Series: Antiphony: Paul Zweig

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Greek

This entry is part 22 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the fourth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. (I skipped both the first and third poems, not because they aren’t rewarding to read, but because their heavy autobiographical content makes them too difficult for me to respond to.) See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

Stanzas in an Emergency
by Paul Zweig

      I
Here is the river,
The salt-tide edging upstream,
Grey cliffs extending in the sunmist.

I will not count my blessings,
I will be blessed.
I will solve the baffled distance in my mind.
I will not panic at my freedom.
I will know the smooth night
When my wife perches beside me,
Plumed and shining, as on a branch.
I will bring the estuary of the grey day
Into everything cramped and scarred.
I will bring you, my puzzled patient friend,
Whom I keep eluding
When you want only to tell me about love.

      II
My neighbor emerges
In a clang of tumblers and doors.
With her sad nipples, her daughter vanished into permanent winter,
She is stubborn as a nun, and almost beautiful.
I see the news seller on the corner,
His blind face, his daylong
Conversation with dimes and quarters.
I accept my wife’s rage, her pride,
The spined flower standing for her in my mind,
The frantic light which is love’s exit, or entrance.

      III
To exist at the highest level;
To be entirely conscious, so that even my smallest sigh
Glides happily, and the deathwatch is never bored,
For the little one, God’s human face,
Death, with his gay elfin whisper,
All the goings-on in closets,
Smothered giggle, lank defeated clothes;
All, all come crowding in, like guests at a wedding,
With promises that only death can keep.

      IV
A stubble-faced Greek runs the all-night
Market around the corner.
His bins are full of mangoes, plums,
Crushed sprigs of mint,
Bananas large as clubs, roots for alien stews.
They are colors that play against the night,
Bins of the loveliness that never sleeps.

This Greek in his shop
Stands guard for me, I sleep for him.
Together we endure the night.

* * * *

The Greek

My customers are real characters, some of them.
That’s no surprise.
But this one disheveled Jew? He writes
the screenplay, I think. You should see him.
He sleepwalks in here at 2:00 a.m.
and stands in front of the import bins – star fruits
& mangosteens – with his head cocked to the side.
Can I help you, sir, I’ll call out
when I can’t stand it anymore
& he looks over & grins – great big smile.
Paul, my friend, you already have, he says.
He likes the fact that we have the same first name.

The next morning he’s in here again, 8:00 o’clock,
for a loaf of fresh bread.
He might have big dark bags under his eyes
but he’s looking happy now, as if
he can hardly contain himself.
Like a man with a secret: sometimes it feels heavy,
sometimes it’s light.

His wife is French, he tells me once, the bread’s for her.
Another time, just as he’s handing me the money,
he stops & runs his finger through
the parallel slashes in the crust.
If it’s going in the oven anyway, he says,
why do they cut it like this?
It’ll split one way or the other, Paul, I say.
All we can do is tell it where.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The fresh chance

This entry is part 21 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

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

Snow
by Paul Zweig

Love is all we could manage,
Its particles floating from the hard rim of the air.
Our tracks were clear in the fresh chance
Heaven threw behind us….

[Remainder of poem removed 10-10-05]

* * * *

Dust

In my dream running after you, lungs aching
as you rise above the shore on sudden wings,
watching you grow smaller & smaller
against the sky,
I shout myself awake.
It’s past four.
A wind moves in the curtains, bringing the scent of rain.

I turn over, & something small & sharp
pokes my cheek: the needle end
of a breast feather from
some long-dead goose
has threaded a small hole in my pillow.
I pull it out.

The darkness quivers with distant lightning.
I lie awake, listening for the first rumble,
the first random taps against the pane.
Today, I think, I will take a broom
to the stairs below the window
where dust has settled in the corners of every step.
An hour later, when the storm passes,
the sky is already light.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

City of changes

This entry is part 20 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I apologize for the paucity of posts here lately. I’m still reading Paul Zweig, and have come a cropper of the lengthy and magnificent last poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems. (See here for details on this experiment in close reading.) I hope to be able to post a poem in response to it, but I make no promises. In the meantime, given its length, I thought it ought to get a post of its own. As usual, I’ll take it down in a week to ten days, so enjoy it while you can. (N.B.: I will definitely not be attempting a response to “Aunt Lil,” the first poem in the selection from “Eternity’s Woods.” I simply don’t have any comparable experience to draw on there.)

The City of Changes
Venice 1973
by Paul Zweig

        I
Returning to thunder, white buildings,
And a damp smell rising from the sidewalk.
Lightning plunges through me, exposing
The gray wall I lean against
Like Rodin’s half-carved statues.

[Remainder of poem removed 10-10-05]

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Black stone, yellow field

This entry is part 19 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the eighth poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

The Black Stone
by Paul Zweig

        I
Death was my first appetite,
I’ve had others since.

Black stone I swallowed on the day I was born,
You are the loneliness fattening in my breath…

[Remainder of poem removed 9-31-05]

* * * *

Image hosted by Photobucket.com

The Yellow Field

        for Beth

Somewhere in that critical hour before supper
I lost my appetite, all of it,
just as my strict Nanna used to warn against
when she set out the sweets.
My other grandma would light a cigarette
& gently shoo us out of the house
so she & grandpa could enjoy their cocktail hour – ah! – alone.

Peace without children, yellow field
where I dissolve, finally, into a murmur of bees.

Given a field of yellow, the weather doesn’t matter.
Given water from the ground or the sky
& my own, too-corrosive minerals, given
a season of ice, fissures growing
wherever the rhizomes can get their fingers in past the knuckle,
prizing the dead stone open along its seam
of gleaming yellow: a field spreads
wherever I used to feel hunger.

I stand in the middle of it at sundown, still as a tall stump
that doesn’t belong,
watching for the brilliant wings of monarch butterflies
beating, gliding, searching for a one-night hat stand.
I could be the spot marked Mexico on a yellow map.
My shadow stretches into the distant woods.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

In lieu of listening

This entry is part 18 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the seventh poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

This poem is set in rural Brittany, where Zweig spent much of the year.

Listening to Bells
by Paul Zweig

I hear bells ringing in the village,
Filling the valley with their deep liquid sound.
They mean that someone has died today…

[Remainder of poem removed 9-24-05]

* * * *

Listening to Owls

      for Yemi

An hour before dawn, two screech owls start calling,
loud & close.
I feel like an involuntary eavesdropper
on someone else’s scandal-ridden version
of our lives. It passes
from ridge to ridge, shivering over the houses
& the thirty-five acres of goldenrod plundered from the woods,
like a truncated version of the same
open wing that descends nightly
all over the world, leaving only a few pinholes
of available light.

The owls start calling with the suddenness
of all terrible descents.
I have just been thinking about the long stretches
of highway I would have to walk
to visit distant friends, how we have quarreled
& quickly, almost effortlessly, made up.
But now I tilt my head back
& gaze at those enormous purported suns,
farther away than their image can travel in a lifetime.

When the owls start calling, it takes me a moment
to realize it isn’t my infant niece wailing
in the back bedroom,
fighting her way free of a bad dream
in that existential solitude before language.
Sometimes screech owls keep to a monotone trill,
but not this morning. It’s all high-pitched peals
with a plunge at the end
& enough tremolo to make me think
of the laughter of the desperately happy –
laughing just to keep from crying,
as they say in the blues –
or delirium tremens, the gone high
turned vicious as a beaten dog.

I listen to the owls & chide myself
for anthropomorphizing, not unlike
Indians who can’t hear an owl call
without remembering their own lost
or inconsolable dead. Who else
could part the air so noiselessly?
Staring down the dark tunnels
of frantic scurrying lives,
the eyes of the ancestors grow big as satellite dishes.
They clack their bills.

But these owls are calling for reasons entirely of their own.
They bear no greater share of blame
for this wild tremor in the human throat,
this stutter of images,
than any other ill-omened
inhabitants of the known world.

This might be a mother & her recently
fledged offspring, I think.
It occurs to me that they call
the way they do – with such brevity & abruptness,
throwing their voices –
because of their own, well-founded fear
of larger owls.
They stop far sooner than I stop listening.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Above the ears, below the waist

This entry is part 17 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the sixth poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

Robinson Crusoe’s Notebooks
by Paul Zweig

When I am alone,
the world becomes an erotic dream.
Sex boils in my shoes…

[Remainder of poem removed 9-24-05]

* * * *

John the Baptist’s Final Sermon

Whose tongues tick, whose lips move in whispers
as if to raise lost consonants from the dead?
I am that man just off-stage, in the prompter’s box.
If I find willing ears, they will hear me
the way I see the world: askance.

Madam, I am no Adam, giving creatures their names
while his still-ignorant member wandered in his lap.
Male & female, says the scripture, hermaphroditic
were they made to gambol along the edge
of unpronounceable vision – through dreams, perhaps,
or in the margins of a hand-drawn map.
But then the names leapt like sparks from a campfire,
setting their fur alight, & scorched them into awareness.

We who are among all creatures the most naked:
unto us is given the most excruciating consciousness.
I remember how it burned for weeks, that circumcision.
I remember the crown of an infant’s head, right
at the moment of birth: apple of its mother’s eye, full
to bursting. And an even more pregnant fullness I recall,
among glossalalia & the moving shapes of shadows,
in which this Life was shouted into being.

Whatever is holy is almost unbearable.
One cannot proclaim the Word with unclean lips
or catch more than a glimpse of holy Presence
& expect to live. How could such immensity
restrict itself to a name on the tongue or
an image within the heart, within the head?

But dipped in the waters of rebirth,
the Anointed One prepares his terrible crown.
Everything above the ears becomes a place apart –
& then the whole rest of him, of us, because
for the longed-for future ever to descend,
we are commanded to cleave to just such single-
mindedness, O Salome.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Perfect night

This entry is part 16 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the fifth poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

Amanita Phalloidus*
by Paul Zweig

To be alone in the woods, poking at the moist odors
For mushrooms, knowing the diffuse sexuality
Which comes after a long rain has soaked the forest floor…

[Remainder of poem removed 9-24-05]
__________

*Zweig apparently means Amanita phalloides, a.k.a. Death Cap. Despite its scientific name, it is not nearly as phallic as the stinkhorns (Phallaceae).

* * * *

Fungal Earth

This afterlife in the upper air
is a form of exile. The forest drips,
oozes, swells like a sponge

while we huddle under
our umbrellas, painfully swollen
with these spores, our names,

waiting for some
transcendent breeze
or the diaphanous touch of a beetle’s under-wing.

But below, in the perfect night of the earth,
we one-eyed men are King.
Sparrows fall into our efficient nets.

With garrote & poison we keep the soil safe
for our charges, whose every eager rootlet
finds its hyphen

until a clot of fungal
flesh encloses
each cell of sunlight.

The forest is our whore,
soliciting godhead
in knots & gnarls,

crossed branches rubbing
each other raw,
excrescencies of wood.

Hardly a flower bud
opens to a bee
without our hosannas.

Our lucky coins shimmer
& turn green
at the bottom of the sky.
__________

Most plants rely on symbiotic relationships with mycorrizal fungi for basic tasks such as water and nutrient uptake and protection from disease and predation; the study of these relationships, including basic taxonomy, is in its infancy.

Many of the more familiar fungi are the primary agents of plant decomposition in forest ecosystems, and they too are turning out to be less plant-like than was traditionally supposed.

Mushrooms, it turns out, are even more interesting than scientists suspected. They know that the colorful forms we call mushrooms are actually the fruiting bodies of fungi and that each one is sustained by miles of microscopic filaments, called hyphae [or, in aggregate, mycelia]. Those hyphae snake through the forest floor and into rotting logs, secreting enzymes that break down complex carbohydrates into the nutritive sugars needed by the mushroom. Such saprophytic mushrooms break down woody materials into soil. Without them, our woods would suffocate in their own debris.

The mycologist George Brown and his graduate students at the University of Guelph in Ontario have recently made more remarkable discoveries about what fungi do. Apparently many of them are not benign saprophytes, but fierce predators which attack and eat the microscopic nematodes, rotifers, amoebas, copepods, and bacteria that share the soil with them. And the ways in which they capture and eat them often have the makings of a horror story – catching them in adhesive nets, crushing them with constricting rings, immobilizing them with toxins and eating them alive, attaching to them like tapeworms, impaling them on spores shaped like grappling hooks, and shooting them with projectiles.

– Marcia Bonta, Appalachian Autumn

Posted on by Dave Bonta

My life as a landlubber

This entry is part 15 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m still reading Paul Zweig, and trying to get back into the spirit of writing poems in response. The following prose piece was sparked by the fourth poem in the second section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, entitled “The Archaeology.” I’ve been in a bit of a confessional mood lately…

1.
My first God was a lake in Maine with a soft mud bottom & plenty of leeches. I am too young to swim, but I love watching my mother, so slow on land, slice efficiently through the small waves while seeming merely to recline on her right side. The lake is large & not to be trifled with. In the winter, it turns to stone, my first desert: a white lid for the dreamless eyes of fish.

2.
I am four and a half. My mother is hugely pregnant, & my older brother & I decide to play a practical joke: I hide myself in the deep grass on the back slope above the pond, while Steve bangs in through the kitchen door: “David’s drowning!” Mom rushes past me, frantic, calling my name. I leap to my feet: “Here I am!” She’s furious.

Later, I sit inside staring numbly out at the grass, wanting to be missed again like that, wishing I could still be hidden there, curled up like a comma in that green sea as the wind moves through.

3.
Oceans with stone beaches, thundering surf. In an old black-and-white photo, we wander at low tide past the iconic cliffs at the Bay of Fundy. Fifteen years later, in Taiwan, Steve & I find ourselves on another beach dotted with stout, wave-gouged menhirs. He swims out to a small island, then hollers back: “Come see the geysers! Hurry, it’s spectacular!”

A typhoon is swirling somewhere off to the east, raising mountainous waves. Somehow I fight my way out, & it’s worth the effort: smoothly sculpted sandstone as if from the desert southwest, undermined by the sea & pocked with hollows just the right size to lie down in, imagining I’m St. Brendan innocently beached on a whale’s barnacled back. Its blowhole shoots spray high into the air with every wave, each time giving rise to the same rainbow.

After a while I hear faint voices from the shore: “Come back! Come back!” I try to obey, but the current is too strong & pulls me sideways, out to sea. My strength quickly dissipates; I go under once, twice, my brother reaches me just before I go down the dreaded third time. “Stop swimming,” he says, “& stand up in the water – there’s a shelf of rock we can rest on.” I quell my panic & feel for the rock with my feet, my chin just barely above the troughs. For the first time, I learn to space my breaths. “Here’s what we’ll do,” he shouts in my ear. “Put an arm around my neck, but don’t strangle me. If I paddle & we both kick, we can get to shore.” It works.

Back in the car, we marinate quietly in our separate swamps of self-disgust: “I would’ve died without his help.” “I almost killed him.”

4.
Then, I was too skinny to be buoyant; now, I’m unsinkable. Adrift in my skin boat – hide stretched taut across the ribs, the sea on the wrong side – I float through my days.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

What remains

This entry is part 14 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the third poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

I must say that the longer I continue with this project, the more difficult it becomes to bring my full attention to each poem without some calculation entering into it. That is to say, as my desire to write poems in response comes to feel increasingly compulsory, my reading becomes increasingly distracted and fragmentary.

Losing a Friend
by Paul Zweig

When the anger finally came
We were starting to find how much we already knew
About dead friendships . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 9-08-05]

* * * *

Lament

How many friends have I neglected
because I was too busy waiting for
the long shadows of January
or watching clouds cross some ephemeral
forest pool, dark with tannins?
How many friendships have withered
while I stalked a slug along an oak log
orange with fungi, agog at its ability
to glide on an instant carpet
& retract the stilts of its eyes
all the way into its head?
I’ve lost friends & learned how to be
merciless with myself – I mean,
how to edit.
Living in this mountain hollow,
I tell myself I could never take
the same walk twice.
I have planted myself here like
a yellow birch sapling on top of a hemlock stump
that rots away even as the birch encircles it
with an apron of roots, & a hundred
years later it still preserves, unseen,
the hollow shape of the corpse
that gave it life.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

How else?

This entry is part 13 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the second (and title) poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

The Dark Side of the Earth
by Paul Zweig

We don’t talk about the war anymore,
Living on the dark side of the earth,
The winter side . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 9-08-05]

* * * *

The News at Four A.M.

I wake to a slow dripping
outside my window,
click on the news,
then remember
the recycling has to go out.

My feet find
the path without
a flashlight. I wade
through faintly visible fog,
a soundproof room
inhabited by the automatic
lusts of insects.

Halfway to the road,
I come to a halt.
There in the darkness
at my feet,
from glowworm
to glowworm

something is passing, it seems,
fading out at one spot
only to come back on
a few feet ahead:

a faint, cool signal
making its way over
the hidden face
of the earth.