The Laughter of the Sphinx

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by Michael Palmer




  ALSO BY MICHAEL PALMER

  books and chapbooks

  Thread

  Company of Moths

  Codes Appearing

  The Promises of Glass

  The Danish Notebook

  The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972–1995

  At Passages

  An Alphabet Underground

  For a Reading

  Sun

  Songs for Sarah

  First Figure

  Notes for Echo Lake

  Alogon

  Transparency of the Mirror

  Without Music

  The Circular Gates

  C’s Songs

  Blake’s Newton

  Plan of the City of O

  selected translations

  Voyelles by Arthur Rimbaud

  Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (film by Alain Tanner)

  The Surrealists Look at Art (with Norma Cole)

  Blue Vitriol by Alexei Parshchikov (with John High and Michael Molnar)

  Theory of Tables by Emmanuel Hocquard

  Three Moral Tales by Emmanuel Hocquard

  in The Selected Poetry of Vicente Huidobro

  in The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry

  in Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain: 20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets

  in Twenty-two New French Writers

  other

  Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics, ed. Michael Palmer

  Contents

  THE LAUGHTER OF THE SPHINX Author’s Note

  Idiot Song

  Let Us Ravel the Silence

  For László K

  The Laughter of the Sphinx

  His Artificial Lover Sings a Wordless Song

  Isle of Dogs

  Light Moves 1

  Light Moves 2

  Light Moves 3

  Light Moves 4

  Light Moves 5

  Light Moves 6

  Untitled (27 vii 2012)

  Trio (Paris 1959)

  In Elegy (The Mute Carter Sings)

  Tomb of Aimé Césaire

  Sounds for Times Bones (among the dancers)

  Storm

  Unter den Linden

  In Memory of Ivan Tcherepnin

  Call

  Encounter

  Call the Makers

  Untitled (Jerusalem April 2013)

  Shrine (Hong Kong)

  Did

  Untitled (27 vi 2013)

  Prose for Times Bones

  A Dream of Sound Inside the Mountain (after Anish Kapoor)

  Perfezione della neve

  Honor (O.M.)

  Untitled (15 viii 2013)

  Song

  Let Us

  All

  At the Tomb of Artaud

  Poem (Oct – Nov 2013)

  To X (Endarkenment)

  To the Polish Poets (March 2014)

  A Late Supper

  Poem Devoid of Meaning

  Strange Now

  Falling Down in America

  Proposition

  Addendum

  Et in Arcadia

  The Republic

  After

  STILL Zeit ist Geld

  1st chorus

  There’s no there’s no there’s no

  The child first learning the words

  2nd chorus

  From the broken tower

  And the children sing

  Things get lost

  The children drum on anything

  3rd chorus

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Title-Page

  Frontmatter

  Start of Content

  THE LAUGHTER

  OF THE SPHINX

  Author’s Note

  A number of the poems included here have led parallel lives. “Light Moves (1 – 6)” were written as one part of my collaboration with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company on the dance Light Moves (2011). They pointedly echo and evolve from Jackson MacLow’s 22 Light Poems (Black Sparrow Press, 1968). Both “Sounds for Times Bones” and “Prose for Times Bones” were written for the same company’s 40th-anniversary work, Times Bones (sic - 2014). “A Dream of Sound Inside the Mountain” was commissioned as a response to Anish Kapoor’s sculpture “Large Mountain” and was first published as one in a series of responses by an international group of poets, a chapbook entitled “Poetry for Anish Kapoor” (Palais des Beaux-Arts, Bruxelles; Bozar Literature, 2013). “Let Us Ravel the Silence” first appeared in the French magazine Ligne 13 (#6, Winter-Spring 2013), in Françoise de Laroque’s translation. It was published in conjunction with Irving Petlin’s “The Emperor’s Bridge,” to which it is, similarly, a response. Petlin’s pastel itself derives from an illustration in W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. So the wheel turns.

  “Still” was conceived as an open sequence both for voices and for the page. The order of the poems need not be seen as fixed. I envisioned it with the possibility of musical accompaniment, hence performance. Should a composer ever care to take all or some of it on, I would hope that she or he would feel free to consider a transformative approach to the texts (e.g., by employing repeats, etc.) as desired. Here too, the possibility of parallel lives.

  Idiot Song

  By permission of the sun,

  the arctic chill descends.

  In a teacup a storm,

  in a sentence the logician’s fate

  and poetry an enemy of the state

  of things

  by the roadside in a ditch

  or beneath a buckled bridge.

  Now it is our wounds

  that make love in the streets,

  wounds hastily dressed

  with vetiver and mint

  while slender poplars bend

  amidst the violent winds.

  What is your name,

  mindless sun?

  What idiot song

  will mark your end?

  Let Us Ravel the Silence

  Let us ravel the silence,

  its pages turning

  It is a hum, after all, of no sound,

  a buzz of absent bees,

  a swirl of sky licked by flame

  and a waste of sea,

  reeds bending east towards a tentative shore,

  scatter song of light’s passage

  across a curving earth

  There is a bridge in the bare distance

  It is a bridge between silences,

  bridge of steel where once

  the Emperor’s dragon was meant to pass

  bearing the palaces of the gods on its back,

  brows furled over blazing eyes,

  scales of gold coating the torso

  And always the stones at sea-bottom

  like extinguished stars

  The sun here neither rises nor sets

  Does chalk emit a breath

  For László K

  The characters are the victims of the novel

  They pay with their lives

  for our words

  They fall between the pages

  in their silence

  and we invent hounds

  to devour the
m

  We invent worlds

  to swallow them

  We pass sentence

  upon them

  The hangman arrives

  with his silken rope

  its infinite strands

  forming a circle

  without beginning or end

  round as the wave’s grey eye

  rolling toward what sudden shore

  unpeopled yet teeming

  with watchful night fires

  The Laughter of the Sphinx

  The laughter of the Sphinx

  caused my eyes to bleed

  The blood from my eyes

  flowed onto that ancient map

  of sand

  Ridiculous as I am

  often have I been drawn

  to such lands

  rippling oceans of silence

  and the distant, enigmatic glow

  of burning shops and burning scrolls

  overseen by river birds and mitered beasts

  sad-eyed scholars and mournful scribes

  omniscient ibises

  and in the dust-clogged air

  the laughter of the Sphinx

  endlessly riddling, endlessly echoing,

  loosing the blood’s engulfing tide

  His Artificial Lover Sings a Wordless Song

  The year of silence coming to an end

  my artificial lover joined me on the fevered wheel

  to the tune of Tinkers Polka, Plums of Purity,

  Under the Double Eagle, When

  the White Magnolias Bloom . . .

  Artificial love was in flower

  amidst the revolutionary fragments.

  I wondered then, do captive griffins roar

  in their dreams? The Mosquito Waltz,

  Tiger Mourning for Its Shadow . . .

  Far from the real

  a day of naked beauty, filtered light.

  Do children link their arms as before?

  Do they play at rounders, blindman’s buff?

  Will the despoilers have it all

  to themselves? Even the textured sky?

  Xi Chuan, we often ask the same

  questions it seems, or is it simply

  that together we studied the stars

  in Mechanicsville? Orion’s Belt shown,

  the Sisters and the Drinking Gourd.

  Words formed

  their own

  seamless patterns

  one moment,

  sundered the next.

  My artificial lover joined me on time’s wheel

  in the painted world.

  The birds of the hours

  crossed and recrossed

  before us.

  The crowded barques set out.

  Isle of Dogs

  On the Isle of Dogs we barked.

  We had our say

  from day till dark.

  A chorus we were

  of piebald hounds.

  Our howling spiraled out

  across the downs.

  We howled at the redness of light,

  bayed at the rising waters

  and approaching night—

  we lived on an island of sounds.

  None listened, none heard,

  the sounds were entirely ours .

  None listened, none heard

  but we didn’t care

  as long as our howls

  shaped the still air—

  we lived on the Isle of Sounds.

  Light Moves 1

  Mineral light and whale light,

  light of memory, light of the eye,

  memory’s eye, shaded amber light

  coating the page, fretted

  light of anarchy, flare of bent

  time, firelight and first light,

  lake light and forest light,

  arcing harbor light,

  spirit light and light of the blaze,

  enveloping blaze,

  century’s fading light,

  light of cello, voice, drum,

  figures billowing along

  horizon, aligned, outlined.

  Light Moves 2

  Bright light of sleep, its

  shortness of breath, its

  thousand sexual suns, curved

  and fretted light, lies of that light,

  dark, inner light, its

  whispered words:

  Now beyond, now below,

  this to left, this to right,

  scarecrow in stubble field,

  nighthawk on wire,

  these to cleanse your sight.

  Light Moves 3

  Light through the Paper House

  rippling across floors and walls,

  across the words of the walls,

  its paper tables, paper chairs,

  its corners,

  pale light by which it reads itself,

  fills and empties itself,

  and speaks.

  Light Moves 4

  Watcher on the cliff-head

  in afternoon light, aqueous light,

  watcher being watched

  in the salt-silver light

  amidst the darting of terns,

  beach swallows and gulls,

  between the snow of sand

  and the transit of clouds,

  keeper of thought or prisoner of thought,

  watcher being watched,

  snowman of sand,

  anonymous man.

  Light Moves 5

  Night-sun and day-sun

  twinned and intertwined,

  light by a bedside,

  cat’s eye by night,

  owl light and crystal light,

  endless motion of the light,

  the rise and the fall,

  the splintered flare,

  churning northern lights,

  phosphor, tip of iris,

  gunmetal moon’s

  far, reflected light,

  oil sheen

  on pelican’s wing.

  Light Moves 6

  And yet what have we done

  where have we gone

  sometimes in light sometimes not

  traveling

  we say the great world the small world

  the fields

  patched with yellow the sudden crows

  the city’s streets

  alone among others

  the billowing streets

  bodies crowding past

  outlined by light.

  What have we done

  among the roads and fields

  in the theater’s shadows and the theater’s light

  so bright you cannot see

  those watching beyond

  in perfect rows in the dark.

  (in homage to Jackson MacLow)

  Untitled

  (27 vii 2012)

  A messenger passed over me

  (it was 11:41 PM)

  and I thought:

  I wish I were as stark

  and true as Sonny Rollins

  those nights on the singing bridge,

  wish to gnaw on the singing bones

  in Charlieville and Rome,

  wish for the peace of the blaze,

  peace of the parricide,

  of the eternal ferryman

  blind to the river’s twin sides.

  A messenger passed over me

  (it was 11:43).

  I washed the last dishes,

  gazed at my altered eyes

  in the fractured glass,

  found fellowship with a moth


  flecked with gold,

  tore certain pages apart.

  A messenger passed over me

  (it was 11:51).

  I watched the rain

  seep through the roof,

  counted the drops,

  thinking of Li Po.

  A messenger passed through me

  (it was 11:58),

  passed over the waters

  of the warming world,

  passed through the eaves, the walls,

  the pages of this house,

  and I knew that soon enough I would become

  a fossil bird or a diorite stone.

  Trio (Paris 1959)

  And at the Blue Note

  that night Bud called

  Pork Chops and Assholes

  In Elegy

  (The Mute Carter Sings)

  Sings:

  When young

  we lived in a certain

  enveloping light

  and things turned

  it seemed

  toward our eyes

  as if coming to be

  Yet to see them again

  as if ourselves then

  The quartzite

  stone the blood

  pours through how

  it pours silently through

  the bright stone

  The pepper tree that speaks

  of lost meanings by a stream

  meanings of speech

  meanings of tree

  what meaning to the stream

  Wheels on the night path

  sounding their way

  The mute carter sings:

  My cart is full

  my cart is empty

  one and the same

  The voices of children

  and dogs intermingling

  the slender girls along the shore

  chanting the coming mysteries

  the confounding mysteries

  of what is to be

  In elegy the mirror

  reassembling its shards

  In elegy memory

  embracing its shadows

  In elegy shadows

  refashioning the body

  In elegy the bell

  betraying the hours

  In elegy the page

  borne off by a breeze

  The mute carter sings:

  We swallow the earth

  limb by limb

 

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