Later Poems Selected and New
Page 29
So : a scrap of paper a loved bitter scrawl
swirls under into the confluence
of bodily waste and wasted bodies :
—a shred absorbed, belonging
7
Weathers drag down and claw up the will :
yellowdust wind asphalt fog a green slash
of aurora borealis or :
a surveillance helicopter’s high-intensity beam
impaling solitudes ransacking solidarities
In the end no pleas no bargains :
it’s your own humanity you’ll have to drag
over and over, piece by piece
page after page
out of the dark
2010–2011
Endpapers
i.
If the road’s a frayed ribbon strung through dunes
continually drifting over
if the night grew green as sun and moon
changed faces and the sea became
its own unlit unlikely sound
consider yourself lucky to have come
this far Consider yourself
a trombone blowing unheard
tones a bass string plucked or locked
down by a hand its face articulated
in shadow, pressed against
a chain-link fence Consider yourself
inside or outside, where-
ever you were when knotted steel
stopped you short You can’t flow through
as music or
as air
ii.
What holds what binds is breath is
primal vision in a cloud’s eye
is gauze around a wounded head
is bearing a downed comrade out beyond
the numerology of vital signs
into predictless space
iii.
The signature to a life requires
the search for a method
rejection of posturing
trust in the witnesses
a vial of invisible ink
a sheet of paper held steady
after the end-stroke
above a deciphering flame
2011
Notes on the Poems
* * *
Your Native Land, Your Life
SOURCES
The phrase “an end to suffering” was evoked by a sentence in Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter: “No one knows where the end of suffering will begin.”
NORTH AMERICAN TIME: IX
Julia de Burgos (1914–1953), Puerto Rican poet and revolutionary who died on the streets of New York City.
DREAMS BEFORE WAKING
“Hasta tu país cambió. Lo has cambiado tú mismo” (“Even your country has changed. You yourself have changed it”). These lines, from Morejón’s “Elogio de la Dialéctica,” and Georgina Herrera’s poem “Como Presentaciön, Como Disculpa” can be found in Margaret Randall, ed., Breaking the Silences: Twentieth Century Poetry by Cuban Women (1982). Pulp Press, 3868 MPO, Vancouver, Canada V6B 3Z3.
ONE KIND OF TERROR: A LOVE POEM: 6
“Now you have touched the women, you have struck a rock, you have dislodged a boulder, you will be crushed.” Freedom song sung by African women in mass demonstration in Pretoria, 1956, in which 20,000 women gathered to protest the issue of passes to women. See Hilda Bernstein, For Their Triumphs and for Their Tears, International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa, 1975.
YOM KIPPUR 1984
The epigraph and quoted lines from Robinson Jeffers come from The Women at Point Sur and Other Poems (New York: Liveright, 1977).
CONTRADICTIONS: 16
See Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927–1979 (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), p. 173.
CONTRADICTIONS: 26
See Cynthia Ozick, Art and Ardor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984), p. 255: “the glorious So What: the life-cry.”
CONTRADICTIONS: 27
Ding Ling, leading Chinese novelist and major literary figure in the Revolutionary government under Mao. Exiled in 1957 for writing too critically and independently. Imprisoned as a counterrevolutionary in 1970; cleared of all charges in 1976 at the end of the Cultural Revolution.
Time’s Power
SLEEPWALKING NEXT TO DEATH
Title and opening words from “Slaapwandelen (naast de dood)” by Chr. J. van Geel, Dutch poet and painter. For the original and my translation, see Adrienne Rich, Necessities of Life (New York: Norton, 1966).
HARPERS FERRY
In 1859, the white abolitionist John Brown rented a farm near Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), as a base for slave insurrections. On October 16 of that year, he and his men raided and captured the federal arsenal, but found their escape blocked by local militia; the U.S. marines then seized the arsenal. Ten of Brown’s men were killed in this conflict, and Brown himself was later tried and hanged. Harriet Tubman (1820–1913), Black antislavery activist and strategist, led more than 300 people from slavery to freedom via the Underground Railroad. She was known as “General Moses.” Though in contact with John Brown, she withdrew from participation before the raid. Tubman never actually came to Harpers Ferry; her appearance in this poem is a fiction.
LIVING MEMORY
“it was pick and shovel work . . .”: quoted from Wally Hunt’s Vermont (Brownington, Vt.: Orleans County Historical Society, 1983).
An Atlas of the Difficult World
AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD: V
“over the chained bay waters.” From Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge,” in The Poems of Hart Crane, ed. Marc Simon (New York and London: Liveright, 1989; poem originally published in 1930). “There are roads to take when you think of your country.” From Muriel Rukeyser, U.S. I (New York: Covici Friede, 1938); see also Muriel Rukeyser, The Collected Poems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978). “I don’t want to know how he tracked them.” On May 13, 1988, Stephen Roy Carr shot and killed Rebecca Wight, one of two lesbians camping on the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania. Her lover, Claudia Brenner, suffered five bullet wounds. She dragged herself two miles along the trail to a road, where she flagged a car to take her to the police. In October of that year, Carr was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. During the legal proceedings, it became clear that Carr had attacked the women because they were lesbians. See Gay Community News (August 7 and November 11, 1988).
AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD: VI
“Hatred of England smouldering like a turf-fire.” See Nella Braddy, Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story behind Helen Keller (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1933), p. 13. “Meat three times a day.” See Frank Murray, “The Irish and Afro-Americans in U.S. History,” Freedomways: A Quarterly Review of the Freedom Movement 22, no. 1 (1982): 22.
AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD: X
The passages in italics are quoted from Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (New York: Bantam, 1970), pp. 24, 26, 93, 245
TATTERED KADDISH
“The Reapers of the Field are the Comrades, masters of this wisdom, because Malkhut is called the Apple Field, and She grows sprouts of secrets and new meanings of Torah. Those who constantly create new interpretations of Torah are the ones who reap Her” (Moses Cordovero, Or ha-Hammah on Zohar 111, 106a). See Barry W. Holtz, ed., Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts (New York: Summit, 1984), p. 305.
FOR A FRIEND IN TRAVAIL
“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him ‘What are you going through?’ ” Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Putnam, 1951), p. 115.
Dark Fields of the Republic
WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE
The title is from Bertolt Brecht’s poem “An Die Nachgeborenen” (“For Those Born Later”): What kind of times are these / When it’s almost a crime to talk about trees / Because it means keeping still about so many evil deeds? (For the complete poem, in a different translation, see Joh
n Willett and Ralph Manheim, eds., Bertolt Brecht, Poems 1913–1956 [New York: Methuen, 1976], pp. 318–320.)
“our country moving closer to its own truth and dread . . .” echoes Osip Mandelstam’s 1921 poem that begins I was washing outside in the darkness and ends The earth’s moving closer to truth and to dread. (Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, trans., Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems [New York: Atheneum, 1974], p. 40.) Mandelstam was forbidden to publish, then exiled and sentenced to five years of hard labor for a poem caricaturing Stalin; he died in a transit camp in 1938.
“To be human, said Rosa . . .”: Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was a Polish-born middle-class Jew. Early in her abbreviated life she entered the currents of European socialist revolutionary thinking and action. She became one of the most influential and controversial figures in the social-democratic movements of Eastern Europe and Germany. Besides her political essays, she left hundreds of vivid letters to friends and comrades. Imprisoned during World War I for her strongly internationalist and anticapitalist beliefs, she was murdered in Berlin in 1919 by right-wing soldiers, with the passive collusion of a faction from her own party. Her body was thrown into a canal. On December 28, 1916, from prison, she wrote a New Year letter to friends she feared were both backsliding and complaining: “Then see to it that you remain a Mensch! [Yiddish/German for human being] . . . Being a Mensch means happily throwing one’s life ‘on fate’s great scale’ if necessary, but, at the same time, enjoying every bright day and every beautiful cloud. Oh, I can’t write you a prescription for being a Mensch. I only know how one is a Mensch, and you used to know it too when we went walking for a few hours in the Südende fields with the sunset’s red light falling on the wheat. The world is so beautiful even with all its horrors.” The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, ed., trans. and with an intro. by Stephen Eric Bronner (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1993), p. 173.
CALLE VISIóN
Calle Visión is the name of a road in the southwestern United States—literally, “Vision Street.”
“that tells the coming of the railroad.” “With the coming of the railroad, new materials and pictorial designs and motifs, including trains themselves, appeared in Navaho weaving (ca. 1880).” (From the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe.)
“a place not to live but to die in.” See Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1635): “For the World, I count it not an Inn, but an Hospital; and a place not to live, but to dye in.” (Religio Medici and Other Writings by Sir Thomas Browne [London: Everyman’s Library, J. M. Dent, 1947], p. 83.)
“Have you ever worked around metal? . . .” From a questionnaire filled out before undergoing a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan.
“The world is falling down . . . .” From the song “The World Is Falling Down,” composed by Abbey Lincoln, sung by her on the Verve recording of the same title, 1990 (Moseka Music BMI).
“And the fire shall try . . . .” I Corinthians 3:13: “Every man’s work shall be made manifest . . . and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.” Used by Studs Terkel as an epigraph to his Working (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
REVERSION
This poem is for Nina Menkes and her film The Great Sadness of Zohara.
THEN OR NOW
This sequence of poems derives in part from Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969, ed. Lotte and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and Rita Kimbel (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992). While reading these letters, I had been reflecting on concepts of “guilt” and “innocence” among artists and intellectuals like myself in the United States. The poems owe much also to the continuing pressure of events.
SIX NARRATIVES
The narratives are spoken by different voices.
“Vigil for boy of responding kisses, . . .” See Walt Whitman, “Vigil strange I kept on the field one night,” in The Essential Whitman, selected and ed. Galway Kinnell (New York: Ecco Press, 1987,) pp. 123–124.
INSCRIPTIONS
“I need to live each day through . . . .” These two lines are quoted from an earlier poem of mine (“8/8/68: I”) in “Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib)”; see above.
“When shall we learn, what should be clear as day, . . . ?” These two lines are from W. H. Auden’s “Canzone,” in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (New York: Random House, 1945), p. 161.
“Medbh’s postcard from Belfast.” I thank the Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian for permission to quote her words from a postcard received in August 1994.
“suffused / by what it works in, ‘like the dyer’s hand.’ ” I had written “suffused,” later began looking up the line I was quoting from memory: was it Coleridge? Keats? Shakespeare? My friend Barbara Gelpi confirmed it was Shakespeare, in his Sonnet 111: Thence comes it that my name receives a brand / And almost thence my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand. I have kept “suffused” here because to feel suffused by the materials that one has perforce to work in is not necessarily to be subdued, though some might think so.
Midnight Salvage
CHAR
Italicized phrases and some images from Leaves of Hypnos, the journal kept in 1942–1943 by the poet René Char while he was a commander in the French Resistance, and from some of Char’s poems. I have drawn on both Jackson Mathews’s and Cid Corman’s translations of Char’s journal in integrating his words into my poem. Char joined the Surrealist movement late and broke with it prior to World War II. It was André Breton who said, “The simplest surrealist act consists of going down into the street, revolver in hand, and shooting at random.”
MODOTTI
Tina Modotti (1896–1942): photographer, political activist, revolutionary. Her most significant artistic work was done in Mexico in the 1920s, including a study of the typewriter belonging to her lover, the Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella. Framed for his murder by the fascists in 1929, she was expelled from Mexico in 1930. After some years of political activity in Berlin, the Soviet Union, and Spain, she returned incognito to Mexico, where she died in 1942. In my search for Modotti I had to follow clues she left; I did not want to iconize her but to imagine critically the traps and opportunities of her life and choices.
CAMINO REAL
“Can you afford not to make / the magical study / which happiness is?” From Charles Olson, “Variations Done for Gerald Van der Wiele,” in Charles Olson, Selected Poems, ed. Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 83.
“George Oppen to June Degnan: . . .” See George Oppen, The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 212.
Fox
MESSAGES
Blaise Pascal (1623–1662): Le silence éternel de ces espaces m’affraye. (The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me). See Pensées of Blaise Pascal, trans. W. F. Trotter, Everyman’s Library no. 874 (London: Dent, 1948), p. 61.
NOCTILUCENT CLOUDS
“Several times in the last few months, observers in the lower 48 have seen ‘noctilucent clouds,’ which develop about 50 miles above the earth’s surface—clouds so high that they reflect the sun’s rays long after nightfall. . . . [G]lobal warming seems to be driving them toward the equator. . . . In retrospect it will be clear.” Bill McKibben, “Indifferent to a Planet in Pain,” New York Times, Saturday, 4 September 1999, sec. A.
“Usonian”: The term used by Frank Lloyd Wright for his prairie-inspired American architecture.
TERZA RIMA: 3
Vivo nel non volare . . . : “I live in the failed will / of the post-war time / loving the world I hate”—Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Le Ceneri di Gramsci,” in Lawrence R. Smith, ed. and trans., The New Italian Poetry, 1945 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 80–81. See also Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poems, selected and trans. Norman MacAfee and Luciano Martinengo (London: John Calder, 1982), pp. 10–11.
WAITING FOR YOU AT THE MYSTERY SPOT
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br /> “The mystai streamed toward [the Telestrion].” C. Kerényi, Eleusis, trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen series 65, vol. 4 (New York: Bollingen Foundation/Pantheon, 1967), p. 82.
The School Among the Ruins
TELL ME
“remembered if outlived / as freezing.” Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), no. 341.
“harrowed in defeats of language.” Michael Heller, “Sag Harbor, Whitman, As If An Ode,” in Wordflow: New and Selected Poems (Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House, 1997), p. 129.
“in history to my barest marrow.” Black Salt: Poems by Édouard Glissant, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 33.
THIS EVENING LET’S
“friendship is not a tragedy.” See June Jordan, “Civil Wars” (1980), in Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 267.
TRANSPARENCIES
“we are truely sorry . . .”: Clyde Haberman, “Palestinians Reclaim Their Town after Israelis Withdraw,” New York Times, August 31, 2001, p. A6.
ALTERNATING CURRENT
The Villa Grimaldi outside Santiago, formerly a military officers’ club, was converted to a detention and torture facility during the Pinochet regime in Chile. It is now a memorial park honoring the victims of torture.
DISLOCATIONS: SEVEN SCENARIOS: 5
“You thought you were innocent . . .”: See Paul Nizan, Aden Arabie (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), p. 131.
Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth
CALIBRATIONS
Landstuhl: American military hospital in Germany.
“You go to war with the army you have.” U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, December 2004.
HUBBLE PHOTOGRAPHS: AFTER SAPPHO
For Sappho, see Greek Lyric, I: Sappho, Alcaeus, trans. David A. Campbell, Loeb Classical Library 142 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982– ), fragment 16, pp. 66–67: “Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatsoever a person loves. . . . I would rather see her lovely walk and the bright sparkle of her face than the Lydians’ chariots and armed infantry.”