Series: Antiphony: Paul Zweig

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 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’ve been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own: thirty-three of them so far. I haven’t done this in close to a month, though, so I’m not sure how successfully I’ll be able to get back into it.

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.

I’ve been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the eighteenth 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. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or two to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

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.

I’ve been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the nineteenth 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. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or two to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

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 been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the twentieth 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. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or two to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

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.

I’ve been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the twenty-second 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. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or two to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

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.

I’ve been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the twenty-fourth 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. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or two to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

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.