Category: Poems & poem-like things

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

Afraid That I Am Not a Poet
by Paul Zweig

Afraid that I am not a poet,
Yet willing to write
Even about that . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 8-25-05]

* * * *

Ukiyo-E

Outside of a poem, I have never seen
such a seemingly everyday thing as
an empty mirror.

I think of the fear I would feel if
I came face to face with
the absence of myself
& shiver with longing & delight.

Ah, that the mere thought of a thing –
an outline, an image – can open
a window in my chest
& make my tongue dance about
for words!
__________

Ukiyo-e, which refers to a genre of pre-modern Japanese woodblock prints depicting scenes from the demimonde, literally means “Picture(s) of the Floating World.”

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

On Possessions
by Paul Zweig

      I
Burning what I own,
Burning this fuel of nerves and money . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 8-25-05]

* * * *

On Possession

1.
The Gothic cathedral at Burgos, in northern Spain,
was too much: all that colored light
flooding in around the apse
where the monstrous symbolic god was expected
to lay his thorn-pillowed head.
I couldn’t see it.

Cathedrals are best on days when wind & rain
beat their wings against the glass.
Outside, the stone shell darkens
& one longs to pull it tight against the skin
like a frogman’s wetsuit.
Inside: revelation. That a blue drop
should hide a molten core!

2.
The lords of this world reach as far as they need to.
Their fingertips smell of oil & wet ashes
from the crematorium.
We are all possessed, say
the bells of wherever.
This very poem gutters in its wax, poor thing.

3.
The university library commissioned a sculpture
to mark the dedication of a new wing:
in white marble, an open book
with a flame rising from the page, tall
& sinuous – a lap dancer
in the seat of what, we are solemnly
given to understand, represents knowledge.
The room vibrates with the hum of computers.
Sunlight slants through the high windows
above the milling crowd of students,
smooth faces glowing,
glowering,
glistening,
glazed
from the firing of each split-second synapse,
that light-drenched gap.

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the fourth poem from his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

A Sadness from the Old Philosophers
by Paul Zweig

I plant my stick in the loose earth,
And now my father lies down beside me….

[Remainder of poem removed 8-23-05]

* * * *

A Wryness from the Old Wives

Click, clack says my walking stick,
& the soft buzz of a rattlesnake
shivers from the rock.

You go for water & bring back a strange new lover:
that’s how it is in the tales the old wives
used to roll between their palms.

One long noodle of clay made a bowl, a mirror
you could drink from. Coiling or uncoiling,
something always gets loose.

Northern true katydid (Pterophylla camellifolia)

What does it mean to bring one’s full attention to a text? Medieval Christian mystics pioneered a form of deep reading, lectio divina, which they viewed as indispensable to clear thinking, prayer and contemplation. As one present-day Benedictine monk puts it,

The art of lectio divina begins with cultivating the ability to listen deeply, to hear “with the ear of our hearts” as St. Benedict encourages us in the Prologue to the Rule…. [This] is very different from the speed reading which modern Christians apply to newspapers, books and even to the Bible. Lectio is reverential listening; listening both in a spirit of silence and of awe. We are listening for the still, small voice of God that will speak to us personally – not loudly, but intimately.

(For more on lectio divina, see Slow Reads blogger Peter’s review of Sacred Reading: the Ancient Art of Lectio Divina, by Michael Casey.) Could something of this technique be carried over into secular reading? After all, every truly inspired text is full of silences and caesuras, places where the incommensurability of word and world appears to be a source of energy rather than an obstacle, like the gap in a spark plug. The goal would be a bit more modest: rather than Christian contemplation, I’m after little more than the meditative trance brought on by immersion in creative work. That’s the logic behind this experiment in writing poems prompted by the poems of others, beginning with Paul Zweig: more antiphony than lectio, I suppose. My intent is not to try and equal – or even really to imitate – the original poem, but simply to respond to it out of my own experience, using the most exact and exacting language I can muster. I don’t expect every response to be a resounding success. But I am hoping that the effort will lead me to listen more attentively to all the sounds and layers of meaning in the original texts.

Here’s the second piece included in Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, edited by C. K. Williams, Wesleyan University Press, 1989. (After a week or so, I’ll remove his poems from the posts in order to avoid copyright infringement.)

Walking over Brooklyn
by Paul Zweig

Black smoke trails from the incinerators,
Bits of cardboard flaming in the cage
On top of tall chimneys….

[Remainder of poem removed 8-21-05]

* * * *

Eye to Eye

In the story of my childhood I am
usually elsewhere, a thin presence to myself,
mumbling from a script of my own devising.
It never occurs to me to wonder
how my opposite number the hero
might really feel: Hey, it’s hot up here!
I’m tired of coming to the rescue of girls
you’re too scared to say one word to.
And how can you call yourself a pacifist
& expect me to avenge all wrongs
with my infallible fists?

Of unscripted moments, I remember few.
I wreck every kite I ever try to fly
in the mountaintop’s sideways wind.

Late summer of my 40th year, I catch
an echo of my childhood in the nightly
chorus of katydids, their camouflaged
leaf-bodies falling out of & back into unison
like a concert audience that continues its rhythmic
clapping during a break in the music.
I float on that throbbing: sleep is the only time
I get to dream now. By day, I tread
the high wires of the cicadas’ whine
& press a cold watermelon to my belly –
one sightless eyeball to another.
Soon enough, all distance will dissolve
into a single arc of spent sugar.
The half-moon will rise a lurid red.

Marooned in motel rooms for five days with a single, well-thumbed book of poetry, I pored over the words of Paul Zweig – his Selected and Last Poems, edited by C. K. Williams, Wesleyan University Press, 1989 – like a shipwrecked survivor hoarding pieces of driftwood. I began thinking about a new experiment in close reading or exegesis wherein I would write poems of my own in response to poems by some of my favorite writers, beginning with Zweig. I have no idea whether I’ll be able to carry through with it or not; even stating the aspiration here violates a personal taboo against articulating an ambition for a writing project before undertaking it. So it’s more than likely that this post will be a one-off. In any case, my intent is not to match Zweig’s effort – a near-impossibility – but simply to respond to it using the most exact and exacting language I can muster.

Here’s the poem C. K. Williams chose as the opener; it originally appeared in the book Against Emptiness. As always, merely typing out the words of another poet enforces a more intimate kind of reading than I am used to…

On Discovering a Thighbone under a Heap of Stones
by Paul Zweig

      I
I’m waiting for the Druid to claim his bone
In the woodshed. I have dusted and cleaned it,
But the stain of earth remains….

[Remainder of poem removed 8-18-05]

* * * *

On Discovering a Poem by Paul Zweig

I have grown too accustomed to the terms
of surrender, the unconditional so-called
human condition. In the crawl-space
under my house, dust where no rain
has fallen in a hundred & fifty years
preserves not merely bones but hide
& hair of rat, raccoon, groundhog.
A porcupine flat as a punctured balloon
still bristles with the nibs of dry pens.
Every few years when I have to repair
the insulation around the heating ducts,
I uncover the remains of my fellow inhabitants
with a shock of recognition:
that I have never been here before, as long
as I have traveled in this one place.
Perennial wonder that we & the dead
should possess such durability. Aside
from the body’s moist exudates,
what passes? Earth, bone, these fossils
under our faces: consonants in
some ancient Baedeker
dehydrated for easy portability –
add vowels & serve.

I ask no more of you than what you wanted
from yourself, Zweig. The opening poem
in your posthumous book almost begs
the well-traveled reader to pass by.
Blood, stones, field – the shibboleths
of every workshop poet. But I am hardly
a sophisticate myself; what better place
to begin than the common gate?
Gate.
Rogate.
Interrogate.
We spell each other, then. The dry bones live.