One has to be inside
Winter to write
about it — or not —
as the ink inside
my pen congeals
and won’t come out
and my frozen iPhone
doesn’t even sense
my index finger
tapping in the pin.
I can feel the tendons
creak in my hand
as if cold made
flesh real by
feeling it
self so.
Like residues
stored in the gills
of mushrooms, clouds
of futures stalled.
Everything we lived
through so it would not
return — our regrets
the same as our hopes
are stalled, circling
a greater point unseen
though it is there
whenever we imagine
what was not meant to
or might have been —
so the unborn is still
born if differently
into this world, if only
for our intentions
that it not be.
The dead will have died
as have the living
and the earth even
here before us
but we are not finished.
This is the opening.
The wind sounds
no alarm as we enter
the nothing around which
all rounds, swirling
as going down a drain
meaning the same
as gaining momentum
to outpace the pull
and throw out our arms
right as we disappear,
having run out of
ourselves. As does matter
exist to end twinkling
in the iris, the eye
a black hole no one
may enter and
come back from,
back into themselves
as they were when
separate, whole
and untouched by all
they aren’t. Rocks
are being untied
as we speak —
or is it that our
speaking undoes
what we’ve described.
The dusk is far too
clear upon the water.
The seagulls are tossed
about the rough wind
like men overboard
and flags on the bridge
whipped taught as if
fighting to be torn
free of rope and pole.
People turn and look at me
as I pass, confused by
what is going on.
Is it too late? The air
frigid though it is
supposed to be
the end of Spring
and we are the ones
who are alive.
We haunt ourselves —
smiling in pictures clearly
sharper than the eye
can pinch the screen to see
that smile’s a scowl.
They are stronger than us
and more themselves, and free
in that they are unburdened
with having to live, no —
they already were.
It’s over. They cannot be
argued with, undone.
Worst of all, they know this
about themselves.
What are they looking at —
the dark of the lens.
Why should they smile
standing in a wilderness
without provision —
to say, I am content
in this moment belonging
to no one not me.
The burden isn’t
what we know
they didn’t — no,
it’s all they won’t
let us forget.
They’ve rounded us up
on the gazebo stairs
for a group photo.
Smile now! the lady says
and I realize I’m not
exactly sure where it is
we should look — her face
in front of the cordgrass
or sky all around us turning
sepiatone with afternoon
light. Panic. Thank you!
and the rows of us
disperse at her signal.
She already took it.
Hühnerdrahtähnliches verhält
den Steinbruch am fernen
Autobahnrand — doch schießt
der Schössling zaundurch — seine
holzungsgeweihte zwei Meter
stochernd in die für den Himmel
unreife Luft eines Julimittags.
Eine braunweiße Unterrichtungstafel,
wie man so kennt. Wir stachen
am Ausfahrt zur Eremitage
im letzten Moment ab. Es war
ein gefährliches Manöver
zum Glück gelungen. Die Stadt
war uns uninteressant, mein Vater
und ich. Wir wollten uns eher
das ziellose Herumlatschen
ersparen, wie unlängst unsere
Erfahrung im Weimarer Zentrum.
Auf ein vor dem Dichterpaar
aufgenommenes Foto begreife ich
endlich wie peinlich eng
meine T-Shirts damals waren.
Im Passagiersitz notierte ich Anfänge
eines Gedichtes, das mehr als
ein Jahrzehnt später (und nach dem
Tod meines Vaters) dieses wurde —
entschlüpfte sogar die Sprache,
wie erst dem Stift wackelig
schreibend während der Fahrt,
übersetzt ins Deutsche.
Gestörte Züge — Staben, Ziffern —
Seismograf — ein Versuch kenntlich
Wörter zu bilden, wie Lenker in hand
mein Vater die A9 hochjagte.
Weiterblättern. Ein englisches Zitat
scheinbar aus dem Brochure
niedergeschrieben — A gem of rococo
pleasure gardens, diversely outfitted
with grottoes, a ruined theater, ancient tomb
and false cliff dubbed Parnassus.
It was here the prince played at living
a hermit’s life. Wir tauchten ein
in das lapsarische Bildnis
nur um etliche Prinzipien des Neo-
klassicismus zu kennzeichnen.
Schau wie diese nur grobe
Pompeijbrocken sind.
Unfertigkeit als Leitmotiv.
Die Büsten des bayerischen
Olymps bestrichen mit Blattgold.
Ihre Gesichter — berühmt —
und Brauen — krumgehauen.
Wir verbrachten nichtmal
30 Minuten vor dem Entschluss
Hey dad — let’s get out of here.
I'm feeling capable again. No, it's not that
the scales have fallen from my eyes
but that they themselves are as bricks
making the house a solid thing and not
just an alliance of the air with itself.
How seeing proves more lid than iris,
more curtainfall than proscenium.
How like the messiest butterknife known
to man the pathetic fallacy spreads
the preserves on toast and hand, equally.
How the weight of a jug of Tropicana
is nothing without the almost hairless arm
that will either succeed or fail in lifting it,
too puny to move most of the world
into and out of place. And so who's to say
a rampart is not foam, your body not pumice
or the billionaire nobody they want to be.
Let go and whether it’s you or the makings
of breakfast that float unmoored away —
like Morpheus does Neo in The Matrix
I want to ask you where you think
you are, where this is happening.
And then — does it matter?
Narrows where light
was slit above
and water sang
to itself carving way
down to floodplain
basins as long-necked
birds gathered to pluck
fish from the water
who never knew guilt
flushed to the deltas
with ditches leading off
to fields and other places
where maize grew
and mud hazardous
as mouths now leash
currents to the end
of land coursed through
out of sand opening
its sterility of lips
words spoken
This is a draft of the first part of a sequence I’m currently working on about Walt Whitman’s tomb in Camden - that is, the conditions of its conception and creation (present poem), his death and funeral, ending with my own experience visiting it in April 2015.
It was in a letter dated Sept. 29th, 1890
and addressed to your dear friend
and executor, Mr. Bucke: a drawing
done in blue crayon on a loose scrap
of paper fingertipped off the carpet
next to your rocking chair, folded
haphazardly and tapped down into
the envelope right after drawing it.
Like a house pictured in the mind
of a child, your dwelling reduced
here to its most basic form. A roof
and two supporting walls, a door
to enter with your name above
saw-toothed tidings of the ground —
the famous signature that betrays
the surrounding text as written
by your hand, the ink having run
on the too soft and porous paper.
Smile and see
the parenthetic creases
exhaled through, deep and cool —
this cowboy’s shadow-buried eyes
and rough noose that rounds the steer’s
gape and gleaming neck.
Wincing in leather, jeans and flannel,
the first guy is under a road sign
(one cigarette of the mind
against the flow)
as golden roasted bald
eagles flame out and the wind
is made ensign, hot and pregnant
with tumbleweed blown down
desert smokey
to the snake’s den.
Another dude just chills, leans
and ashes on the canyon’s tongue,
spits into its pitted ribbing.
To thread the grain of it, the dead
desert hand (a photographer’s) bows
the plates simmer violet and horizon.
High noon all-the-prettier for its negative.
The last one is out there lassoing
from atop his saddle-stacked stallion
with severe frontier thumb
all that fallow dreamage, riding down
dust roads from corral and ranch
to kneel and knead some clods of loam
cool to the touch after sundown,
stuck in a compadre’s pockets.
Smoke-rise and a day’s slow drone out.
Cactus hands reach for the sky.
It seems everybody has an opinion
they have defined in relation
to the Revolution. Still some sing
the chorus upon barricades
to the chagrin of that audience
belonging to an entirely different
production scheduled to begin
taping on a soundstage next door
not quite contemporary, or even
considerably before our big scene
when the first shot shot is shot
and the day is wrapped for those
who were lucky to have died.
Now things have quieted down
for the dear friends we’ll never meet.
Friends — no matter what they will
have pointed at us, done with and to us,
what now we feel shall be revealed
as matters immaterial of long ago
and the times will roll over us
in their greater sleep, to fashion
of our lives history, to remake
our homes glamorous flats
of pilots, ace debonaires
with prudence enough
to know when to quit
the hopeless conflict
and go nurse those
dry martinis they
left sweating
at the bar.
You have never wanted
for words. Like flintstones,
strike them together. Like this.
Like bright bowls invaded
by flies too soon before
the apples could be enjoyed
as anything more than
decoration. Missed a spot
where it began. White mouth
of the mush. It is forbidden.
Pick it all up and flies alight
for the mash of garlic
and breadcrumbs clogging
the drain. Take Windex
and spray it in the trash
just to be safe. Here, like this.
Picture a garden shed
full of rakes and shovels —
rusted steel, wooden hilts
cracked along the grain.
Broken, stupid things.
It’s hard to believe that
these were once of use
in men’s hands. But look —
their nobs are smooth.
There’s no need to.
As I sit at my grandmother’s grave,
my mother pulling weeds from the lavender
and my grandfather in the collapsible
Coleman chair next to me, his liver failing,
I watch as an ant struggles to climb
the polished granite of the headstone.
It keeps falling off, then tirelessly
tries to climb right back up
as though its life depended
on reaching the top.
Two years are etched on arrows
pointing to rings in the cross-section
of a 100-year-old oak. An arrow bearing
the year 2011 gestures towards the bark
at the trunk’s edge where the year
2000 is nailed about two inches away.
The years don’t proceed evenly
down to a center, as one might think
they would. Rather, the rings distort
as they circle the trunk, evening
as they near the bark and take on
the tree’s outer shape. Dark patches,
black welters mark the marrow
of the wood, where sap still bleeds
from cracks six years after it was felled.
Judging by how much space is left
between the years and the center
where the rings are so dense I can
no longer discern one from the other
it seems inescapable, that I imagine
the wood as a kind of map of time
contracting towards its center
as bathwater rounds a drain.
I scratch at a spot roughly where
I was born, then trace further inward
the births of my mother, my father.
There aren’t enough rings to hold
the births of their own parents
but that are compacted in the dark
of the heartwood, smooth and hard
as stone. It’s unclear why the oak was
cut down — whether it was diseased
or too old, or even if it could still be
standing, growing with our lives below
the bark. Or am I only able to know
myself apart — the tree as being
there, its rotting cross-section
propped-up in front of me
that I might see when
we were once alive.
First edition of Leaves of Grass, self-published by Walt Whitman in 1855. I originally wrote this poem in German sometime around 2010 or '11 as part of a larger series, and then translated it into English in 2014. The series in question was a kind of exercise in playing with language, and that can still be seen at some places in the English translation. Beyond that, the original poem was inspired by reading about a legend of sorts that Walt Whitman, pacing on the sand of Wallabout Bay in his youth, once found a femur bone sticking out of the sand (I have not been able to find any mention of this "legend" anywhere since). Nevertheless, Wallabout Bay (which is now occupied by the Brooklyn Naval Yard) was where several British prison ships had laid anchor during the Revolutionary War after their occupation of the region around New York City. The conditions on the ships were brutal, and up to over 10,000 Revolutionary soldiers are thought to have perished in captivity on the ships. Their bodies were simply thrown overboard, and it was a common occurrence to find human remains washed ashore on the lower banks of the East River well up until the end of the 19th Century. These remains are kept in an ossuary housed beneath the Prison Ship Martyrs' Monument in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn. Since I could not establish the veracity of the legend as it stuck in my memory, I decided to make the reference in the first line a little more ambiguous, but it seems to me now that I've made a composite figure of Hart Crane and Walt Whitman. Currently, I'm contemplating whether this poem should be expanded, or form the motivating crux of a new poem sequence regarding those two figures.
Bones of mates gone overboard he found youthlong
woven at surf's end, sown and sticking out of the sand
like barnacled rods, the clefs of songs as yet unsung
Wallabout Bayside of the holy ship-broken East River.
Grass pokes and earth spills from the words of the title
pressed into the binding, spared the poet's name
with nothing but the creased rot of leather to cover
the pages that sadly touch each other, unable to sleep.
Our reading is a yellowing no campanion will comfort
as we dig our way down. As we bury and tuck ourselves in.
Heidelberger Schloss, Carl Rottmann (1815). This poem is an outtake from my book - it was once part of a trio of poems that explored growing up in and around Heidelberg that I've since broken up into individual pieces. This is the weakest and most embarrassing of those three (though I tend to find the majority of my poems embarrassing) - the focus on the 'I' of the speaker strikes my ear as a little too cloying, the phrasing too treacly. First written in April 2008, I rewrote the poem extensively in 2017. See multiple versions below.
Years I slept, wound and fused at the core of the nautilus. I dreamt
of the soil. My breath was methane, exhaled from cracks and cuffed
upon the Jura. Years split stone and shell. I woke up. I remember only
to forget. The ferns petrified in the cliff, the oak groves long axe-felled.
Columns of spotlight that spilled downward through the beechwood
ocean-heavy. Cloud knights and movies never made, spied in the sky.
Gaiberg : a village between forest and field, where the mountain slopes
down to the loamlands and ridge-hemmed fringes of what would prove
Memory with its grey-blue of distance. Growing up, I could see no end
to that haze expanse, but barely make out the ruined citadel of Dilsberg
and glean a truth of distant places home becomes. To expect no return
for the endlessness of youth's quest. Home : besieged in your absence,
burned down, built over. Part of a new empire. And whatever remains
familiar is just cloyingly still there, trim like some pensioner’s garden plot
stuffed between the bypass soundbarriers and the fenced-off railyards
that, like the Neckar, would kidnap me in their current — take me away
across the plain. Years planted in the Rhinebed, running the rift country
yet another valley reeking of onion and gasworks, the other side fading
like a range of cloudbank. Mirage or mirror, never there to begin with.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Years you slept — wound fused at the core of the nautilus. Of the soil
you dreamt. Your breath was methane, exhaled from cracks and cuffed
on the Jura. Years split stone and shell awake to forget. Whisper ferns
in the cliff, groves long axe-felled. Clothes the child you’re told you are
wears in pictures, folded in landfills to dress you again. Spotlights drown
the canopy, spill columns ocean-heavy. Beams of movies never made
in the sky. Cloud knights, sagas of defeat. Gaiberg — its ridge sloping
down to the loamlands. A view proving memory in grey-blue of distance
the childe mistook for haze. There’s no end to where roads go defining
borderlands of shining meadows where squires kneel to pick dandelions.
Dilsberg — ruined citadel, distant as home becomes expecting no return
from quest of youth. Besieged in your errance, scorched earth overbuilt
as the provincial seat to another, a new empire. And whatever remains
familiar is just cloyingly still there. Trim like some pensioner’s garden plot
sanely tucked between the bypass soundbarriers and fenced-off railyards
that, like the Neckar, would kidnap with their current — take you away
across the plain. Years planted in the Rhinebed, running this rift country
yet another valley reeking of onion and gasworks, the other side fading
like a range of cloudbank. Mirage or mirror — never there to begin with.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Years you slept — wound fused at the core of the nautilus. Of the soil
you dreamt your breath was methane — exhaled from cracks and cuffed
on the Jura. Years split stone and shell awake to forget — whisperferns
in the cliff, groves long axe-felled. Clothes the child you’re told you are
wears in pictures, folded in landfills to dress you again. Spotlights drown
the canopy, spill columns ocean-heavy — beams of movies never made,
sagas of defeat starring knights of cloud. Gaiberg — its playground sloping
down to the loamlands. A view proving memory in grey-blue of distance
the childe mistook for haze. There’s no end to where roads go on defining
borderlands of shining meadows where squires kneel to pick dandelions.
Dilsberg — ruined citadel, distant as home becomes expecting no return
from quest of youth. Besieged in your errance, scorched earth overbuilt
as the provincial seat to another — a new empire. And whatever remains
familiar is just cloyingly still there. Trim like some pensioner’s garden plot
sanely tucked between the bypass soundbarriers and fenced-off railyards
that, like the Neckar, would kidnap with their current — take you away
across the plain. Years planted in the Rhinebed, running this rift country
yet another valley reeking of onion and gasworks, the other side fading
like a range of cloudbank. Mirage or mirror — never there to begin with.
One of two works self-published in 1918, Pessoa wrote these sonnets in English very much under the influence of Shakespeare (and Hopkins, by the looks of it). He sent his collection to several British journals to be reviewed, where one critic in the Times Literary Supplement noted that Pessoa's "command of English is less remarkable than his knowledge of Elizabethan English." As I first encountered a PDF of the book in 2012, I was left a little bewildered. How was this, and Pessoa's other verso inglês, not more widely known and read? These poems are right up there with his major work - and even within an oeuvre defined by its strangeness, its otherness, these poems are doing something really quite weird.
It's also the admittedly amateurish or "outsider" quality of some of the poems that renders those sharp turns of phrase all the more cutting, as what's profound becomes uncanny. Much like when I read the Book of Disquiet, I can never not imagine my reading as if I were picking loose leaf pages at random out of a discarded steamer trunk, the paper as sallow as those of the book scanned here below - reading words that, even though they are passing through my mind as I read them, and even though I and many others are aware of Fernando Pessoa and Alberto Caeiro and Alvero de Campos and his other personas, that the oblivion these words issue from outweighs my awareness, that pushes back and struggles against my reading as a kind of magnetic pull towards wanting to be forgotten. I mean, I can admit it - I often forget about Pessoa and his work, he slips my mind. I rediscover him on my book shelf. Here is the oblivion that everything which is past is part of, that it all becomes, to put the body in nobody - that we will never know how these words came to us, they just are. Closed between the covers of a book, or suspended in code that is only rendered as text whenever our browsing calls it into being. Or they are found, these words and works, a bizarre and random instantiation of what was only previously imaginable - not imagined, but what was possible to have been imagined. One can easily invoke the legend of Kafka here, too, though what's so uniquely troubling with Pessoa is how we get the inner life of a man who not only has disappeared, but who never was in the first place. There's a certain sensation that emanates from Pessoa's writing, an aversion at its subtlest and a horror at its most acute, which is felt in relation to the givenness of what others always seem to point to as the "facts of life" - the things and ways of the world, the world as a world itself, and our being in it, a part of it. That things are real, that they are - an absurdity, the knowledge of which goads from the page and infects and corrodes the knower. Not to go too much further on this silly tangent, but reading Pessoa reminds me of how literally everything that's everything is made up - which does not mean the same as make believe. For what point do we inhabit, from which we can believe? It is as though I often graze some infinitely unsettling realization that I just barely, luckily, avoid having. This is particularly the case with the Book of Disquiet, but I get the same vague sense of vertigo reading these sonnets - which in their own way enhance this uneasiness precisely because they themselves, the poems, are so rarely read.
At any rate, to me this slender chapbook is a kind of conservatory greenhouse full of overgrown ferns, orchids and corpse flowers stuck somewhere on a run-down East Midlands country estate. Pessoa practices upon English what was so often exacted upon the spoils of British colonialism: he exoticizes it. Moreover, the effect these sonnets achieve is one of rendering English - or, more narrowly, the idiom of the Elizabethan sonnet - foreign to (and yet more strangely) itself.
To weather being
sick is like running
headfirst through
hours, not minding
(in fact desiring)
the waste of time
as you lift and kick
your toes upturned
to stomp down stalks
of knee-high grass
ahead, not minding
your step like you
would normally,
anxious to get
to the other side
without getting
any more bugs
on you than
you have to.
I bury myself, dig my head
and hands into the firmament
of dirt above me, plucking
at the stars of my limits
like dresser knobs,
like strings.
To have no future
but what was curtained
as occlusion, a skipped beat
the heart dropped into
like a button does
the buttonhole. Shutters
are shut in accordance
with their purpose, to blind
the meadow’s view and leave
you there, seeing nothing
but slats. That you may close
your eyes and find sleep
another field, truer
for never having been
a field at all. Impossible
to lead your life, leaving
all doors unopened
on whatever you are
destined to ruin
just by being
yourself.