from Silences (2019)
She heard sparrows (Virginia Woolf)
Something making a sound never made before, a series
of slurred whistles in increasing tempo common, uncommon,
invented for the sake of geography, birds of the air, the narrow eye ring
a song from a branch of artemisia absinthium
and bathing in indentations, a scattering of wings scattering dust,
the rapidly unforeseen, something not exactly bird-like,
night falling in layers, as the iconic aspect of all things hidden
in paper and feathers, the brushed technique of feathering to absence—
after a time the more they sound like creatures falling
outside the imaginable, rustling, unfolding,
a doubling of moments of having been here before,
a feeling of transparent thickness over-layering,
then the sparrow speaking four or five times prolonged and piercing
in Greek words, from trees in the meadow
beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.
Aftermath
Rothko’s streak of black paint crosses from left to right
halted by the frame on either side, its linear extension only surmised
and dredged up as a cry comes as a sharp cut in air
all that has happened, color coloring sound
what is a natural voice
I can’t even find it when I’m talking out loud no matter the color
of the sky
afterwords not only pages in books but ones made in air,
on canvas those iridescent black lines
a distant voice calling used to be a bedroom each of us slept in
out there out the window of what comes next,
birds, crying crows
if nothing in words can be visual, what’s sound on a page
and yet below the black is gray or orange, a kind of silent enigma
so many colors
like sounds merging, one’s own and a washed-out ventriloquy
liquid moving
as balance wavers, a glass of water on an outstretched hand
as turning silent in the midst of speaking as hearing
voices slipped in, no longer able to speak sitting in the dark listening
to the highly purpled air, streaks of maroon.
Et in Arcadia Ego
No such thing as empty space or an empty time, there’s always
something, no way to create silence as Cage tells it,
in an anechoic chamber at Harvard, hearing two sounds,
one high and one low, the high one being, the engineer said,
his nervous system, the low one, the circulation of the blood.
“Until I die, there will be sounds” until I die, those hummings stalkings
unfoldings one on top of another, a cerulean collagepiece
lost in the layers of drawer paper pasted over the stunned silence
of arms and legs, rendered still, more than still,
set backwards into a category of the not-having come-into-being,
bloodless forms of pure flesh, circles of naked skin,
a hand on a shoulder, hands pointing to the inscription,
a hand loosely draped over marble, no sound,
not a whisper from the missing fantails blown in from somewhere.
Magritte: The Kiss
To restore silence is the role of objects
Samuel Beckett
Nothing looks the same or walks the same these latter days,
this face looking only to where it’s going, the coffee high,
the arching neck, the palm tree cracking the concrete once called to me,
now clouds cover the surface of what’s moving slowly,
missing milkweed fluttering its orange wings seems to have
nowhere to go, to avoid nearing what isn’t there:
a face behind twisted cloth facing a lover, those wrapped-up
head-like things, muffled in their winding sheets
while behind them in the upper right corner a detail of molding.
Ordinary, luminous, wry.
Winter (The Vicarage Garden Under Snow) Van Gogh
The painting’s quiet, lowers below all sound
the threshold we must have crossed over, that river dividing
the tracks from the bridges, from the unrepresented town
as we stand there about 4pm in front of the white snow
dirt coming up from under the once white cover and a man shoveling
his angled body—behind him the river and branches lightly dusted,
more twiggy things than could be counted unless standing as still
and long as the man, the branches trying for movement
in their jagged horizontals, but still, unmoving
and the effort to be where one is not amplifies silence
the effort to wipe out the noises of shoes, murmurs, a coat
coming off, to stand alone with the scene in which the shovel
can’t lift the wet snow, the river can’t run,
and the vicarage garden lies below the frozen ground.
Others (and Van Gogh’s Bedroom)
The one sitting there, the one who’s the one about whom some slivers
of what one can ever know might be known—
yet unreadable on a backdrop up for grabs, even the color
as when the label calls the walls “violet” now chemically altered
to blue in the painting of a bedroom,
as I look up and see a woman, herself fading
(a headache of green and pink
into voice
how effort can’t find them or move them closer
no wonder silence crawls up folding chairs,
folds us in deep crevices, some intimate, some farflung languages
of the underskin, the specific finger taps
and how rosy fingered dawn, could break someone’s heart,
still I’ll never understand suicide no matter how I try,
deep silence behind one’s own straining to grasp who he was,
or might have been,
his conjugation of verbs and the stale smell of brick,
as opaque as one’s own efforts to imagine being out of air
but for the temporary cessation in which time must extended
into claustrophobia, where proximity falters and tilts the objects
in the room: cane chair, bottles of who-knows-what, red-green floor, reflections of
a glass slivering.
Property
Who belongs to whom and where as the bird’s noise
to some shrub near the ribs, under the third branch
from the ground, hooked to wings it seems to have flown,
belonging now to the pure form of light in which nothing
makes any sort of sound just skirmish in the dirt,
half-hearted footnotes recalling lists of names on the page of a book
belonging once to others lost in cities belonging nowhere
documenting everywhere as rapidly as mania can manage
where belonging might mean billions offshore, percolated, pretended,
the profitable poison of carbon dioxide, ozone, and methane,
as high-flown sounds fade and slip out and around us:
to whom do they belong these birds sounding their directional language
unknown, unlabeled, belonging to the as-yet unpropertied air.
From Ocular Proof
A blurry photograph
The tree azalea overwhelms evening with its scent,
defining everything and the endless fields.
Walking away, suddenly, it slices off and is gone.
The visible object blurs open in front of you,
the outline of a branch folds back into itself, then clarifies—just as you turn away—
and the glass hardens into glass
as you go about taking care of things abstractedly
one thing shelved after another, as if they were already in the past,
needing nothing from you until, smashing itself on the tile floor,
the present cracks open the aftermath of itself.
The photographic object
It’s too close or too far to be seen at the fogged horizon,
my balance is off, clearing away the brush at the side of the photograph,
tying up bundles to be carted away, and pruning what’s left.
What for god’s sake
is that roundish bit on top of a shrub over there,
branches any good wind might break,
asymmetry in disheveled light—
it’s either dense shadow or a tree, either downhill or a camera tilt,
ironic
or a story hidden in what’s seen.
What was I seeing in the dusty leaves and skin and endless hours,
even afterwards (calm, astringent)
in the still black and white.
Brassai’s night photos
Photographing Paris at night, Brassai wanted to be raised
to the level of object: the world is richer than I,
the wall speaking to him in graffiti chipped from a childish drawing
of interlocking hearts only seeming symbolic, only seeming impossible.
On such days reification attracts as the whole city spreads out before you,
metempsychosis not from flesh to flesh, but (from where he stood
his large camera before him) into bridges across the Seine.
from Transfer of Qualities
the cup
The cup on the shelf above eyelevel, the reach to get it for the first morning glass of water, the running of the water now clear after the silty water yesterday, the large dragonfly drowning in the cup, now in the bottom of the sink, and the sudden understanding of the whirr that edged the room last night, the unlocatable whirr that stops and starts and finally falls still as the lights are put out and what is left is the neighborhood barking, unidentified sounds pushed to the edge of consciousness, the sudden storm in the middle somewhere, and the knowledge that there must be a reason for what is now silence, a reason lodged in the absent muted clatter, as in the sudden morning appearance of venational wings, each the size of a thumb, folded inside the cup from the top shelf.
the folded muslin
Looking at the folded muslin it seemed as if the cloth had extended across the distance to make contact with one’s skin—not so much as if one’s own gaze had moved out into the world, but rather as if the visible had imposed itself, reached out and seized some part of where you yourself fold, an eyelid wrinkled shut, an elbow creasing. Unable to keep it an object “out there,” onto which shape and size and even meaning are imposed, one loses the power to name. It shapes itself to our bodies like the sheets of ghosts or lovers, as when the drape of a storm that has not yet arrived stills the air, puts a slight damp across the brow and under the arms, undoes even the little one knows of science and leaves one utterly enclosed and mute.
the seashell
The seashell disintegrates into your hand, one now with the palm—slippery, whitened, powdery. With a needle and thread endless hours are spent collecting shells in a bucket, sitting with legs folded under, head bent over, a necklace forming shell by tiny shell. In a 1949 film Olivia De Havilland sits at an embroidery screen poking it again and again with a needle. She thinks of nothing else as the frantic knocking continues at the door.
Lost utterly in the summer heat, untold hours were given over to making these fragile necklaces, to scraping open the small holes that almost always cracked the shell into shards, bits of shell sticking to fingers and skin, falling into the sand and disappearing in the atomized whiteness, only to begin again, to recapture the sense of inarticulate shine that was the needle, the single shell, the blinding reflection off the sand and sea.
a glass bowl
You enter the room in which each item has been carefully placed, not perfectly or according to any specific aesthetic rules, but certainly, obsessively. Each has to be where it is, exactly here or exactly there. The verbena sticks up out of its vase just as it should at the far edge of a table bought years ago on a street of junk shops and panhandlers. The blackenedChinese jar arches its handle next to the black arch of a companion bowl, a photographic memory never remembered until intruded upon. Someone has come in the room and moved the chartreuse glass bowl so chartreuse as to seem a gigantic smudge, and suddenly the room begins to swim. The bowl floats in a wobbly arc into the foreground, the rest of the room dims and you feel suddenly and uneasily intimate with the glassy and sickly surface, glazed over by displacement.
the window
The window is both a thing in itself and a transparency that obliterates itself by being itself. The thing itself is the wooden frame and cross pieces, the smudged glass panes. The frame creates both an exact view—a tree cut off at the right edge, a corner of roof and jacaranda blooms—and also a frameless view that pulls one off the seat one is sitting in, towards the walls on the other side of the room and out into the blinding white of the morning. It is between inside and outside, between every picture one has seen of trees and these trees, between stasis and movement, between the certainty of the keyboard beneath the fingers and possibility, both the slight noise of tapping and the tapping of branches on the window, creating an illusion, belied by the weighty body, of a weightless glide into the California light that seems the absence of all light, transparency itself.
The book
So much for statues and vases. I hope books are not like them. Buy a vase, take it home, put it on your table or your mantel, and, after a while, it will allow itself to be made a part of your household. But it will be no less a vase, for that.On the other hand, take a book, and you will find it offering, opening itself. It is this openness of the book which I find so moving. A book is not shut in by its contours, is not walled up as in a fortress. It asks nothing better than to exist outside itself, or to let you exist in it.In short, the extraordinary fact in the case of a book is the falling away of the barriers between you and it. You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside. George Poulet, Criticism and the Experience of Interiority
1.
The word in the sentence has been smudged, the ink blotted, the paper overfolded, the meaning derailed; the sentence now pale, missing its force and import, languishing as the characters in La Boheme, sickly as music without words. The others, the ones intact, try to make up for the missing word and proliferate a range of meanings consistent with the vocabulary and syntax, yet still it is the realm of guesses, guesses as to the missing, as to the alteration in meaning, as to the endless possibilities contained in what would otherwise have been a quite mundane sentence leading to the next in the paragraph, but which now has taken over completely given the aggressive force of the uninvited guest.
2.
For a writer, the intimacy of the image is in submitting completely to what one has imagined and put on the page, to oneself one might say and yet not oneself, an onanism without guilt, the subsuming embrace of an image abstract enough as not to flush the skin, yet vivid enough to cause a collapse into the lilies as if trying to remember the names of the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, although one never can, just the overwhelming smell of them at the side of the greenhouse door—so much white odor, dusty stamens, the moment of her modest rapture as she saw him appear in the archway with the single flower, the ceiling a complex mosaic of blue and stars, ave gratia plena dominus tecum.
3.
The book lies open and prone but keeps closing itself like an irritating fan if the body beneath shifts position from side to side. The paper is there; the fingers are there, and they slip in and out of one another. Yet immersion in one of these things is not, one first thinks, an encounter with the material and restless thing on one’s lap. It is rather an encounter with a tyranny of sorts, a haunting into the next hours as a character whom one has never met comes closer, not inhabiting exactly, not taking over thoughts and gestures, but warmer than a fictional character ought to be, standing too close and breathing hard in an internal landscape that was once your own and through which you are both walking where the fictional snow is a kind of snow closer to paper confetti than rain, its texture not unlike the feel of the page underneath your fingers.
4.
No one else seems to catch the overwhelming odor of mold that creeps along the floor,that intrudes in random moments as one’s attention is focused on a passage in a book one has been meaning to read for weeks. In the story, there are many scenes unfolding, rubbing up against one another like that dirty yellow fog against the window pane with which we are all so familiar, and in such a way that it is impossible to isolate one discrete moment from any other in order to understand it more thoroughly or to penetrate more deeply. Rather, there is a sense of increasing distraction such that one must attend with all one’s faculties lest one miss even an iota of the characters’ accumulating shame. Yet, of course, despite one’s efforts to lose oneself in reading, the odor is throughout the room and onto one’s skin and has affected proportionally one’s disgust at the emanations from the page.