The pendulum-motion of a swing you have just abandoned:
I will remember this in the hour of your death
A palpebral twitch of pocketwatch measuring time that is relative
a yardstick measuring space that is elastic
The meniscoid curve of a star
sling-shot from just above Ursa Major, then nothingness
or rather, interference: white globs of atmosphere and dust
rendering its epistolary light
illegible.
Nonetheless my inborn alphabets
strive to decipher it, and call it portent
The entire universe is something sent
to the grave seancist, her face set
her hand a-tremble on the hazel rod
her cursive erratic and spiderish.
She stands in the dark room, witless
and terrified. For some reason she thinks of
playing as a child at the sea.
She remembers walking along the sand,
watching the waves lapse over the cuneiform
footprints of illiterate shore-birds.
She recalls the metre of the surf
rocking like a body disturbed or in ecstasy
and feels it as a pounding in her head,
a jerking in her fingertips...
This is what comes through:
The skeletons of whales
breached in the centre of a continent
half-submerged in dunes that have the look of waves
their undulance, their nonlocality.
The posthumous light of a star
caught in Schrodinger's limbo, yet reminding her
more of a German poet's spiritual agony.
A telephone call
making her wonder if she is the butterfly
dreaming of Chuang-Tzu.
The stamps of countries
which have disappeared.
The gentle oscillation
of a swing with no passenger – –
LET ME BE CLEAR:
I do not expect you to decipher this
at least not right away. I never claimed
the music of the universe
was easy to dance to, the way
one would pick up a polka or slip into a waltz.
I never said the universe was rational
or even rhythmical, in the sense that it sticks to a time signature.
Of the visual arts, its closest kin is collage
and it writes prose sort of like Nabokov, in many languages,
without regard for the vocabulary of the reader.
It does this to express itself the better.
It does this to be more full, more real, if not
more legible or coherent. If you insist
you can call this absurdity or randomness.
All I ask is that you don't dismiss it.
Let us return
to our quaking spiritualist. What is she transcribing?
What significance?
Radiolarians and gyres,
scarabeid beetles, hypnopompic
scribblings on the lids of her fluttering eyes.
In her fringe state, she possesses a demonic urgency.
It all comes together. Her hand is arachnid
spinning a spasmodic web of purple ink. What she sees
is something we cannot see.
The braille of constellations,
The glow-worm's fickle semaphore –
There is no adequate translation.
It is a kind of gesture,
The ripe, ensuing limbs of a dancer
signifying – significance – obfuscation...
At first the message is sharp
as the spiculae of a limitrophe star
on the edge of your field of vision
but the static blizzards in
as you fix your pupil upon it:
abyssal darkness upon darkness.
Retina, firmament, palimpsest.
Call it
jabirish if you wish
but let me be faithful to her
because she moves me
in her incoherence
because her beauty
carries me beyond – –
O where?
well
I am there no longer.
Only the limb of a pine tree
pointing at no stars
no moon.
Notes on Poem 2:
Schrodinger:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_cat
German poet: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/lament-3/
Chuang Tzu:http://www.humanistictexts.org/chuang.htm
scarabeid beetles:http://jungcurrents.com/synchronicity-the-golden-scarab-beetle/
radiolarians: see Dreams, Memories Reflections
gyres:http://www.yeatsvision.com/Geometry.html
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