I. After the End
Beyond the eight o'clock blue of August twilight
Lies the truth we now see, that in our grandeur and temerity,
We have outlived the <fin de notre Histoire>, and in our sur-vival
we bypassed this end, and yet stand suspended above the abyss that it is.
I have ever lacked the sense of endings, death and departure are the unknown
to me;
in me;
The deep blue sky, as it prepares to erupt, whispers to me,
that the end was always already completed, and elevates me
to that apex of poetic grandeur, from which I can see that
at the end of History, every ending has touched my heart, inscribing
seductively this truth – that every ending has been dear to me.
A crack of thunder shatters the immense silence of this kingdom of ends
Illuminated by the lightning bolt, this silence is exposed as refusal
– As an obscurantism of ends –
And shattered, torn to pieces, a new truth is born; that each and every ending
Has been but the inverted image of nascent beginnings waiting to be born.
The sense of our hypertelic Histoire will never again be the same,
for the lies of stillborn worlds have been exposed – even if
our Histoire was finished before it ever began, it is now possible
to inscribe on my heart, on our Histoire, a new truth – that the end
was no more than a beginning, and that death and departure have no sense,
are the absence of sense,
except as rebirths in joyous non-sense
II. The Separation Anxiety of Demeter
The piteous i n a d e q u a t i o n of word to world leaves me wounded; the schism marked by
but one d e a d l e t t e r, the mark of the anguish of imprisonment in language. In another
tongue the i n f i d e l i t y of words is clear – it is self-evident...
W e l t und W o r t – the word: Welt-ort, the l o c u t i o n of an ordered world
This too signifies, as a s i g n a t u r e, that s i m u l a c r u m which is the world of words – Burying
beneath words the r e m n a n t s of being and of b e c o m i n g
– which r e m a i n forever u n g r a s p a b l e by l a n g u a g e –
– words cut through me in the fading light opening unto a s i l e n t v o i d
-
In the u n g r a s p a b i l i t y of autumnal sensations
In the s e p a r a t i o n a n x i e t y of Demeter
In the urgency of the lengthening t w i l i g h t
The fruit of f o r g e t t i n g brings to light
the f a l s e f o u n d a t i o n secured by words
as but a t r a p – d o o r opening onto
an i n c o n c e i v a b l e abyss and onto ecstasy.
III. Betrayal of Worlds
What new wounds are needed
To end the ceaseless betrayal of words?
Endless words, endless stories,
Productions of a restless mind
Craving the reassurance of an enduring identity...
I slip, I fall, I lose myself in laughter and in tears
Pleading with chance
Yet she hears only my incomprehensible laughter and tears
Pleading with time
Yet his only concession is my forgetfulness of his reign
My time is not that of this world
Losing track, losing my way, my sole consolation
Fickle chance in conspiracy with implacable time
Brings me to my knees
Then bears me aloft
Beyond words... Beyond the desire to endure...
And yet...
No sooner do I catch a glimpse of what might be
I fall... into the abyss that subtends all...
I have seen the depths
And I cry
And thus betray words with wounds
Stories, with moments at the extremes of anguish
Identity, with the forgotten hours falling free
Implacable Time - you will never let me BE
Without transition, without care
Flowing free
As rivers into the ocean
As waves lost among other waves
Far off at sea
Chance, the seductive countenance
of some event, yet far off, on the horizon
...defies time and smacks me in the face.
IV. A
Dream I Don't Remember
In a dream I don't rememberyou whispered in my earof signs and portents still unrecognizable,
of a nascent epoch or year
In a dream I don't remember
I knew you by name,
in the turning of the seasons
you by turn knew me all the same
Awake
I don't remember
I cry out all the same
I don't remember
Who's name it was I called out,
I don't know any more
that I am awake
Or in a dream I won't remember
in which I'll know and recognize that which awaits
me
you
V. Poem Never Written
This is the fulfillment of the prophecy
Of a poem never written:
In this absurd
Paradoxical movement,
Becoming this moment
Transfigured, the resigned
Infinite, repetition of my
becoming a knight
of faithless faith.
VI. The
Sandcastle
My faculties of language and speech in an hypertrophic condition
condemn
and enslave thought to endless toil at Sisyphean efforts,
other
times thought take flight, borne aloft on wings of wax, which, melting,
almost imperceptibly takes shape as some sort of script In
vain, I seek the meaning of these unrecognizable characters written
upon my body; and caught in a moment without duration or cessation, wings
now completely melted have inscribed foreign words upon my flesh
Now
falling, enraptured by that ruse of language that we call reason,
and, by
chance alive, sandcastle reason now gone with the tide, I find
myself speechless, all words in abeyance, silent, at last
in
the image of actual émigrés of times past and
I, an émigré from the world of words, I write in a foreign tongue, and
in a foreign land, far from the lands of speech
Reason,
that crumbling edifice of sand, at last, was overcome by waves of
time Perverse,
audacious Chance in time exchanged vision for reason, Limit-figures
of desire now dashed to pieces,
and
my outstretched hand lay empty and still, still weak-willed grasping, until
the living wax-character script flowed down to my wrist...
Suddenly
intelligible, the script spoke truth irrefutably
A
message inscribed by chance, in strange words and letters,
Its
sense palpable – undeniable – my proper renunciation of reason
...to
put an end to all grasping and striving – in recognition of dice
already cast...
...The
Rest Is Language...
We
are born with a cry, we die
(if
we are lucky)
with
a cry, a scarcely audible rasp, or in silence
And
but for brief, transitory moments,
...The
Rest Is Language...
Living
thus within language, we are
ever-strangers-estranged
from the world.
For,
every language is to us a foreign tongue –
born
as we are into a world of speech –
- into our NATIVE tongue.
Likewise
all names are im-proper,
our
names and surnames given
to
us – my name becomes proper and property
only
on conditions already imposed on me
- To
escape: empty anonymity, or rather, self-given, self-assumed,
pseudonymity . . .
VII.
Images of Happiness
In
a dissolving dream-image
Your apparition echoed
In a moment removed from the
continuum
and into contiguity,
Across the
artificial partitions of time,
The moment returns, a
revenant
As for the first time our lives,
our stories,
intertwine
like two naked bodies
profoundly touching
This
moment -
Shared moments to come -
Like so many dreams of desire
-
Profoundly real
And yet I remain in profound terror
of a
sudden waking and dissolution
Attaining
this initial intense moment
which acid-etches its image
- in
our shared memory space
- in the depths of our being
This
moment falls burning out of nowhere
into place.
How many
disconnected improbable antecedents
fashioned this intimate and
inevitable moment
- in its absolute beauty
and gave form to our
being
- yours sharing in the moment's beauty
Open to the Aleatory AbsoluteI am too, open before you....
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