after after

A summary, a part

2011-06-21T10:03:00.002-04:00

Left for later letters
what we hoped
to understand
though I only ever wrote
after walking.

What those flowers
set off, what the rain
left, petals caught in
the torrent to
the grate, the lake, the sea.

I didn't bring enough always.
I don't have the distance now.
I have been silent for so long, thought of you so much
there was no need for a taxi to take us away.

A report (later crossed out, re-written)

2011-06-06T23:08:00.000-04:00

A broken oath becomes
silence saying what did I say —
foundling stones, stars

suspended from wires above the tracks that
my age and your age and the age of
don't misunderstand me.

Writing to you orphaned or
the most basic perhaps
Father and Mother say the house is always haunted —

I see it differently: sudden silences
because I can only make assumptions
one hour black and speech-filled.

A birch tree

2011-06-02T13:50:00.002-04:00

A self portrait in a meadow.
You didn't draw what happened when
you drew. You drew a birch tree.

Gave it to him but he didn't
follow the last time erased else
Did you ask him to.

In that story he's singing. And you
escape to the south
Trap of narrative. No mirrors. No roses.

No writing about birch
or confusing them
with beech ever erased. 3:06pm.

Under the shadows, the roses

2011-05-29T18:43:00.000-04:00

Untranslated poppies overflow
red, overspill, then roses. A storm
of roses. And this means
what this means. Word-shadows.

A language that should be mine
since we started writing
again I am content with anything.

The night is lit with thorns.

The letters of my new solitude

2011-05-21T09:51:00.000-04:00

I believe in doubt hours
flow parted by grey islands
colour by colour drawn at midnight
seeded by time by ciphers by quotation
you cathedral unseen
you currents unheard
you clocks deep in us.
Every moment anniversary.

Writing I can understand that you
are not writing to me cannot write
will not — the flow parted
in the letters before I was
nothing is missing just
the ink for this and I can live.

“Though elegy seems the nearest category of genre”

2011-05-13T16:39:00.001-04:00

It isn't because we remember anymore
how many gardens were thick with bees forgetting
the unintended flowers cut off or cut out, drawn or a dream

I don't remember being happy but I long for it, not nostalgia
that's wrong, say a leap-year came between, say
I do remember having breakfast in your garden

the bees circling the slow and normal
cosmos echinacea marguerite gladioli aster yarrow sage phlox monarda
κοσμοζ meaning ornament and order, regulator, meaning here&now, also of stars, meaning extraordinary if

Then first snow writing
on the stone flags
a low song star-scrawl

Was that you hurrying alone cold twilight
I think not. A stranger or a cloud
or interruption no need to look back

to lose you
rose-hips by autumn both
of us keeping cut flowers far too long

the petals fallen colour
thickened by ending elegy also
invisible a kind of hunger

* * *

Trailing through the forest other side the wall
cathedral shadow and shell holes scabbed over by fern and moss, morel, the fox the lion the wolf the hermit the appetite eagle hourglass charcoal army peat jay nuthatch nightjar landmine current cut into and etched glass and shattered electric fire stag quiet but a branch snapping, falling, a wing, and what is it Augustine said about time that could be ‒–

cried out and one white
owl slow in the cold sudden
I have no memory of

but dreamt you in the woods
stumbling on deadfall and shelter
I took refuge there not expecting fire escaping fire

* * *

Listen this will be my text.
The first train to Lyon at.
The first train to Geneva at. To Milan at. To

The last train unlike appetite or memory
Regensburg Berchtesgarden Lake Constance
under inconstant sky slow stars wheeling

a book I cannot read
anymore
[with what eyes – Sappho] [τίοιςιν ὸφθαλμοιςιν]

will not write this, own the anxious brushstroke
c'est toute ma vie
silence / exile / cornered

you unremembered stranger
bread and cheese and fruit and butter
morning streets outside the garden a city in ever-dark forest

anticipation or recollection of snow and no
that's wrong too: memory is not will neither forgetting
not elegy raising stars strewing flowers

leap-year cloud-girl star-girl
I cannot touch you
and faintly falling like the descent of their last end my text

11:55. 13:50. 17:50. 19:50. 21:50.
14:57. 16:57. 19:42. 21:57. 22:33.
14:50. 18:50. 22:50 [more numbers]

Commentary (2)

2011-05-06T14:55:00.000-04:00

Today grey, it's an honest colour.
Exactly, it's called grey, the last few
days and weeks we've lived and seen it.

No more bullshit: there's truth before
the truth is seen. Re-read my letters.
I was, sadly, mostly right.

After fifty years, slipping I
don't. I. Read, re –
grey, exactly, honest. Few.

Or convinced of it. Grey called
grey and called, sadly, mostly. Adverbs
tired of truth or seeing I am letters.

Before 1967, this evening, that morning

2011-05-06T14:52:00.001-04:00

Star.
Eye-star. Star. Over-starred. Feather-star. Star. Wood-star.
Star. Fawn-star. Chalk-star. Centaury-star.
Fellow-star. Seven-star.
Canopus.

Marten-star. Bright-star. Belt-star.
November-star. Star.
Quasi-stellar.
Starry-eyed. Constellation. Star-bloom, aster.

Stars. Stars out.

Star-way.
Star-like.
Star-hard.

Starry. Free-starry. Starlit. Star-round.
Star-crossed, star-covered.
Star-thrown.

Star-waste.
Star-time: sidereal time

at any one place at midnight will be about four minutes later each night, until, after a year has passed, one additional sidereal day has transpired compared to the number of solar days that have gone by.

This is what I see

2011-05-06T14:50:00.000-04:00

You are living in a street of little stars
in perfect concord. Standing on the bus
the knife-crowd stills my breath.
Your street. Your door. My stop.

As the smith pours fire out
onto sand, beats it, hammers
the steel edge folding over
and over again in my lungs

a rage I cannot remember past sand
art or desert lightening while the heat
oxidizes into bleeding rust earthing
the electric throw of this street in stars.

Your street. There is sand by the door.
Graves should not be
dug in sand. An urn, a monument
or a book is necessary. Again

this raw air is sand in my throat.
You know – no, you used to know.

Decorrelation

2011-05-06T14:48:00.000-04:00

1. Say to the stranger's eye: be the water.

2. Say to the stranger's eye: be the water.

3. Yesterday and today I thought a great deal about you – or about us, if you will.

4. Try for a moment to forget I was silent for so long and so insistently.

5. I long for you and our fairy-tale.

6. Just a few words in haste, to tell you how happy I am that you are coming.

7. Here is the letter in which Frau Dr. Rosenberg invites you to Paris.

8. Hopefully you received my letter this time.

9. You must know how frustrating it is to wait for mail.

10. As lines so Loves may well themselves in every Angle greet: but ours so truly Parallel, though infinite can never meet.

11. The work that has been such an ordeal and a burden for me is finished.

12. I was in Germany briefly and came home with a heavy attack of flu and headaches that prevented me from replying immediately.

13. Our encounter in Rome was a true encounter for me, important and serious like the true things in life. Rare.

Commentary

2011-04-12T21:13:00.002-04:00

Say this is not my story over
words beneath legible words each morning
star. Also evening star

and chalk star, as he has it: you'll rub
that out with your sleeve the yellow dust
all that's left. Shake it off.

You shouldn't wear black.
Some days still ordinary some
unrepeatable and yet again.

(In the grandeur of this reverie
self disappears and fast.)

From an essay on desire

2011-03-31T12:36:00.003-04:00

The difference indifferent lack left
unattended by white clouds high
wind-bitter birds wild garden childless

sunflowers and hollyhocks swaying
morning glories braided and overgrown —
this storm in the rose garden

stolen from books loved when we were
young, and, creatures of the summer heat, called
desire. It seemed more honest to remain silent.

At your table

2011-03-31T12:35:00.000-04:00

Sunlight, linen, opera, need
to go out and buy cut flowers, need
Too often you say you want and you want and you don't.

You find yourself making up an explanation,
memorizing static, style. Demand leaving.
Setting out or setting aside or just what's there.

Sometimes the noise of traffic. Machinery. A roof garden. Wind.
The wrong mirror, unrecognized beginning of disquiet. 1:00pm.
Only the or of distance, roses and tulips and hawthorn.

So many stars

2011-03-24T10:51:00.001-04:00

I can look up from this even midnight
[star numbers]
sharpened to a finer point

but not tonight
not to write to me not to call me
not to not now now in

I can look up from this say yes
saying no
[star numbers again]

in judgement and not a single you

Don't die before evening she wrote much later.
So many stars held out to us he wrote much later.

All I have
numbers, now not one of them.

I learned to erase

2011-03-23T20:41:00.001-04:00

No less than; neither more nor less than, simply.
Taken literally, embodied, an essay. Or a lesson.
What will we be for each other

you said. You drew.
I wrote down what you said.
Need became style. I learned to erase.

If wearing white erased
If eating erased
If erased after fast, blue paint.

We spoke every day.
I sat at your table warm mornings
made lists of numbers.

558. 1370. 784. 832.
16. 4. 17. 10. 10. 43.
5171. Not true, erased.

Your unalterable testimony

2011-03-17T23:38:00.000-04:00

Dispersed in words, or, snow lettered
under streetlights I am words
and I am secrets you are secret words
and letters, falling, the word to enter
the word to pass, the word
traced in the snow with a stick and filling in the letter
sent and lost, or, received and hidden away
the letter unsent unwritten or the letter
that signs for myself at the bottom of the letter
a location where breath crystallized
endures distance or deceit or
every or almost every evening
I have tried to continue my long letter
I cannot send it tries to do too many things.

Leaving or arriving.

2011-03-17T23:35:00.002-04:00

Book by your bed anxiety.
Half-packed (or unpacked) suitcase, gooseneck lamp
read together, and then.

For all the days and nights past
and still to come, you said. 9:33pm.
The plural of intensity.

The Hebrew אשרי is a noun in the construct state
the form it takes when joined
to another noun on which it is dependent.

But as he read it was all plain

2011-03-10T14:04:00.000-05:00

In the farthest near-meaning lose
your father, your mother, your lover.
Child, wife, friends. All unclear burning off
lose your self and all your books, your hours.

Make a list of dates or rivers from memory.
Hide silence-mad in other lives.
Say there's living yes
pared down here. Say as if,

fog-stars topping the hills and licking down
night to dark water tending your lost wounds.
It should have been warmer, that swiftsure tongue.

The picture we lay down by

2011-03-02T12:07:00.000-05:00

Quiet between us
the silent sweet fox sleeps
a plain red illustration

I wish you'd told me more.
Flowers still grow

newspapers blown
along the path lie
mated to rust in the hollows

after the rain, the air thick
with the scent of mushrooms.

I cast another look out of the train
you'd looked around too
but I was too far away.

A photograph

2011-03-02T11:21:00.000-05:00

of you by water.
Sketchbook, Kodachrome.

Desaturated with memory.
Trying to hold on, hold on
what we will be.

I didn't take that picture.

Unrepeatable

2011-02-22T16:25:00.000-05:00

How the wind
sounds. Crystalline.
Anonymous. Outside.
Breath unvoiced.

Unwritten, hardened to
language. As if I
wrote to you and lay
heaven bare. But not again.

There are volumes of letters.
There is a packet of letters.
There is a letter.
Not read.

Forgive me for assuming
this in spite of everything.

Unsent, unreceived

2011-02-12T10:35:00.000-05:00

Because I want you to write again
everything is as usual.
Thread and other caresses.
I am not writing
that they reached me by such a detour.
Something that makes me helpless because I can only make
assumptions and these inevitably lead nowhere,
an atlas or a concert ticket afterward.
The cards you send, which satisfied me
until recently, are no longer enough.
Yesterday and today I thought a great deal about you.
You are always my concern.
My thirst or assurance.
You, beautiful things and gloomy things.

Presumption of knowledge

2011-02-08T00:51:00.000-05:00

A tree. Of course I'll say an apple tree.
The children climbing and one
too scared to go high. Well then,

you say to them, let's make a painting of it.
I read that and knew you at once.
The comfort of apples bright as city lights

imagined stars and the ladder zag of branches.
A crazy-coloured childbird.
I'm sure you always wanted to wrestle, too.

The world, walking towards us in empty hours

2011-02-06T09:35:00.002-05:00

The beautiful moon the fiction
of warm bedded monochrome
over early days-edge clouds, comfortable
fantasy no matter
how much evidence I draw up (like dew) —
she can't decide but look. Not enough.

This is nothing so so extreme.
A poem comes back on a postcard.
This is not Bohemia, a desert country near the sea.
This is not blood-flowers by the cart track
and red leaves or razors on the sidewalk or —
Two books, side by side on an empty table
a half seen face a word half read a leaf fully turned —
the thought that a word could still be

might be enough
cloud-veiled this morning the sea
of tranquility sea of storms
our city torn into scraps of rosy light
windscattered or flung across
I border like little else on everything
lost to words and ragged abandon.

Is that enough? Not much but I know
your eyes will rest for a few minutes
here my words yours his hers.

The lion's sweet face

2011-02-06T09:30:00.001-05:00

playing with a ball
of string. Lonely

and en route. Stays with it.
A counter; a loosening, as of a knot.
I don't know. A knot made

of three loops: remove one, the other
two are unbound. Any one.
A real lion: tawny, yawning.

In the mirror it's Sunday

2011-01-31T11:48:00.000-05:00

The poppies again
darkening me with that heavy dream
in which I want to become light –

The wild animal memory of spring.
The white stain of uncatalogued binary stars.
The balance wheel of a watch. Mechanical.
Unseasonable. Dependent. Misspelt. Rough.
Blameless. The empty vase and the open window.
They look up at us from the street. It's time.
Adversity. Variable. Division. Hazy. Unripe.
By autumn, leaf-fall, tamed, walking, tight –

I do not know why I want you, or what for;
I am very glad about that.
Normally I know it all too well.

Marguerite

2011-01-25T10:44:00.002-05:00

Wordshadows, message by message
two white centimetres top
the brick wall's common bond
and the garden is sealed from the sky.
No cloud: felt.
I wonder if these clay pots will crack.
This winter I didn't shelter them all.

It's hard to watch and let go.
The ice melting in your hand
is never pure and later
you can't say that
was the moment of change.
There isn't a moment of change.
That changes how you remember
safety, how you remember
snow in other gardens, remember
thinking cover me, cover me now
and always in this white of you.
The dry stalks of what are those flowers called.

Once words did just fall. Now snow and a rake,
a long-handled spade whitening against the wall.
One voice in this quiet, and a city
beyond, “beyond me” as they say.

All I can do is read what others say.
I probably wanted to write every day
but our return journey passed
beyond the well of stars. Is this voice
a broken tool now? Who owns that?

Things draw us

2011-01-25T10:43:00.000-05:00

A young woman
laughing the first time.

A brush in water and watercolour.
A thrush. A thick blue. Or
middle-aged, a man,

graying, slowing, still
thinking it's possible
halfway. Always

blue forest that's the way in and
Then the litany
of necessary, and things.

Porcelain, stainless, paper.

Pont Mirabeau

2011-01-16T14:30:00.000-05:00

Curved in a weeping deep between
not obvious like this
voice, whose fire, the galaxy and the great bear

and the falling curve of its own weight,
the weight of all the stars.
This is not Germany.

You wanted to illustrate shame
your head in your hands
the shadow line of your empty hips

loss beginning and ending there
as if you carried stones you set
it aside —

exchanged in order to be consoled
wind tightens the ribbon drawn across the bridges
and what is hidden by names, yours, mine, theirs
the seed of voices
that plunged from Paradise.

A note on order

2011-01-16T14:28:00.000-05:00

Just to note that I'm not posting these poems in any particular order. Certainly not order of composition nor any narrative order. And neither are there connections between the B/C poems and the CS poems. Except in the way things are always connected by being juxtaposed.

Ok. I'm done belaboring the obvious now.

After a quiet year, this October

2011-01-10T13:12:00.000-05:00

Every star is numbered.
Let me count the ladder steps from here.
Let me say I saw you climbing up
into the lead-grey constellations
of another autumn.

This cloud around me I think of as home
stepping back to leave room for
it's written down, torn out
pages of counted empty
light consuming like old silences.

So quiet here.
Half an hour has passed since
the first sentence, and last autumn
is forcing its way into this autumn.

Life. Or, Still Life.

2011-01-02T14:57:00.000-05:00

With their catalogue: the pear
two apples in a bowl the salt
and pepper the burnt-down candles

all the books the coffee cup
that has a pear
and a peach drawn on it.

Then five notebooks.
Photographs and folded in St. Jerome
at his study and the melancholy angel;

the beginning of an essay on desire;
no compass no bible no translation –
Those apples have been there

too long. That's not everything.
12:54pm. Still life. A start.

This year does not roar across

2011-01-01T08:07:00.000-05:00

This is how it goes. There's a moment,
and then a moment. There's a beginning that's
obvious but when you look back it's
snow sliding off a roof as the sun warms the angle,
first a bit, then a bit, then the whole
goddam thing in a roaring whoosh
of limited avalanche. I live
in this part the opposite
of convulsive, we're talking winter
city here, winter made of snow and snow,
it's a beautiful mess you know
even if I have no real sense of can't say
My Paris or My Berlin, My Vienna
My Cologne My Rome My London
even My New York, My Toronto, My Montreal.
My language.
How to own this
white enclosure of streetlight and clear nostalgia.
Without beginning the word hope or no one.
I have to hide my lyric here and now.
I hear they say that life is the only refuge.
Various things were mentioned, various
things that were important for me to know.
This is not a dialogue.

Changes after this

2010-12-24T08:36:00.003-05:00

In the past I've posted here daily (in 2009) and sporadically (in 2010). I'm now in the midst of two ongoing creative projects, one dealing with the letters of the poets Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, the other responding to the work of the painter Charlotte Salomon. I've decided that in 2011 I'll post weekly fragments of that work in progress; the Bachman/Celan poems tagged with the label bc, and the Charlotte Salomon poems tagged with the label cs. There may be other things as well. Older work has been moved offline.