Series: Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the fifteenth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or so to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

Bless the Earth, Bless the Fire
by Paul Zweig

Here is the wanderer with
His unwrapped soul, his parcels of pure voice …

* * * *

Hourglass

I sit as stolidly as a column of cold ash,
longing for a bell’s clapper, or the skin
of a drum that shivers under the blows
of a pair of brushes. I have held
this shape too long, I tell myself.
The fine teeth of my thoughts
are through with falling.

Across the lawn, the French lilac
still glows green against the gray trees
as if summer could last forever –
as if a craze of twigs were some disgrace,
& not the soul’s own map –
& I feel a sigh coming toward me
from the edge of the world.

Grain by grain,
the shadows are losing their firm outlines.
The sun buries itself in a white sand sky.

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the thirteenth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

Anything Long and Thin
by Paul Zweig

All traffickings upward out of the earth
Or sideways across it: longitudes,
Desperations; the glue of sentences . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-18-05]

* * * *

Living On

Consider what one might learn
by meditating on a corpse:
how the flesh can crawl, the bones
of a beautiful face break
the crust of fantasy like little moons
out of the ground, vacant snail-shells
still glistening with an off-white rheum.
Or consider swallowing two squares
of LSD & looking in the mirror:
what perfectly disintegrating visions
might be yours, & with what slight effort.

It’s exhilarating, really, to find this
blind matter – that it somehow coheres
despite its utter insensitivity to longing
or loneliness. It gives itself
only half-grudgingly to the chance
mouths of the shark or the brown bear.
True horror comes disguised
as cold necessity: learning about cells
in the fourth grade, our bodies began
to dissolve into prisons
or office towers populated by soft-
walled cubicles. Then atoms:
solar systems with pin-prick suns,
barely enclosed eternities
of inner space. The schoolroom clock
made a mockery of turning.

To know that emptiness, they suggested,
was to know ourselves. They could have said
that matter is incredibly rare,
a temporary resting state for energy.
They could have told us
about fictons, their mad spinning
that somehow keeps the lover’s caress
from encountering a null set,
bodies collapsing into a shrug
of cold fusion. What a comfort
it would’ve been, maybe,
to learn about the stubborn corpse
rippling outward for millions of years,
if only in bone shards or a line
of footprints in some fossilized beach
that come to a sudden end: indelible
record of buoyancy, & the killer wave.
__________

For more on fictons, see here. Please note, however, that I mean something different from Robert Heinlein, whose fictons inhabited a thoroughly Newtonian, narrative space. My fictons are massless and carry a negative charge.

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the twelfth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

One Summer Before Man
by Paul Zweig

Listen! The undergarments of the women
Are rustling OM. It is the Sanskrit
Of skin, the Hebrew of hair. . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-18-05]

* * * *

One Autumn Before Computers

A giant puffball bulges among
the dried stalks of goldenrod
like a misplaced hope.
I stuff it in my coat pocket & look
around for others, without success.
That evening, I chop its spongy cloud-flesh
into a sauce with clams.

Then, too, there was the spruce tree
a porcupine had recently girdled.
It stood in the dense center of a galaxy
of needles, some fallen pale side up,
some dark green – a pleasing blend.
Out at the feathery edge, a scattered pile
of hickory shells. I crouched there
tracing words with my finger
over & over in the soft dirt,
as if into the uncomprehending palm
of a young Helen Keller.

I try to imagine what it would be like
to write for such an audience:
one autumn before home computers,
on a Xerox machine at the university,
my father making a copy
of a copy
of a copy
until my poem rose from the page like mist.
I forget the point of the exercise, now –
something about the need to keep
the originals, maybe, or to write
as firmly as we could.

Or years before, at another college,
going with him into the library
after hours, to run off copies on
what must’ve been one of the very
first Xerox machines, enormous,
full of lights & noises –
the only thing stirring
among all those wordless books.
“Will it make a copy of me?”
I was five years old.
“Sure. Close your eyes.”

I remember the heat as its beam raked my face,
my mounting excitement
& the letdown that followed,
squinting at a piece of paper heavy
with drying ink. What would I have done
if, as I’d expected, the machine had given
birth to my identical twin?
Imagine someone with whom
deceit is impossible.

Thirty-five years later, I still recall
how the sky looked when we went
back out: fast-moving clouds
back-lit by an almost-full moon.
It was a revelation.
“Clouds at night!” I whispered,
taking one last glance behind me
into the shadows.

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the tenth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or so to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

Hope

A stalk of yellow weed isolated in sunlight;
The tinge eastward toward Queens over tarred rooftops.

A wake furls slantwise across the empty river . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-06-05]

* * * *

The Catch

We were playing hide-&-seek. At the last moment,
I dove under a black rubberized tarp
that had been lying out back for several months.
I heard her finish the count & come looking,
rounding the corner of the house on rapid feet.

The tarp rustled from my heavy breathing.
A beetle made a racket
burrowing out from under from my right ear,
which was pressed against the ground.
She ran past, the beetle wiggled free
& everything grew still.

After a while, I heard the approach of slow footfalls.
This time, I held my breath as if
my life depended on it. The steps came up
to the edge of the tarp & stopped.
“Nobody under there,” I heard her say.

Is it better to fish without luck,
or to stretch a net & accept the inevitable by-catch?
The silence after that second attempt
has yet to end. From time to time,
a harvestman runs over my carcass on seeing-eye legs.
What mountain is this, I start to wonder,
keeping the smooth sky from a tangled earth?
__________

For bycatch, see here. For an excellent, brief essay on harvestmen, see here.

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the seventh poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

A Fly on the Water
by Paul Zweig

        I
It is eating me.
It is everything hungry in the world,
And wants me, and I’ll tell you, I don’t mind. . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 11-06-05]

* * * *

Qarrtsiluni

It isn’t death I dread, but the lidded coffin
& all that soil coming between me & the sky.

The earth is for living in, or under,
safe between the third and fourth ribs
of the great land whale.

Chewing the fat
with our boneless ancestors,
we could relearn the art of metamorphosis –
from the larval worm, how to wait
in the darkness for a stone
skin to split

& mixing dust & water,
bring clay to life with our own
perilous breath.

It isn’t death we fear, but the pain that precedes it
& this waking, all alone, in a strange bed.

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the sixth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

The Perfect Sleepers
by Paul Zweig

The light flooding my chair
Is too strong at six in the morning;
It was meant for the policeman prowling
In a room around a criminal…

[Remainder of poem removed 10-21-05]

* * * *

In the Hold

The sealed cracks around the permanently locked door between the two apartments were no barrier to the flood tide of her enormous need. I had seen them sitting outside until well past dark, his jeep riding considerably lower on the passenger side as they took turns drinking from a paper bag. They came in around ten & went straight to work – an all-night shift.

Sleep was impossible for me as well as for him. Every half hour, just as I started to doze off, her shrill voice would jerk us back to full consciousness: I haven’t seen you in three months, and you’re just going to SLEEP? He’d answer in a low murmur I couldn’t make out. Then the asthmatic creaks of her long-suffering box spring as she once again mounted the ladder that led – Oh dichosa ventura! – out of the dark hold of her hated flesh.

As the night dragged on, my annoyance gave way to admiration for her persistence & her unwillingness to abandon her partner to the vicissitudes of sleep. I knew well enough how the rungs of that ladder multiply toward the top, crowding more & more closely together until, inevitably, we lose our footing & fall back into ourselves: ragged breathing, the soaked sheets, dust mites swarming in the drifts of shed skin.
__________

The Spanish quote (“oh happy chance!”) and the image of the ladder are from St. John of the Cross’s mystical poem La Noche Oscura, or The Dark Night.

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the fifth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

Prayer Against Too Much
by Paul Zweig

Late-summer trees;
White flowers thickening around each house,
Where people eat, touch, talk . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 10-21-05]

* * * *

Triptych: Against Moderation

Where the buck took a hunter’s bullet & lay down
in the laurel, a dozen chipmunks are calling
in unison – mallets on a xylophone
all striking the same, middle bar.
Too much moderation seems a dangerous thing.

*

We are only ever saved by what exceeds us.
When old fields fall to subdivisions,
the kinds of thoughts that need an unbroken span of sky
vanish along with the hiccup of the Henslow’s sparrow,
the wind in the grass.
A few house lots hazarded in the forest
& the wolves begin to forget how to lope,
halt in the middle of a howl –

a freight train wailing through the gap two hundred years later.
All it lacks is the shiver – such a small thing.
It hardly seems reasonable to demand the return
of thousands of acres of wildness
just for that.

We sit at the crossing, engine idling.
On the next to last boxcar, neat black letters
spell out an immoderate & wholly inarguable projection:
NATURE WILL WIN.
Then the flashing orange light receding into the distance.

*

If you pray, pray for the physicians
who cannot heal themselves.
Pray for the shaman to remove poison everywhere he presses his mouth.
On the loading dock behind the hospital,
the same cherry has been burning at the end
of one cigarette or another for hours now.
Each new arrival joins the huddle
hurriedly, as if to confer over some desperate case,
bending pursed lips as close as necessary
to suck a spark from the middle
of a column of ash.