I’ve been aghast these many months the months bunch up, like a patient upon a table anesthetized, on half-burned grass, aghast again, at August’s end
So many months with broken breath, now snot rags, ragweed, wheezing; the peeved grass, having lost what was naïve also clotted in a sneeze
but think, the patient, I, anesthetized, might salvage breath for what’s ahead the ghast extending out in time to breathe, to lay a hand upon a head to pay respect to a flattened bird the breath to bike around its head the rag we hold, so dear, to make it last, to count no matter what
The old man at dusk comes around the bend puffing his cigar
and a bat shadows me as I walk towards the sun, its alchemy
golding pine needles on the ground, igniting grape vines.
Hills recline in the distance smudged by a hand working in pastel, soft and slow the line where mountains meet violet
and clouds lay back smoking fiery pipes. Village, I am wordless.
At a nearby campsite, a grill is about to be lit, about to blister some sausage. Blister until twigs catch, vines chatter in the flames like gossips with nothing on their minds.
A small curve of a port – boats sit in great fields of mud, the water rolled up like a carpet to join the sea, to bunch into glossy, spit-tipped waves.
What did it mean – if we longed for the sea?
The absent ubiquitous sea, everywhere and nothing.
Walking on a road called Pas de l’Assassin, I might think the sea is the victim.
In the brutal emptiness, the stubbled fields could be rolled up and sold to market – I might be richer, but the land poorer.
The strange crucified lord of the corn fields might answer someone’s need, but not mine.
I settled down by a tank of green waters, drowned my sorrows by downing a dozen oysters.
Café life, the terrace seats and tiny spoons and lovers’ faces in the sun. A trampy man demands to buy a bottle of water; the garçon says we don’t sell bottles; the bum grumbles into his half-shaven jaw:
Je veux une bouteille d’eau. They are fighting as if during the Revolution – it’s Bastille Day – over a bottle of poured or rented or drunk water. They are growling through their teeth as two people might seethe over how to say “hamburger.” After the old man sits,
(deadringer for “Boudu” fished out of the Seine) he tries to ferret away his dear bottle. The garçon runs to wrest the green Perrier from his grip. Half empty, half full, it’s all the same. Under the shade of the chestnut trees along a boulevard in Ménimontant.
All lines of the poem arrive, perfect in itself except that it needs to be written. The gestalt in a swift and complete vision. Start. Where. So many words crowd the mouth. Also tongue-tied.
Vision – the Puritan town made worldly. Sun shines on it. The clapboard café. Iced tea chatter in Cantonese, Hindu, Persian, English. Bespectacled kids climb the sofas. Benevolence.
Call the counterpressure “Usha.” Winds blow like steam off the wand of a barista. Could be a binding woosh of the sea, oceanic, self-annihilating. She could be USHA, a department crushed by Musk.
Instead she is product of Ivy League, Second lady Fourth hypocrite. Product of immigrants. Abuse of language is world violation. How can she walk the street with a soul of total devastation?
My immersion into Paul Celan’s poems hasn’t been depressing; instead I’ve been following, with keen attention over the past weeks, a mind which has been where we are treading. Celan spoke of poems as being prophetic, that they “cast their shadow ahead of themselves: one must live after them. Life itself must pass through the poem.” Yes indeed!
I follow mindfully through his halting struggle to wrest language out of its abuse and false clarity. And darkness, I can’t help but feel the power of “living, creative darkness,” a human darkness which also seethes in poems. I’m thinking of Celan’s “From Darkness to Darkness.” Never would you find a deus ex machina, a miraculous light bursting into a scene in Celan. Instead a subtle light appears, throws shade ahead of the poet, onto a beloved, onto an empty field. There is trembling possibility – a breakthrough of recognition, across borders, time and self. (I’m drawing on a brilliant introduction by Susan Gillespie, who translated Corona, Selected Poems.) Through the obscurity, the poem carries forward, having been sparked with the light and coursing energy of human exchange.
I felt it when reading together with a group of smart folks who were listening as if a trumpet was sounding. And at the protest where a shared consciousness was erupting in the gray rain. It is a kind of faith, hope against hope in a dim world. A shared consciousness to observe the present and the unknowingness of the future. Rock on, Celan.
Oh, a mere mortal; the hours I spent on my couch, watching, not watching, pacing, cleaning, anything to trim the tension of watching the tennis gods
two bedraggled bodies wracking them- selves senseless smacking the small ball to new and giddy places. Mother, if I had five ounces of that resilience…
Five hours in, sports writers are sick with praise. Even the clay, even the living dust is whipped up, spent but glowing, having witnessed magnificence.
