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.
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.
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.
Raked sand garden at Ginkakuji Temple, Kyoto, by Richard Jackson (used by permission)
View the full-size image here and the whole photo set here.
Update: Links glossary added (see bottom of post). In case anyone but me is keeping the track, this is my fourth (Friday morning) draft of a response to Zweig’s poem about Venice…
The City of Absences
Kyoto 1985-86
1.
Crossing an unexpected bridge,
I find myself once more in the city of absences,
twenty years gone. It’s August, I think.
The cicadas drown out every human motor.
I return to labyrinths of old wood,
disposable chopsticks,
the absent-minded purchase cocooned in paper.
My eyes adjust to the darkness in all-night coffee shops
& pagodas of moss.
City where I learned to live
on little but the morning bakery’s give-away bag of bread heels
& the peaches & pomegranates left at roadside altars
to buy off the peripatetic dead.
I bow my head for its low ceilings & sticky air
& an unseen female voice sobbing iki, iki, iki every day at noon.
Horribly pale, full of awkward & inadvertent gestures,
I return with my larval tooth
chewing, chewing, slicing slow half-circles from the air
with the wing of a mantis,
brandishing a Noh dancer’s open fan.
2.
City where I first learned my vocation
as a chorus of one.
My split-toed slippers whisper over the bridge
as I chant my itinerary: through the gate
to the inner provinces, past the gnarled pine that marks
the traveler’s naive goal, & now,
seemingly by accident,
some ancient battlefield deep in autumn grasses.
It’s as if the celibate poet gets drawn into the vacuum
left by every improperly commemorated death.
His task is to question, to listen, to transmute.
The difficult entrance past, he steps to the side.
I return for the mudra of automatic encounters:
two cups & we’re friends,
three cups & we’re trading insults
& lighting each other’s cigarettes from the embers of our own.
3.
Nothing changes.
Water drips where it has always dripped
until invisible fingers replace the worn-through stone.
Some outcaste genius rakes sand in a certain way
& eight centuries later the monks still take the same steps,
chant the same words to pace themselves,
walking backwards through the pure-white ocean
without leaving a ripple.
This time, too, I will make plans & abandon them,
I will return to the disco walled with mirrors
whose patrons dance alone with their reflections,
like the Kinkakuji
when a carp comes to the surface: that languid sway. Kagami no ma, the mirror room
where the actor tries to become one with his part.
I will tan myself to a golden hue
& slip in among the crowd of smooth-faced buddhas
posing for snapshots at all the sights:
Pachinko Palace, constructed under the Showa emperor.
Rabu Hoteru, where married couples can shed the costumes
marked papa, mama.
Tachimamben, famous for its blue-suited businessmen
leaving offerings of saké in the gutter.
Makudonarudo, where shadows are barred at the door.
This time I will fill my pockets with one-yen coins.
They weigh next to nothing – sexless little moons of aluminum –
& I float up over the ticket sellers
with one sudden gulp of focused breath.
The sky fits me like a mask with two backs.
I am past the gate with its double roof, through the torii.
4.
Garden paths unscroll like kimonos, glossy
from centuries of discriminating use,
turning away from everything that teems or hungers.
Two steps and the moon,
three steps & the summit of an uninhabited peak
with inch-high pines.
Impossible to find a novel place to sit.
City of imperial absences,
city of foreigners with fat Daruma asses,
go ahead, try pushing me from my seat behind the pillar.
My very gravity rights me.
My eyes are filled with so much wakefulness,
I can hardly focus on anything here in the present.
But the ear – listen! – is finally all lotus.
My forefinger & thumb unite
to press the eraser’s pink tongue to the page.
__________
Links glossary:
Japanese roadside shrines (a very unique example) usually feature the bodhisattva Jizo and are intended to placate hungry ghosts
Disposable chopsticks (waribashi)
Noh drama (section 2):
The main character of a Noh play is called the shite (pronounced sh’tay) who sometimes appears with one or more companion characters called tsure. In many plays, the shite appears in the first half as an ordinary person, departs, then appears in the second half in his true form as the ghost of famous person of long ago. The former is called the maejite and the latter the nochijite. They are traditionally performed by the same actor.
The secondary actor, the waki, is often a travelling priest whose questioning of the main character is important in developing the story line. He also often appears with companion waki-tsure. An interlude actor called ai or ai-kyogen also often appears as a local person who gives further background to the waki, and thus to the audience, in order to understand the situation of the shite.
The waki is dark, passive yin to the shite’s yang. He never wears a mask. Mudra
Japanese outcastes (Burakumin, called kuwaramono or “river-bank dwellers” during the Kamakura period, when many of them found refuge in Zen monasteries)
Kinkakuji (temple of the Golden Pavilion) Kagami no ma is the immediate backstage in Noh, connected with the main stage by a bridge. “Here the actor, already dressed in many layers of robe and a wig, puts on the mask and sits before a large mirror to study the figure he makes; this is where he undergoes the process of becoming the character.” (Kunio Komparu, The Noh Theater, Weatherhill/Tankosha, 1983) Pachinko; Showa emperor Rabu Hoteru Tachimamben (no Google results) means “stand-and-piss spot.” Makudonarudo Daruma (cf. the common Zen ko’an, “Why did Daruma come from the West?”)
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.
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]
* * * *
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.
Here’s an old poem. What is it about dead animals that makes them such pungent material for poetic treatment?
Spoil
For hours now the grownups had kept at it:
a scarcely modulated piano roll of talk
as steady as an all-day rain. At last
we bolted out the back where
the corn came almost to the door,
the tassels shining like epaulets
in the late afternoon sun.
We bushwhacked through the knobby-
kneed ranks, crouched in weedless furrows
to burst from cover with rebel yells
& Hollywood whoops of the wounded
until someone let loose with
a scream that sounded too real– Vultures! Barely missing us
as they sailed out from a ragged
knot of trees we hadn’t counted on:
three, six, then ten or more
immense black pairs of wings,
each dangling a shrunken head, red
with glassy yellow eyes as empty
as outer space. They hung
so close they must’ve risen
on the air sucked out of our lungs.
Then the smell hit us.
Alone, anyone would run.
But being a threesome we had to brave it,
couldn’t go back with half a story.
The smell wasn’t hard to track:
a dry sinkhole big enough
to swallow a tractor–the reason
that patch of woods remained unplowed–
had trapped a cow.
Its bloated hide bounced our bold missiles
like a trampoline. We tested its tautness
with ever larger rocks until, one
by one, like gleeful privateers we leaped
or scrambled down, unable to resist
such bounty. Now
the foreshortened sky had no more room
for vultures. We danced
on the carcass of a dragon–a woolly
mammoth–the last dinosaur! And
the sunlight scaled the hole’s lip
& slipped away through the corn
while we shouted & argued
over the provenance of this wondrous foe
we had so clearly vanquished.
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.
unaltered phrases from on-line news sources, via Google News
He wanted a real overhaul for the world body
An urgent overhaul of the world body
Poetically described the world body
A final text to move the world body
A harder line at the world body
Taking the message of Youth Upliftment to the world body
To breathe new life into the world body
To encourage and support the world body
To consider committing the world body
The Palestinians want the world body
President Bush called on the world body
The most sordid and shameful episode in the history of the world body
Washington’s relations with the world body
Would have been unthinkable for the world body
Admission into the world body
“Working methods” within the world body
Acceptance of help from the world body
A more strategic relationship with the world body
A particularly troubled time for the world body
Monday night among members of the world body
Committed to strengthening the world body
Enhancing the capacity of the world body
Reason enough to create the world body
The world body could take action
The world body has had past experiences
The world body is the prime instrument
The world body is possibly too democratic for its own good
The world body is supposed to print and oversee
A document enabling the world body
To undermine the effectiveness of the world body
It should have its own seat in the world body
A “Goodwill Ambassador” for the world body
Deviously appointed to the world body
A second-class citizen at the world body
Has yet to get approval from the world body
A horde of reforms for the world body
The Western Shoshone tribe has asked the world body
To tackle the problems facing the world body
Detrimental to the internal unity of the world body
World Rankings released by the world body
Findings that further tarnish the world body
Sweeping changes to the world body
What larger players have in mind for the world body
Taking Iran before the world body
The Islamic world in the world body
Endorsing the reshaping of the world body
Will also oblige the world body
To regain legitimacy for the world body
What future would await the world body?
The bleeding sometimes never seems to stop, according to the world body
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.
