The End Circulates in the Wide Space of Summer
by Paul Zweig

I
We hardly speak.
You have been here so long
You are like another leg or arm.
We trot across the ice,
Approach the book, and enter it.

[Remainder of poem removed to avoid violating copyright]

* * * *

The Fish Swims Under the Mountain of the World

Sunrise, & the wren’s song bubbles
up from his feet. He dances on the wall
as the ridge turns crimson. Watching from
the window, I feel the heaviness in my chest
lifting like a field stone flipped by the plow,
turning its unmarked cheek toward the harrow.
This world was never a text. With the spring
plowing, arrowheads swim to the surface
of the field adjoining the large sinkhole
down in the valley where an underground stream
briefly exposes itself to view. You can follow it
back under the bedrock in growing darkness,
hunching farther & farther over until you’re down
on all fours & the water meets the ceiling
with a final gurgle. I think of this whenever
the sky in a poem shivers under the knife
of a wing. Some hide is forever being flensed.
Practiced fingers turn the outside in,
or pull & sever a slick fish-shape from
the mother of flint. What flesh did those stone
points seek, so near the valley’s own gullet?
The hunters left no record on the cave walls
that hundred-year floods wouldn’t have erased,
but elsewhere, a few pecked images remain:
dream creatures carved on riverside cliffs, or
on the spines of ridges hundreds of miles long,
these sinuous swimmers. Yesterday morning,
I walked the ridge crest as far as the gap
& stood watching the sun shimmering on the river
& glancing off the windshields of trucks
in the quarry beyond, back-lighting
their plumes of yellow dust. In a month
& a half, this view will vanish behind
a screen of leaves, & by midsummer,
the field next to the cave will be thick
with the rustle of corn, product of 8,000 years
of continuous editing. I come home to
the blank page with my gaze full of distances,
thinking of a fish buried under a hill
so the Three Sisters – Squash & Beans & Corn –
can sing their names into memory another year,
the pattern of scales replicated in the grain.
I too used to garden that way,
& could again. It’s spring. The first
mayflies are rising. Something leaps.

Eternity’s Woods
by Paul Zweig

I
I have come to this house
Of soft angular stone, wondering
How much must fall away before I have nothing.

[Remainder of poem removed to avoid violating copyright]

* * * *

Water

I have sought to borrow inspiration
as others borrow comfort
from strange lovers. Let me

press my ear, I said, against
the scallop shell at the base
of your throat. Let me hear

the throb of the surf, & dream
of ships. What were we
talking about, again? I caught

nothing but a swallowed sob,
a corrosive drip. Compostela
remained a day’s walk away from
the Cape of the End of the Earth,

which was of course pure hype.
Right here in the hollow
where I grew up, I have heard
water trickling under the rocks,

& once my brother & I even dug
for it, four feet down through
a jumble of sandstone. When
we quit, the water sounded

just as loud as it had before
we started. I used to search
for a clearing in the woods
where, when the wind stopped,

the only sound would come
from a hidden spring. But
I didn’t want it ever to be found,

not even by me. Solitude
has since become my deadliest habit.
I don’t know what I am doing

here, talking to a dead poet as if to
my better nature, dreaming of poems
that would taste as good as water.

The Taking Away
by Paul Zweig

The close-fitting sleepless night,
Everything still: the woodchuck in its hole
Under the rock pile, the apple tree outside my window.
[…]

* * * *

Outside In

A night of wind
& the smell of thawed soil,
rustle of nightcrawlers
tugging leaves down
under the earth,
rapid footfalls of rain.
At the woods’ edge,
a constant creaking
& groaning, as if
from doors swinging
loose on their hinges,
which are stiff with rust
from a lifetime in
the open air. I sleep
without dreaming,
wake without waking up.
Two more hairs turn white
according to schedule.
The house shakes
with the effort to keep
from flying apart.

The Other Ocean
by Paul Zweig

It was the whip-marks of the horned asp,
And the Beduin sucking his coffee
Through cracked fleshy lips…
[Remainder of poem removed]
* * * *

The Other Coltrane

when the new moon’s still a sliver
pale fingernail against
the blackboard

& you hear
the shriek of wheels gone
slightly off-true with the track

ninety-nine cars heaped high with coal
hurtling by in the darkness

don’t it make you shiver
that night train

And Yet . . .
by Paul Zweig

It’s true, we carry the world inside us,
Always present like light.
[…]

* * * *

Inside-Out

1.
It’s false, the world we carry inside us,
like a stone in a chicken’s crop,
that false tooth.
The winter light;
the red haze of maple buds just beginning to swell;
the story in the paper about the walled-off beach in Haiti
where cruise ships disgorge their passengers
without telling them where they are,
& the local man interviewed for the story says
They want to come here, because they’ve been everywhere else
& my country is the loveliest of all –
it hurts, this world, it makes us ache with longing.
And yet no amount of saliva will grow a pearl around it,
because it is not the real world, which we do not know.

2.
But the world knows us.
It doesn’t stop where we do, at the fingertips,
doesn’t get sidetracked in the labyrinths of lung & gut.
We glow in its shadow the way the moon glows, lurid,
during an eclipse.
It seeds us with cities, this world that was once a womb.
When we die, the abandoned residents
eat themselves out of house & home.

3.
Like the wish hiding in the wishbone,
I take my own sweet time.
If you want to see me sooner, stand
between two mirrors turned to face each other.
Though the antibodies will all muster out,
crane your neck as best you can,
look over their shoulders.
There at the end of the tunnel:
that darkness. A hint of stars.

Parting the Sea
by Paul Zweig

Fog hides the shallow ditch, no more
Than a grassy furrow, marking the edge of our land.
[…]

* * * *

Molding the Image
              Aaron speaks

Stay up on the mountain too long, & it changes you.
Droplets of cloud cling to your beard.
Your skin begins to glow like a salamander’s belly.
The occasional groans of the trees start to sound
like the way a crowd should murmur.

Waking up every morning to find the same,
present moment whispering
its incessant demands in your ear –
it makes you intolerable.
You lose touch with the teeming pleasures
that ordinary people crave, because their days are long
& time points in one direction.

Living in the clouds, you lose all perspective,
until one day your worst fantasies
rise up against you:
the luster of gold unfastened from wrist & ankle,
oiled bodies ready for some glistening bullock.
The smashed tablets.
The swords dripping with gore.

Look, I am not that man Moses,
so incoherent with whatever strong emotion
happens to possess him.
God gave me the subtle tongue of a go-between
& the vision to match, bending
in both directions. Look,
the needs of the people are holy to me.
I have been to the mountain, & I can tell you,
there’s nothing up there that’s even faintly human.

Early Waking
by Paul Zweig

Again the ashen light,
A tiny spider swinging on its pendulum thread
Against the pane.
[…]

* * * *

Waking Up Dead

Lost the letter I in a card game
& wake up still a little drunk.
The sky looks like the proverbial world
of hurt, scarred by contrails that fade slowly,
much too slowly.
Laundry flaps on the line, & I can make out
every word: Red. Black.
Blue. The dark wash.

But where is everybody?
This old light bulb is fresh out of ideas,
even bad ones.
This body wants to be thumbed through
like someone’s bedtime reading.
The kind with covers of broken-down leather,
dog-eared pages edged
in ineradicable gilt –
the sun through closed eyelids.

Jesus.
This would be a damn sight easier
if I still made sense.

Wasps
by Paul Zweig

This morning I thumbed the spray-can,
And they stumbled from the rafters,
From the cheap rippled glass of the kitchen pane […]

* * * *

Vacuuming the beetles

Hundreds of ladybugs huddle together
in clumps in the corners where wall
& ceiling meet. I point the black tube
like a magic wand, a reverse rifle,
& the beetles disappear with the briefest of rattles
down the vacuum’s plastic throat.
This is nothing like hunting, no meditative wait,
no tense silence or rush of adrenaline.
Snuffing out these house invaders, I feel nothing.
I am alone with the sound of the cleaner,
which cancels out every competing thought.
If there were sound in space, a star
would howl like this when it collapsed into itself:
detritus from the ceiling, meet the detritus from the floor.
Bright clot of color, flame,
here’s a sackful of dust in which to gutter.
The acrid stench of alarm pheromones
grows stronger & stronger, & my stomach heaves
with sudden nausea, the body’s impulse to rid
itself of itself,
starting with the most recent foreign matter.

I’ve had a difficult time resuming this exercise in the New Year, and not for lack of trying. In fact, several of my most successful posts began as responses to this poem, but quickly turned into something else.

The Question
by Paul Zweig

Stone-blue winter;
The upswept brush of winter oak
Vibrates in the wind, expectant, bridelike.

Who am I?
An insect, startled, still sleeping
By the fire.

A bird clings to the telephone wire
Behind the house; an exultant questioning
Booms at its feet. When we die,
We hug the living to us as we never did;
We notice their creased skin, their quick eyes
That slide away, seeing more than they intended.

Who is that moving beside you,
So at ease, so colorless?
What can that dark flutter
Of his say to you, his voice thinned
To pass death’s membrane?

* * * *

Axe

Sein Sinn ist Zwiesplat. An der Kreuzung zweier
Herzwege steht kein Tempel für Apoll.
Rilke

It was late. The lamplight gelled around you
like pine sap thickening into amber.
You were forgetting how to read, losing words
in the exact reverse order of how you learned them decades before,
until the book open on your lap seemed
as blankly comforting as a glass of milk.

Death had come, but not for the reasons usually alleged.
He found himself enchanted by your bones,
which were light as piccolos, & your skull’s smile
faintly visible under the skin
like a subliminal advertisement for eternal spring.
The clock stopped in mid-tick.
Your eyes took on a faraway look.

Was I supposed to run after you? I was tired.
My trademark guitar had long since gone electric –
an axe, as they say.
The kind with back-to-back blades:
one for the kindling, one for the icy air.

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

This You May Keep
by Paul Zweig

A showering of branches,
Leaves in all their fits, their sultry shakes,
Like voices circling in a room . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 12-28-05]

* * * *

This You Must Know

The surface tension of water, & how to use it
for nearly effortless walking.

Light without heat: what every glowworm knows.

What it means to be larval,
to have complicated mouthparts
& the sprout-tips of wings.

The secrets of chitin, which imposes limits to growth
through an architect’s dream of fully inhabitable space.

Why snow fleas persist in seeking their fortunes
on the skin of such a cold, white host.

What the inchworm really measures
with its green prostrations.

What this is that we are told
the meek
shall inherit.

__________

Chitin, pronounced KITE-n, is a nitrogenous polysaccharide – i.e., a type of sugar – responsible for the tough, outer shells of most invertebrates, including insect exoskeletons, as well as the architecture of fungal mycelia and lichens.