Ellipsis

If all time is unredeemable

your face across the concert hall

repels me, gently as a magnetism

though our eyes met

not like two billiard balls clicking, but something

far more fluid – the surface tension of shadows

coalescing on walls caught in the gaze of streetlamps.

There is a beauty to shadows that seem to dance

even when our movements are not elegant;

and a beauty to shadows which seem to melt and swim,

made aqueous and thus utterly escaping

the unending tedious mathematics

of I and you, of 1 + 1

being two...

Shall we go walking in the sight of streetlamps,

shadows overlapping on the walls even if our hands never touch

(save for the brush of accident, so quick it may not

have happened at all – )

Shadows translating unconscionable

desire for the exit of our coordinates

on the plane of space and time that plot us Here, Now

wherever we happen to be. The concert hall, or the walking home.

The smile in your eyes, or a streetlamp's stare.

Where I walked, I saw

two lovers swinging on the playground swings

and in the darkness they were silhouetted,

made the common territory of one contour-line.

In the dark, their shadows unnumbered themselves

and curled back, unhatching into zero's egg

(the O of origin, so aptly named!) – and in their laughter, extending through the night

rapidly approaching that which

is undefined, the asymptote whereof

we cannot speak

though I have tried unsaying it

with the gradual silencing of a chord

or the trailing punctuation of a phrase – in falling short,

I hoped that the Unsaid

would descend upon the emptiness I'd prepared for it

as dawn fills in the interstices of night

grown rarefied with blotted morning stars.

I thought of this when I saw the snow fall

letter upon letter, effacing itself

luminous on the rooftops its illegible palimpsest

in ink of erasure, the colour of doves

descending with their drowsiness and their deaf whirlwinds

the flapping-overlapping silences in the blizzards of their white wings.

The gradual accumulation of noise gone snowblind, radio static

overwriting every intelligible

syllable losing its contours before the overexposure

both zero and infinite,

blank and obliterate...

I have tried to arrive at this point by addition and subtraction

by abscinding and by appendages

yet it each time, I am merely flung back Here,

Now – fixed again in the infernal grid

across the room from you, across the country

across the sky – across the concert hall

I turn my eye upon your constellation

and find that you evade me, growing dark

as if my pupil's shadow blots you out...

Across the calendar and the circle of the clock,

so it is – when I aim to recollect your face

the moment gently pushes me away,

and my very remembrance eclipses your smile

(made a bruised blankness much like the afterimage

of a lightbulb's negative in my eyeball)

and the cursive gesture of your exclaiming hands

is over-written by my brain's dull print

of concept, shape and name and sense and colour –

yet what is it that I saw when I first saw you? Surely not

such definitions and circumscribing descriptions, surely something quick

and bright and vague

that escapes me, as it once ran through my nerves

a brush-stroke of birds out of darkness, unspooling from sleep

and I lose you in a burst of wings and metaphors:

A rain falls on the surface of a pond,

calls forth a coronal displacement upwards

and a set of circles amplifying out

damped and dilute, from your unknowable ballistic

to the ripples of impression that I feel

trembling warm and beautiful and yellow

absconding in the imprecision of my utterance –

so brief, the sliver of time in which you embraced me

half blotted-out by the blunt instrument of my remembrance...

And when I left the concert hall, I was smiling;

the stringed instruments of my soul were not yet silenced

though so soon below the threshold of our hearing...

In the drizzle I stand outside, your brief embrace

intangible, the moment inaccessible

for my coordinates have changed – and though at any given point I am not moving,

somehow I see you growing more remote from me.

Why must it be so? (for if it could be otherwise

would it be as it is, all time unredeemable?)

If we start from the premise that all time is eternally present

then it follows, rock-hard as a syllogism – …

… – The lovers, on the swings near Twilight Hall

swing like twin pendulums attempting a hypnotism

and slightly out of time, just barely slipping

like a heart murmur into arrhythmia...

but then a metre starts to form, a sort of jerk

in my footsteps like the twitch of a pocketwatch

faintly appalling as its steady tattoo

mocks the crescendo of my dreadful pulse...

until all of a sudden they both jump off –

not simultaneously,

but as two raindrops disembark from eaves

to which they have been clinging. Behind them,

the swings still oscillate unseen

half-ominous, and strangely predictable

as radio towers that blink among the mountains

signifiers – signifying – darkness, vacancy

and the mistranslation of interstellar spaces

which we pass over

whereof we cannot speak...

they jumped off, slight as droplets from a twig

and drew together under the streetlamp's gaze

to overwrite each other's silhouettes:

their lips met like meniscus and palimpsest

twin darknesses adhering, converging to transgress

the laws of arithmetic which are the laws of loneliness

the laws of language which are the laws of entropy...

(while the swings went on behind them, vacillating

to and fro – a tremolo, and the bow's faltering

and fat gold time piece growing old

and a coronary valve petering out...)

While I walked past. The past was cast

behind, made a shadow long and graceful and unseen

as I stand in the spotlight of the Here and Now

under a streetlamp, or in the concert hall:

either way, it is killing as a lepidopterist's pin

for (affixed to a point with no area, an instant with no duration)

all movement is impossible

and consciousness dwells only on the periphery –

A streetlamp, its circle compassed by radiance;

drawn from the zero of light's germination at blind

Consciousness in the casting of a backwards glance.

that catches you (a star falling) in the corner of the eye

Consciousness of time past and time future

is always caught between shadow and light

in demilunes of partial comprehension,

curving crescent around blankness to define

time in the shadowing of the moon's many clock-faces

language in the obscuring of her primordial silences...

If it were not so – the babble of many voices,

and I cannot pick out which among them is yours.

If it were not so, no surfaces to touch with

in the filigreed nerves of our scriptured palms...

If not affixed to the eternal present

coming unstuck, the whole plane would collapse

with no present-in-past to be the object of nostalgia

and no present-in-future for our hopes to latch on...

If not entrapped in selves like flies in amber

there would be no smile across the room.

There would be no emptiness for the transit of desire

no furrow of absence for the clock's hand to move through...

And if it were not for the beguiling

inexpressible, whereof we cannot speak, an impasse

reached – would there be any spaces to call forth our speaking,

would there be any openness, any way to address you

anything but the breakdown and the erasure:

wordlessness, tonguelessness, facelessness, nothingness:

the extremest truth over-spilling limits of sense

yet I cannot cross, unless

I leave me here – leave names and faces

across the concert hall

leave your smile's lightbulb

and its retinal negative.

So, my friend

I will wait out in the rain, in my loneliness

and I will not ask of you anything more than this:

the lovely unredeemable

eternal present...  

L'Atlas de Pays Disparus

()

Maps make clear like nothing else

the unbridgeable gap

between representation and reality.

()

But a child may pore over old atlases

without having eaten yet this fruit of knowledge.

()

Russia is a sprawl of cantaloupe

and Europe a rumpled quilt

leaned over diligently by War, that blind seamstress...

()

She mutters as she works

'Baikal, sevastopol

manchuria, tannu touva

samarkand, byzantium

kashmir, zanzibar, serendib..'

(Philately)

As a child, I never collected stamps

but I mourn with nostalgia the lost opportunity.

A stamp is a taste of infinitely vivid unreality

in the hinterland between representation and actuality:

dirigibles above the Mongolian steppe, mandalas, Cernunnos, birds

of paradise –

()

A stamp is a poem, a metaphor

an envoy from foreignness, a migratory bird

skimming on strange motionless wings over whole continents.

()

The stamps of vanished countries are

emissaries of the infinite. The atlas of the infinite is this:

synaesthesia of shapes unknown to geometry, alphabet of

borderlines and the colours of citrus fruits...

()

The alphabet of the infinite is this: terrain

without eye. Walking towards the centre of a continent

and meeting there people who chatter like birds, speech

without phoneme, without tongue...

()

This is the history book of the infinite:

this is infinite remembering

translateable to infinite forgetting

for its pages are so very heavy, no one dares lift them

and the letters like a million ants go marching endlessly

but never reaching

oblivion.

()

This is the borderline of the infinite:

like a suture contiguous to itself, extremity

overlapped with extremity.

()

What vanishes from the atlas of the finite

arrives spontaneously in the atlas of the infinite.

What is banished from the land of consciousness

sprouts mushroomlike on the terrain of dreams.

()

The compass roses in these twin atlases

are images ping-ponged between two mirrors.

()

My love, our veins are tributaries scribbled

spiderishly across the map of somethingness.

Thus, I tremble to think of the ineluctable

day when we will reach that

half-effaced border with

nothingness –

()

This border is an asymptote.

If you like, you may call it the horizon.

You cannot reach it just by walking towards it.

You must turn the page inside out

and disappear.

(Nova Zembla)

So do not fear, my love

the borderline – we will find ourselves

on the frontier of Tannu Touva.

A zeppelin and crescent moon hang in the sky

with all the positive absence

of the un-existant.  

Chipman Hill, October Seventh

Moment: in the gravel pit I step outside the stream of time

and it collapses all around me, like a lawn chair

or a neutron star, turned inside-out by its own gravity.

Here,

all calendars are overlapping:

the cycles of ascending and descending.

Now, on Chipman Hill, October Seventh

(an arbitrary mark in the Gregorian)

I stand atop the lid of the reservoir

where once I stood before, begging the gates of heaven –

no, rather, the gates of Time

to let me through –

perhaps they did. Perhaps at a moment

of imperceptible discontinuity,

the lightning split me like a hazel twig.

You see the yellow warning signs?

CONFINED SPACE DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT PERMIT

         and: DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE AREA

They do not jest.

The one who enters has overstepped the margin

of what is knowable to us. The one who enters has torn the page of the atlas and the calendar.

It is not even terra incognita; there is no latin script or compass rose

to name and orient its Nothingness. Past

the last gasp of semantics, the contortionism of Is

and Is Not – a remoteness

of suspension bridges lost in mist –

How am I to know

if I got through?

Love is a way of knowing, has its limits

like any instrument of measurement --falls victim

to the vicious parallax that obscures planetary movements, love

is a language we must learn to speak though the sense of each word is always incommunicable

and we live in a state of constant mistranslation. Where is the end of this, my love

My love, is there no other side of the suspension bridge obscured in mist,

is there no comatose blur into unconsciousness

that unifies and resolves?

The polarity of looking-in-your-eye becomes unbearable, as it

darkens with the night and leaves me astronomically

alone: is there no window

where the mirror shatters, is there no quadrant where the asymptote

impossibly transgresses arithmetic? I think if there were no measures of location,

no time or space or other dimension to define us, I think

if there were no words or anything

but the image in my dream

the song I sang up on the hill

when all the dandelions bloomed around me – surely

I crossed over then, surely

the Cartesian plane collapsed

for an instant, and left me dancing

with relativity – –

                   I crossed over, and I left me here.

Limbs, hair, heaviness

     the body like a bowstring trembling with

         the violence

         of what it has just flung out from itself,

                                            the insomniatic

         wild-eyed frenzy of such impetus.

A kind of exorcism, amputation

as if I have split the world in half

as if I have split the atom

dawning comprehension

blinding me – the love of extremity

is the veiled wish for death. The absolute love

is apocalyptic fire. The lover

                                is a shelter

and a veil.

The absolute love: electrocution

          the lover, nonconductor:

WARNING DO NOT ENTER

          the film reel's terminal overexposure

          the iconoclast, the deconstruction

The lover is an eidolon, the lover is a phenomenon

         (imprisoned as I am in the observer.)

On Chipman Hill, October Seventh

the view opens to me. (It could have been any other

umbilical marker, any other centre

of infinity – ) All calendars overlapping: and I,

at the juncture between

watch the mushrooms burst through the fallen leaves.

The leaves are moments,

fallen to the forest floor, fallen irrevocably through the bore

of the hourglass. The shed skin of the year

becoming translucent – lacework, lamellae

becoming momentless, becoming timeless: becoming palimpsest

rendered obliterate. The absolute memory

becoming oblivion. The love of extremity.

You can arrive at the same point

both by addition and subtraction: you can arrive by remoteness or by too-closeness

to where it breaks down. You can travel in any direction

on a spherical surface, and you will make your way round

to it: on Chipman Hill

the eternal moment – where we found us

when we left

our selves – walking along the path amid the last periwinkles

merely two bodies in impossible motion.

Notes to this poem:

'the love of extremity' is stolen from Milan Kundera

'impossible motion' -  see the Fletcher's Paradox

3. (Arrival)

This is the arrival in the moment:

that rain, long ago, on the surface of the pond

pockmarking its tiny astroblemes. I thought they looked like light bulbs breaking

but it's hard to convey their essence as I felt it then:

a momentary disturbance in a smooth plane

yet not only this – as a syllable on my lips

is not only air set a-tremble.

I thought it was so strange,

to see them leap like that for a moment before sinking, bloom

their atomiceggshelltulips above the water,

and in the same instant

shatter.

So it is when you leave.

I get out of the car, and realise I am standing downstream

from the place where the stars relinquish their ribbons of light

quiet as leaves trailing from

riparian willows

into

the river that goes and goes. We wondered where

that starlight goes when it is gone, that night

we stayed up late, and skirted syntax like a pier

before the sea's unintelligible

overexposure.

Long

        gone,

                long

                       gone, the very syllable

stretches out its arms

and gestures to the sky – the V

for valedictory, of geese. Points on

and on, like damped harmonic motion

diminishing endlessly, yet

never growing null – that water, is it still

ringing with the rain? That train you took, why,

it is still approaching. But no, somehow I've jumped like a skipped stone

and the second hand has slipped also, a heart murmur, leaving no sense

of the space it has travelled through.

The only tangible

is arrival. The stars are above me. I wake

with the feeling of falling. The same feeling, when I hold a millipede in my hand

curled limacoid and paleozoic – that queasy nosedive, that travelling

at the speed of light, as geological aeons

squeeze claustrophobic into the nanosecond.

How it

torques the inner ear and nauseates, how it makes one

gasp for breath!

Sometimes when I sleep beside you this abrupt

aterrissement will grip me, as the astral body

(or whatever you should like to call it) is wrenched from its cool timeless space,

as if from underwater, fingers webbed still with vestigial knowledge.

I feel I am a pilot in an impossibly small plane

descending quite swiftly toward the Siberian tundra

yet not so swiftly that I do not have

one infinitely elastic moment, extending

long enough for my heart's clockwork

to approach singularity. Look,

there's Kamchatka, there is Sakhalin

there is your funny permeable skin

filled in cartographic detail with pores and alveoli – there are your eyes,

blue crater-lakes that touch volcanic blackness. There, your collarbone juts

its asymptotic mountain range – there is the stunned impact, almost seeming to jump

for a moment, like drop of rain above still water.

The pilot knows nothing of terminal velocity, nor

the measurement of time. He simply feels

the absurdity of the ground –

this alien planet, this lover breathing in

sleep!

Here I am, close enough to you

to pick the sleepy-seeds from your lashes

and yet our eyes glance like billiard balls:

the gentle click

of glass on glass, far more tranquil

than the meeting of two planets

but less satisfying, for the reason that

there is no lapse in basic loneliness.

I think, how did I get here?

           The dreaming-time

is our native element, we move in it with grace.

The people there all seem familiar, they glow like paintings by Chagall

with the inward luminescence of childhood memory.

I met a beautiful woman, with red hair and a gap in her teeth

and I told her I wanted to love her... she lived far away from the town

at the lakeside under a row of elm trees. Her skin was soft, and her eyebrows pale as milkweed.

Beautiful, beautiful, overwhelmingly her beauty subtracted me

from myself and for once I was happy. She never told me her name, and perhaps

she has no need for one. The dream-people are like mermaids, for whom names

are useless appendages, soon sloughed away. The same goes for shadows, and faces

and footprints, for alphabets and shoes. I did not at first understand this,

and felt scared to see the emptiness of their mirrors,

which are lookouts upon Nothingness made visible.

I met a boy, in another dream, and I knew him though I didn't remember him.

He was like something out of the archaeology of childhood, but he took my hand

and didn't once blame me for how far I'd wandered

to arrive again like a tired girl on a train, her hair the colour of dust, smelling of old lovers.

Still I could not remember his name and he teased me for it, put

strange syllables in my mouth and jumbled them with feigned seriousness.

If I see him again, I will greet him properly

knowing that nothing is as it seems.

Our eyes will meet

like raindrop and lakewater.

In dreams, I am descending but really travelling upward

into the gravel-pit incubating its purple eggs --

the nebula, nest of Pleiades.

Under the shadow of pan-thalassic seas,

the viscous flow of energy through matter...

I am rapidly expanding out

and at the same time spiralling into myself:

the levels of organisation shift and change,

patterns of chaos in a kaleidoscope.

This is the form, not particle

but wave – the Aborigines knew it, calling time a snake

undulant with muscle, rippling sigmoidal

through space, leaving

squiggles of musical notation on the blank desert sands.

Music, after all, is the clock's precursor

– and while the clock splinters time, to conquer it –

the song measures elapsed movement with its very silences,

and it cannot be divided any more than water.

I sing when you're gone. I sing when letters

are too much like exoskeletons or beads of glass,

reminding me of nothing so much as my loneliness. Do you hear it, stretching in the lacunae?

The filament, fine as spidersilk, suspended from moment to moment – the exquisite suspense,

like a tight-rope act, when we expect the next note to fall

indivisible as a dewdrop from the bloodred twigs of trees

in February, putting out their

gemmules of punctuation and pause. The sap will be rising then, ophid in the limbs.

The song is what flows through it

slow in the winter, just a drip—

drap—drip, from the eaves, sound of stillicides.

The winter is a long silence, inviting

radio static in the brain

the way blank seashells call forth

projected mermaid voices from their emptiness, sounding always to me

like a lament – though perhaps I am wrong

to interpret such pure concavity as the hollowness

(by definition melancholy)

of bell and gong.

You are gone, and my song

expands into your absence

in the underpass, when the train has passed

echoing

            echoing.

Notes on Arrival:

astrobleme: crater left by a meteor

atterissement: landing

Aborigines:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamtime

stillicides: droplets falling from eaves