Fragment 47
Eros shook my
mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees
Fragment 52
I would not think to touch the sky with two arms
Fragment 56
not one girl I think
who looks on the light of the sun
will ever
have wisdom
like this
Fragment 147
someone will remember us
I say
even in another time
Fragment 162
with what eyes?
from If not, Winter (Sappho)
Fragment 22
]
]work
]face
]
]
if not, winter
]no pain
]]I bid you sing
of Gongyla, Abanthis, taking up
your lyre as (now again) longing
floats around you,
you beauty. For her dress when you saw it
stirred you. And I rejoice.
In fact she herself once blamed me
Kyprogeneia
because I prayed
this word:
I want
from If Not,Winter
Sunday evening, evening gray. All day the storm did not quite storm. Clouds closed in, sulked, spat. We put off swimming. Took in the chairs. Finally (about seven) a rumbling high up. A wind went round the trees tossing each once and releasing arbitrary rivulets of cool air downward, this wind which came apart, the parts swaying out, descending, bumping around the yard awhile not quite on the count then a single chord ran drenched across the roof, the porch and stopped. We all breathed. Maybe that’s it, maybe it’s over, the weatherman is often wrong these days, we can still go swimming (roll call? glimpse of sun?) when all at once the sluices opened, broke a knot and smashed the sky to bits, which fell and keep falling even now as dark comes on and fabled night is managing its manes and the birds, I can hear from their little racket, the birds are burning up and down like holy fools somewhere inside it—far in where they keep the victim, smeared, stinking, hence the pageantry, hence the pitchy cries, don’t keep saying you don’t hear it too.
Joseph Conrad gave a reading at the London Library. A red-haired woman came up afterward. He had seen her circling earlier, taking a chair at the back, but he had not troubled about it. “I knew you in the Congo,” she said now. “I knew your wife.” My wife? he thought, but, as always after a reading, in the retreating roar of his own soul he could barely hear her or remember how English worked. Had she said “life,” not “wife”? Her voice, that of a crow, thrust at him—some weekend they’d “all spent together” and he’d sent her a letter the next day, a poem. Dread rose at the back of his mind; a parcel broke. He turned away, busied himself. He blamed, abhorred the touch of a past time; it surprised him how much. She followed him to the dinner that Charles (the London Librarian) had arranged at a nearby bistro, hurrying along behind everyone else, and, with the touch of his wife or his life burning like a toxin on his inside skin, Joseph Conrad could not meet her eyes or let pathos come clouding into him. When she seated herself at the foot of the table and was speaking loudly to anyone who listened, he felt the pluck of it on the side of his head but did not turn, he had to continue, now he’d begun, it was a long dinner. It was unjust. In other contexts, he admired perseverance. She was drowning. He did not turn. The light of pure reason, Joseph Conrad liked to say, resembles electricity in being cold. Proud statements like this came to him now and again when he was swimming but afterward seemed a bit off. No, it was a little nightmare, it was a rescue he could not carry out (and he was a rescuer).
But eventually the dinner ended. It was still 1907. No one had drowned. Shrugging into coats, they said hearty farewell things. He did not catch her eye. All left together to walk back toward the Library and go their ways. It was an early winter night. He began to feel fundamentally impatient with himself, hot with cowardice. He dropped back to walk beside her. His heartbeat was too fast. She did not seem surprised. An unknownness enveloped them, as if they were playing a game, as if they were draped in cloth or lost in old rooms. How they got to talking about white bread he could not remember afterward, but it shone in his mind, this conversation, as the bread had shone, and he was trying to tell her all that. Maybe she had mentioned lining up for bread in the early-morning dusk, sent out by her mother, running home with a loaf as heavy as two schoolbooks. When one dreamed of bread even now, Joseph Conrad agreed with her, it was not the rough black bread of childhood. Dream bread, mythic bread, was as white as a freshly laundered cuff.
We really want them to like us. We want it to go well. We overdress. They are narrow people, art people, offhand, linens. It is early summer, first hot weekend. We meet on the street, jumble about with kisses and are we late? They had been late, we’d half-decided to leave, now oh well. That place across the street, ever tried it? Think we went there once, looks closed, says open, well. People coming out. O.K. Inside is dark, cool, oaken. Turns out they know the owner. He beams, ushers, we sit. And realize at once two things, first, the noise is unbearable, two, neither of us knows the other well enough to say bag it. Our hearts crumble. We order food by pointing and break into two yell factions, one each side of the table. He and she both look exhausted, from (I suppose) doing art all day and then the new baby. We eat intently, as if eating were conversation. We keep passing the bread. My fish comes unboned, I weep pretending allergies. Finally someone pays the bill and we escape to the street. For some reason I was expecting snow outside. There is none. We decide not to go for ice cream and part, a little more broken. Saturday night as an adult, so this is it. We thought we’d be Nick and Nora, not their blurred friends in greatcoats. We cover our ears inside our souls. But you can’t stop it that way.
Not from Nox
Forest shade, lake shade, poplar shade, highway shade,
backyard shade, café shade, down-behind-the-high-school
shade, cow shade, carport shade, blowing shade, dappled
shade, shade darkened by rain above, shade under ships,
shade along banks of snow, shade beneath the one tree in a
bright place, shade by the ice cream truck, shade in the new-
car sales room, shade in halls of the palace as all the electric
lights turn on, shade in a stairwell, shade in tea barrels, shade
in books, shade of clouds running over a distant landscape,
shade on bales in the barn, shade in the pantry, shade in the
icehouse (the smell of shade), shade under runner blades,
shade along branches, shade at night (a difficult research),
shade on rungs of a ladder, shade on pats of butter sculpted
to look like scallop shells, shade to holler from, shade in the
chill of bamboo, shade at the core of an apple, confessional
shade, shade of hair salons, shade in a joke, shade in the town
hall, shade descending from legendary ancient hills, shade
under the jaws of a dog with a bird in its mouth trotting
along to the master’s voice, shade at the back of the choir,
shade in pleats, shade clinging to arrows in the quiver, shade
in scars.
for Dick Higgins
Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink
this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism,
disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks — impish
hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn’t it glib?
Isn’t it chic? I fit childish insights within rigid limits,
writing shtick which might instill priggish misgiv-
ings in critics blind with hindsight. I dismiss nit-
picking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I
bitch; I kibitz — griping whilst criticizing dimwits,
sniping whilst indicting nitwits, dismissing simplis-
tic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit.
Pilgrims, digging in shifts, dig till midnight in mining
pits, chipping flint with picks, drilling schist with drills,
striking it rich mining zinc. Irish firms, hiring micks
whilst firing Brits, bring in smiths with mining skills:
kilnwrights grilling brick in brickkilns, millwrights
grinding grist in gristmills. Irish tinsmiths, fiddling
with widgits, fix this rig, driving its drills which spin
whirring drillbits. I pitch in, fixing things. I rig this
winch with its wiring; I fit this drill with its piping. I
dig this ditch, filling bins with dirt, piling it high, sift-
ing it, till I find bright prisms twinkling with glitz.
Christian Bök, “From Chapter I” from Eunoia
Santa Fe Trail I go separately The sweet knees of oxen have pressed a path for me ghosts with ingots have burned their bare hands it is th...
