, denn immer kamst du,

Kamst allbeseligend den gewohnten Pfad

     Herein in deiner Schöne, wo bist du, Licht!

          Das Herz ist wieder wach, doch bannt und

               Hemmt die unendliche Nacht mich immer.

Mir grünten sonst die Lauben; es leuchteten

     Die Blumen, wie die eigenen Augen, mir;

          Nicht ferne war das Angesicht der

               Meinen und leuchtete mir und droben

Und um die Wälder sah ich die Fittige

     Des Himmels wandern, da ich ein Jüngling war;

          Nun sitz ich still allein, von einer

               Stunde zur anderen, und Gestalten

Aus Lieb und Leid der helleren Tage schafft

     Zur eignen Freude nun mein Gedanke sich,

          Und ferne lausch ich hin, ob nicht ein

               Freundlicher Retter vielleicht mir komme.

Dann hör ich oft die Stimme des Donnerers

     Am Mittag, wenn der eherne nahe kommt,

          Wenn ihm das Haus bebt und der Boden

               Unter ihm dröhnt und der Berg es nachhallt.

Den Retter hör ich dann in der Nacht, ich hör

     Ihn tötend, den Befreier, belebend ihn,

          Den Donnerer vom Untergang zum

               Orient eilen und ihm nach tönt ihr,

Ihm nach, ihr meine Saiten! es lebt mit ihm

     Mein Lied und wie die Quelle dem Strome folgt,

          Wohin er denkt, so muß ich fort und

               Folge dem Sicheren auf der Irrbahn.

Wohin? wohin? ich höre dich da und dort,

     Du Herrlicher! und rings um die Erde tönts.

          Wo endest du? und was, was ist es

               Über den Wolken und o wie wird mir?

Tag! Tag! du über stürzenden Wolken! sei

     Willkommen mir! es blühet mein Auge dir.

          O Jugendlicht! o Glück! das alte

               Wieder! doch geistiger rinnst du nieder,

Du goldner Quell aus heiligem Kelch! und du,

     Du grüner Boden, friedliche Wieg! und du,

          Haus meiner Väter! und ihr Lieben,

               Die mir begegneten einst, o nahet,

O kommt, daß euer, euer die Freude sei,

     Ihr alle, daß euch segne der Sehende!

          O nimmt, daß ichs ertrage, mir das

               Leben, das Göttliche mir vom Herzen.

The Whale and the Moon

The kind of moon

               that grows sharp over time

As it glows in far-away caves

               where the water can be heard

Like the breathing of the lover

  in your bed.

It was richer, we thought,

               for the darkest of wine

               and blackest of chocolate,

               the thickest of wrapped animal fats,
But any words said were deflections

               because there was nothing we could say

And are written like the last recovered hieroglyph

               from the first recorded melody in stone.

Gestures that are frozen,

               of hands and mouths and loins,

Go on in a loop of never-

   appeased desire.

The lanterns by the pool, the path

               from one room to the next,

The touch and smell of cushions

   and then sheets

Are retrievable like an outdated theory, by feel

               down this blind hallway

               to those full shelves.

How I got there

               and where I went

Were part of the long, slow story of my life

               that unfolds across my half-

               unconscious gaze –

If I’m to be asleep

               it’s better to dream

Where the memory is like the wind

               tossing my soul like a flower

To gently rock in place

               in the shape of what is lost

As if the never-buried won’t be

               entombed with me after all,

And the never-allowed to come to life

               will continue to leap

               into other people’s synapse sparks.

We don’t yet recognize

               the voice of love.

We judge it like we stupidly judge the devil

               as it slips through any guise:

Is it he, or her, or that, or there, or when?

               We ask of the familiar sound

That always answers our questions

               by darkening the lights

               and turning whispers into silence.