Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

The First Elegy

Who then, if I cried out, would hear me from the order
of angels? and supposing one of them took
a sudden interest in me: I should wither from his
more powerful being. For the beautiful is nothing

but terror's beginning, which we yet bear unbowed,
and we marvel at it, as it calmly disdains

to disturb us. Every angel is terrible.
And so I restrain myself and swallow down the siren call
of dark convulsion. O whom then are

we able to need? Neither angels, nor men, 

and the clever beasts note this well, 

that we are not so solidly at home
in the world as construed. There remains to us,

perhaps, a tree on the hillside that we see again
daily; there remain to us yesterday's streets, and

the loyalty, which is forgiven, to a habit
t
hat suited us well, and thus stayed, and did not go.
O and the night, the night, when the wind, full of world,
wears down our faces--, for whom would she not remain, desired,

gently disappointing, she who lies painfully in store for

the solitary heart? Is she softer on those who love?
Oh, they only hide with one another in their fate.
Do you still not know it? Throw from your arms
into space the emptiness that we breath; perhaps
the birds feel the expanded air with an inward flight.

Yes, the springtimes well needed you. Many a star
expected you to sprint. A wave
raised itself up in the past, or,
so that you should drop by the open window,
a violin gave itself up. All this was the task.
But did you manage it? Were you not always
scattered in expectation, as a beloved heralded
it all to you? (Where will you hide her,
so that these great strange thoughts of yours
should come in and out, and stay more often the night?)
If you must sing of lovers, still is their
famed feeling by far not immortal enough.
You almost envy these abandoned ones, whom you
found so much more loving than those who were appeased.
Always begin anew the acclaim that is never to be attained;
think: the hero maintains himself, even the downfall
was for him only a pretext for being: his final birth.
But exhausted nature takes the lovers back
into her, as if the strength to carry this off
could not come twice. Have you thought enough
then of Gaspara Stampa, that any girl passed up
by her beloved, on the aggravated example
of these lovers, feels: that I might be like her?
Should these oldest pains not at last become
more fruitful to us? Is it not time that we lovingly
free ourselves from the beloved, and tremblingly withstand,
as the arrow withstands the string, in order in launching
to be more than itself? For remaining is nowhere.

Voices, voices. Hear, my heart, as else only
saints have heard: that they raised the great
call from the ground; but they knelt
again, impossible, and paid it no mind.
Thus did they listen. Not that you would bear
the voice of God, not by far. But listen to the blowing,
the uninterrupted news that is made up of silence.
It is rustling now, from those young dead ones, to you.
Wherever you entered, did their fate not calmly
address you in the churches of Rome and Naples?
Or an inscription was loftily borne to you,
as of late that tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.
What do they want of me? Gently shall I
shrug off the semblance of injustice that the pure
motion of their spirits sometimes hinders a little.

It is indeed peculiar to inhabit the earth no longer,
not to exercise skills barely learned, nor to give
to roses, and to other things that promise themselves,
the significance of a human future;
not to be what one was in infinitely
anxious hands, and to leave behind
even one's own name like a broken toy.
Peculiar, to no longer wish wishes. Peculiar,
to see everything fluttering that hung
so loosely in space. And being dead is laborious
and full of catching up, so that one gradually senses
a bit of eternity. -- But all of the living make
this mistake, that they distinguish too sharply.
The angels (it is said) would often not know, whether
they were moving among the living or the dead.
The eternal current always pulls all the ages
along with it through both domains,
and drowns them out in both.

In the end they need us no longer, the early departed,
one is gently weaned of the earthly, as one meekly
grows away from the mother's breast. But we who need
such large secrets, for whom blissful progress
so often springs from mourning--: could we be without them?
The story is in vain, that once in the lament for
Lino's daring first music, barren torpor crept in;
that first in the stunned space, into which an almost divine youth
suddenly entered forever, did the emptiness shift into that
vibration, that now thrills us and comforts and helps.

Heinrich Heine, from the Buch der Lieder (1827)

Die Heimkehr

LXXII

Und bist du erst mein ehlich Weib,
Dann bist du zu beneiden,
Dann lebst du in lauter Zeitvertreib,
In lauter Pläsier und Freuden.

Und wenn du schiltst und wenn du tobst,
Ich werd es geduldig leiden;
Doch wenn du meine Verse nicht lobst,
Laß ich mich von dir scheiden.

*

If you shall be my faithful wife
Then fortune on you shines.
You'll live a gay and carefree life
Of leisurely pastimes.

And if you scold and if you rave
I'll abide it all with pleasure.
But if my poems you will not praise
Then let us split forever.

A Few More Notes on Poetry: Hallfred's Saga and Wallace Stevens

I came late to the realization that poetry is what matters most. I lived fully immersed in the era so well picked out by Walter Benjamin, das prosaische Zeitalter, and so I filled up my free time with novels: sentence after descriptive sentence, telling a story that read like a movie.

Nowadays, however, it's either primary or secondary literature either more or less connected with what in my line of work is called the 'AOS'; or it is poetry.

I would like to mention two very different poets I have been reading recently. The first of them is anonymous.

Now let me begin by saying I would be the first to bemoan the Christianization of Scandinavia. Had it not happened so early on, we would have had indigeneous, European pagans, with pagan religion and pagan customs, to marvel at and to study. What we have instead are a few properly pagan rune stones, but mostly just descriptions of the pagan era from the high period of medieval Scandinavian literature, which occurred already a couple of centuries after the mass conversion.

However, I have to admit that this renunciation of Odinism from the 10th-century Hallfred's Saga is one of the most beautiful accounts of conversion I have come across:

It's the creed of the sovereign
of Sogn, to ban sacrifices.
We must renounce many
a long-held decree of Norns.
All mankind casts Odin's words
to the winds. Now I am forced
to foresake Freyja's kin
and pray to Christ.

*

The other poet I wanted to mention is Wallace Stevens. I had recently been mentioning to people whose tastes I respect (more or less) that I was enjoying going back to T. S. Eliot after many years, in particular to The Waste Land, which seems to me to be tinged with the occult in just the way modernist poetry ought to be: enriched by the Tarot and by chants of shanti in the same way that Rilke's poetry is enriched by angels. Enriched without existential commitment.  

But whenever I mentioned Eliot, I would hear in response something like: I'm more of a Wallace Stevens man myself. (As if we were talking about the Yankees and the Mets!) I had never read Wallace Stevens, and I didn't understand why he and Eliot were being juxtaposed in this way. Now I have read Stevens, and I still don't understand.

But anyway, for the most part I remain more of an Eliot man. Stevens is modern, but he is modern not so much like Bauhaus as like the Hartford Indemnity Co., where he spent his entire career. I almost feel like I could have guessed his place of employment, without having read anything of his biography, simply from the quality of the verses. There are, in particular, all the trips to Florida, which was not as awful in the early 20th century as it is now; but which was, if I may put it this way, already devoid of any qualities that might have set the poetic imaginations of Eliot, Auden, or Pound afire. Perhaps Ogden Nash could have come up with a clever rhyme about alligators.

Most of the time, his poems, like insurance forms, fail to hook me. There are a few exceptions, however, where, as if in spite of himself, an image floats up from the midst of a sea of un-followable words and strikes me, hard. This, for example, from "The Man with the Blue Guitar" of 1937:

Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?

Maybe it's the rhyme scheme manqué, the fact that if 'wine' and 'blood' had been reversed we would have had a pleasing, Nash-worthy rhyme. Or maybe it's that the question hits so close to home.

Stevens's grasp of French is so-so. He likes puerile onomatopoeia ('tum-ti tum-tum', and so on), and for some reason strongly prefers the sun to the moon. Much of the poetry is about poetry, and often what he takes poetry to be for remains, after reading, strange to me.

There is one striking exception: 'Men Made Out of Words', of whose year of composition I am uncertain:

What should we be without the sexual myth,
The human revery or poem of death?

Castratos of moon-mash--Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human

Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

This poem seem to explain how an insurance salesman in Hartford, Connecticut, who likes nothing more than his vacations in Florida, might nonetheless be a poet; and at the same time how I, in spite of the fact that nothing really happens in my life anymore, that in an important sense all experiences have been played out already, and from this point on it all really just amounts to management-- how I, in such a condition, could nonetheless come to believe that poetry is what matters most.

--

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T. S. Eliot: Philosophy and Genre

There was in the early 20th century a now largely forgotten American-English philosopher named T. S. Eliot. He published some scholarly articles, notably one in The Monist of 1916 on "The Development of Leibniz's Monadism." In general however he preferred to return to an older form of philosophical writing, also preferred of Parmenides, Lucretius, and Henry More: namely poetry. 

I would like to cite at length the final segment of Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" of 1940. It sums up perfectly my own views of religious belief, of the limits of human knowledge, and of our prospects for salvation, but that's not why I am citing it. I am citing it because I would like to then go on to make a point about the relationship between disciplines or domains of inquiry on the one hand, and the genres in which they are written on the other. So read it now. But really read it.

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.

In the 14th-century Kerala School of mathematics in Southern India, mathematical proofs were, like "The Dry Salvages," written in verse. This delayed for some time the West's ability to discern within these lines of verse many discoveries that the West would take several centuries more to happen upon on their own using a more or less Euclidean style (dare I say 'style' instead of 'method'?).

Here, in Eliot, we are dealing not with mathematics, but with speculative metaphysics of the sort that also interested Leibniz (alongside mathematics): the relationship between the eternal and the temporal, the nature of corporeality, the prospects of surviving the corruption of the body, and so on. As I often say, if this is not philosophy, I don't know what is, and one hopes that the future's historians of philosophy will, in their surveys of the early 20th century, not consider only Carnap, Heidegger, and the rest of the usual canon of authors writing in the prevailing genre of that (but by no means of every) historical period, but instead will enrich their picture of the era by reading at least a few select poets.  The ones who contributed in parallel to philosophy's prevailing genre might yield particular insight, like Henry More in his day, who described the promise and limitations of 17th-century corpuscularianism both in poems such as the Democritus Platonissans as well as in straightforward treatises such as The Immortality of the Soul. 

Read, philosopher, I mean to say, T. S. Eliot, not as a curious reader who has finished his or her work for the day, but as a philosopher.

Defective Verse

I wonder to what extent the 19th-century philological treatment of the texts that would be used to build up national literary canons, together with the difficulty of dealing with damaged, destroyed, and partially absent sources, might have played a role in the rise in the 20th century of free verse, imagism, and other schools that strongly rejected the formal apparatus that had always been thought to be an ineliminable feature of poetics.

Reading Egil's Saga, composed in Iceland around 1240 CE, I am finding that the verses that capture my imagination most are the ones marked with the marginal note: defective. Take this one for example:

*

And...

...the pillar,

glorifier

of my deeds,

which...

...

...the scourge

of Halfdan's line.

*

Or here is one that begins to express a sentiment whose outcome is then lost to time:

*

I often feel

when the ruler of wealth...

....

*

The complete verses are beautiful too, untranslatable, and thus endowed with an extra layer of strangeness when translated. But it is defectiveness, or the points at which philology fails, that seems to yield, unintentionally, a distinctly modern aesthetic effect. I'm sure someone, probably French, has written about the aesthetics of defectiveness; here I just wanted to mention that I've noticed it in some of the fragmentary parts of the Icelandic Sagas.

Rilke: A Translation

Judith's Return

Sleepers, black is the wetness still upon my feet, imprecise. Dew, you say.
O, that I am Judith, I am come from him, from the tent from the bed, his head trickling, thrice-drunk blood. Wine-drunk, drunk on incense, drunk on me -- and now arid as dew.
Low-held head above the morning grass; but I, above in my going, I erect.
Brain suddenly empty, images flowing out into the earth; but I am still pricked in the heart by the whole breadth of the night's deed.
Lover that I am.
Horrors drive all the pleasures in me together, all places are on me.
Heart, my famed heart, beat against the wind:
     as I go, as I go
and faster the voice in me, my voice, which will call a birdcall before the city of need.

*

Judith's Rückkehr

Schläfer, schwarz ist das Nass noch an meinen Füßen, ungenau. Tau sagen sie.
Ach, dass ich Judith bin, herkomme von ihm, aus dem Zelt aus dem Bett, austriefend sein Haupt, dreifach trunkenes Blut. Weintrunken, trunken vom Räucherwerk, trunken von mir - und jetzt nüchtern wie Tau.
Niedrig gehaltenes Haupt über dem Morgengras; ich aber oben auf meinem Gang, ich Erhobene.
Plötzlich leeres Gehirn, abfließende Bilder ins Erdreich; mir aber quillend ins Herz alle Breite der Nacht-Tat.
Liebende, die ich bin.
Schrecken trieben in mir alle Wonnen zusamm, an mir sind alle Stellen.
Herz, mein berühmtes Herz, schlag an den Gegenwind:
    wie ich geh, wie ich geh
und schneller die Stimme in mir, meine, die rufen wird, Vogelruf, vor der Not-Stadt.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, 1911

Notes on Anne Carson

The secret formula, soon no longer to be secret, of my intellectual formation, is that it  has for the most part consisted in a succession of remote tutelages under women a generation or so older than I, who work in no easily categorizable genre of scientific or literary or creative production, and whom I aspire, in certain ways, to be like. It is something like a unidirectional erotic distance-learning, a mixture of Plato's Symposium and the University of Phoenix. Here, the erotic, I should probably have to underline for you modern readers, is not some sexual pay-off, but an impulse, an aspiration-towards.

Anne Carson is perhaps foremost among these ideals. Here is what I like about her: she goes down into the language that goes down into the real predicament to which poetry is a response. Consider these lines from her 'Glass Essay' of the early 1990s:

I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.

It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached,

but as I came closer

I saw it was a human body

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off

the bones.

And there was no pain.

The wind

was cleansing the bones.

They stood forth silver and necessary.

It was not my body, not a woman's body, it was the body of us all.

It walked out of the light.

'Silver and necessary' made me think of walking through snow-covered meadows between my office and home, on moon-lit nights, and of how my bones are always there on these walks, and part of the very same composition. With this phrase alone she left me convinced me that I am myself a mediocre poet precisely to the extent that I had hitherto failed to notice that it is bones, and not ideas or sentiments, that reveal what a human life is like, or rather what is necessary to a human life, as well as the luminescent qualities of that necessary thing.

Carson goes down into language that goes down into being, but it never stops being, at the same time, a joke. This is most clear in her 'Book of Isaiah', which tells, more vividly than scripture itself, of the peculiar triangulation of God and man and woman, all with Carson's characteristically funny and enviable understanding of the insides of ancient languages:

Notice whenever God addresses Isaiah in a feminine singular verb

something dazzling is

about to happen.

Isaiah what do you know about women? asked God.

Down Isaiah's nostrils bounced woman words:

Blush. Stink. Wife. Fig. Sorceress--

God nodded.

This is no 'women's poet', Anne Carson. This is a poet who not only faces up to, but draws her very force from the accrued stereotypes and prototypes of millennia of violence, of men against men and of men against women (quite a bit less of the third possible form).

Carson understands that in order to descend into the language that descends into the predicament that necessitates poetry, one needs to descend into the body and its excretions. The culmination of God's peculiar and dysfunctional relationship with Isaiah comes when the latter is transformed (reduced) to the feminine state through the onset of lactation, a power that in the end will serve as a life-force that courses through all of nature. The comical travesty (in the proper sense of that word, that lies hidden in the way we speak of RuPaul and Divine) of a man condemned by God to sprout jugs, turns into a celebration of nature's own self-generativity:

Isaiah sank to a kneeling position.

New pain! said Isaiah.

New contract! said God.

Isaiah lifted his arms, milk poured out his breasts.

Isaiah watched the milk pour like strings.

It poured up the Branch and across history and down into people's lives and time.

The milk made Isaiah forget about righteousness.

As he fed the milk to small birds and animals Isaiah thought only about their little lips.

God meanwhile continued to think about male and female.

(Incidentally, I myself have written about a case described by the 16th-century physician Santorio Sanctorius, in the annals of early modern medicine, of a widower with an infant child who, by force of imagination, caused himself to lactate.)

Carson calls the collection I've been discussing Glass, Irony & God. I take it that the glass is the words like 'silver' and 'necessary' and 'bone', the words by which Carson descends by language into the predicament to which poetry is a response. The irony is the grasp of language, and the way she never lets you forget that as she descends into the silvery and necessary, she is always just playing with language, playing, that is, as a virtuoso performer, on the foundation of a rigorous mastery of the classical languages. (God seems to move between these two poles: something that has mostly to do with language, something ripe for a good linguistic joke or playful mixing of speech registers, even if tradition portrays Him as something of silvery necessity.)

The dependency of the classical themes of poetry upon the contingent features of language --a dependency that cannot but be generative of humor-- comes through most vividly in what I believe is my favorite piece by Carson, her so-called 'Drop't Sonnet'. The poem concerns the extinction of a special form for the second-person singular pronoun in English, and how this prevents her from refering to 'the streaming downspout of voodoo pine' that she had experienced in a love affair as --in relation to the lover-- thine. Languages are always changing, but a poet can't help but experience the present state of her language as impoverished, as in need of revitalization by an excavation of the past. No one of late has undertaken this excavatory task more rigorously than Carson.

November (2004)

So you think you've got a handle on the causes of the scandal
that has tainted half the roster of our guild?
And you think you know the reason why in leaf-removal season
no one weeps to see mass graves get chlorophyll'd?
And you think you've got a fix upon the timing of our dicks
all going limp as pickled tongue?
Well I've got a sinking feeling (though we're floating toward the ceiling)
that a dirge might be most seasonably sung.
By which I mean each autumn we go scraping at the bottom
of the barrel of the reasons left to live.
And to think! The very gall! Now again, as every fall,
the barrel has a stale little reason left to give.

Thursday Translations, #14

Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin

The Ages of Life

You, cities of Euphrates!
You, alleys of Palmyra!
You forests of columns in the plain of the desert,
What are you?
The fire stripped you
Of your crowns as you passed
Over the border of the breathing
By the smoke of the heavenly beings;
But now I sit under clouds, in which
Each thing has its quietude, under
Well-ordered oaks on the meadow
Of deer, and strange to me
And dead to me seem
The spirits of the blessed.

*

Lebensalter

Ihr Städte des Euphraths!
Ihr Gassen von Palmyra!
Ihr Säulenwalder in der Ebne der Wüste,
Was seid ihr?
Euch hat die Kronen,
Dieweil ihr über die Gränze
Der Othmenden seid gegangen,
Von Himmlischen der Rauchdampf und
Hinweg das Feuer genommen;
Jetzt aber siz ich unter Wolken, darin
Ein jedes eine Ruh hat eigen, unter
Wohleingerichteten Eichen, auf
Der Haide des Rehs, und fremd
Erscheinen und gestorben mir
Der Seeligen Geister.

**

A Fragment of a Hymn

What is God? unknown, and yet
Is the face of heaven full
Of signs of him. Lightning in fact
Is the wrath of a god. The more one is
Invisible,       the more one conforms to what one is not. But thunder
Is the glory of God. The love of immortality,
As ours, is likewise the property
Of a god.

*

Was ist Gott? unbekannt, dennoch
Voll Eigenschaften ist das Angesicht
Des Himmels von ihm. Die Blize nemlich
Der Zorn sind eines Gottes. Jemehr ist eins
Unsichtbar,     schiket es sich in Fremdes. Aber der Donner
Der Ruhm ist Gottes. Die Liebe zur Unsterblichkeit
Das Eigentum auch, wie das unsere,
Ist eines Gottes.

From the Archives

Emmer, Einkorn, and Spelt

Crex crex, crake. Crex still more.
The quern has no corn in it.
Ergo the ergot · ergo the spore.
Siskin stole a radish ·
Aurochs dropped a perfect pat ·
Boar bled and stank and was, well, fat ·
Bear saw to the law of the cycle of gore.
Crex crex, crake. I'm hungry too,
and eating is a form of war.
But I'll have my store, and I'll have my pelt.
Stay 'round, and peck, and you will be dealt
a crake's share of emmer
and einkorn and spelt.

(Anatolia, April, 2003)

Translation

Rainer-Maria Rilke, from the Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)

A god could do it. But how, tell me, could
a man follow him through a narrow lyre?
His sense is discord. At the crossing of two
hearts' paths stands no temple for Apollo.

Song, as you teach it, is not desire,
nor the announcement of something finally attained.
Song is existence. For God it is easy.
But when are we? And when will he turn

the earth and the stars toward our being?
It is not this that you love, young one, even if
voice forces open your mouth, -- learn

to forget that you are singing yourself empty. This shall pass.
In truth singing is just another breath.
A breath for nothing. A sighing in God. A wind.

*

Ein Gott vermags. Wie aber, sag mir, soll
ein Mann ihm folgen durch die schmale Leier ?
Sein Sinn ist Zwiespalt. An der Kreuzung zweier
Herzwege steht kein Tempel für Apoll.

Gesang wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr,
nicht Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes;
Gesang ist Dasein. Für den Gott ein Leichtes.
Wann aber sind wir ? Und wann wendet er

an unser Sein die Erde und die Sterne ?
Dies ists nicht, Jüngling, daß du liebst, wenn auch
die Stimme dann den Mund dir aufstößt, - lerne

vergessen, daß du aufsangst. Das verrinnt.
In Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch.
Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind.

Thursday Translation, #8

Stefan George, from Der Stern des Bundes (1914)

Is this the lad of ancient lore
Who came from thence with flatterer's eyes
With rosy soft virgin's members
With sumptuous tissues enticing?
His trunk was slim and taut. He grasps ·
He tempts no more · has no jewels.
Shines with grit and lust for battle
His look . . his kiss is short and burning.
His seed now shot from the holy shaft
He pushes into pain and danger.

*

Ist dies der knabe längster sage
Der seither kam mit schmeichler-augen
Mit rosig weichen mädchengliedern
Mit üppigen binden im gelock?
Sein leib ward schlank und straff. Er greift ·
Er lockt nicht mehr · ist ohne schmuck.
Von mut und lust des kampfes leuchtet
Sein blick . . sein kuss ist kurz und brennend.
Hat er besämt aus heiligem schoosse
Drängt er in mühe und gefahr.

Two Translations from Middle High German

A Blessing for a Journey
Weingartner Handschrift (12th Century)

Ic dir nach sihe · ic dir nach sendi
mit minin funf fingirin · funui undi funfzic engili ·
Got mit gisundi hein dich gisendi ·
offin si dir diz sigidor ·
sami si dir diz segildor ·
bislozin si dir diz wagidor ·
sami si dir diz wafindor ·

*

I want to see you · I want to send for you
with my five fingers · my fifty-five angels ·
May God send you home safe ·
May triumph's door be open to you ·
and to you the door of sailing ·
May drowning's door be closed to you ·
and to you the door of fighting ·

**

A Blessing for Horses
Pariser Handschrift (12th century)

Man gieng after wege ·
zoh sin ros in handon ·
do begagenda imo min trohtin
mit sinero arngrihte ·

wes · man · gestu ·
zu ne ridestu ·
waz mag ih riten ·
min ros ist errehet ·

nu ziuhez da bi fiere ·
tu rune imo in daz ora ·
drit ez an den cesewen fuoz ·
so wirt imo des erreheten buoz ·

*

A man went his way ·
dragging his steed ·
There my lord met him ·
With all of his men ·

How · is it going · man?
Why aren't you riding?
How can I ride when ·
my steed is all stiff?

Just push at his flank, man ·
while whispering to him ·
he'll step with his right foot ·
and get along good ·

--

The original poems are taken from Karl Wolfskehl and Friedrich von der Leyen, Älteste deutsche Dichtungen (Leipzig: Im Insel Verlag, 1924).

A Note on the Antinomy of Teleological Judgment

You are God’s, yes,
but what are you?

A water balloon launched with a grunt.
A storm, violent and passing.

Articulation makes a snowflake proud,
but this is not the work of soul:

There’s no ghost in nature’s art,
and no death in melting.

It’s summer now, my love.
Woe unto solids.

God loves you too. You’re his.
But we’ll defy him a while yet.

We’ll hold together.

(Originally published in Pod znamenem radosti, 2005).

Spirit Is a Bone

[Originally published in Duchamp Magazine]

The Jews say spirit is a bone,
a solid part, as hard as stone.

Others think it’s like the gas
that glows and hovers o’er the grass
in graveyards hosting dead ancestors,
who go a-ghosting, when methane festers.

Some fancy it a subtle vapor
binding body and mind without any tape or
glue or velcro or rubber cement,
or artisan’s mucilage, handcrafted in Ghent.   

Some say it grows like a sac ‘neath the gullet,
trapping gristle and bone of carp, catfish, and mullet,
and gum, and all that you oughtn’t to swallow:
in bad boys it’s full, but in good girls it’s hollow.   

Or is it oil?  Or is it steam?
Or the residue of last night’s dream?   
Is it in the phlegm ducts?  Is it in the bile?
Does it grow like a frog from the slime of the Nile?   

Or is it chyle, or pus, or some other juice?
Does it grow on a tree in a pod like a goose,
and drop off when the branch can not manage its weight?
Does the hour of dropping determine its fate?

Would it be more like Roquefort or Brie, were it cheese?
Or more like the Swiss through which bloweth a breeze?
And where does it go for la petite mort (when I sneeze)?
And don’t answer: it goeth wherever it please.

Is it just something bloated that floated downriver?
Or something that's noted for the quirk of its quiver?
Or something that hides in a shell like a clam?
Or something repulsively pinkish like ham?

I know I have it,
though I’ve never seen it.
There’s always something lodged between it
and me, its presumed possessor.
Or is it only on lease,
and if so, who’s the lessor?

Could I find it with a tongue depressor?
Is it the dentures upon the dresser,
in a glass of tepid water?
Does it need to be fed,
and if so, what’s its fodder?

Methinks it deprived of all figure and form,
something that’s neither translucent nor warm,
nor opaque, nor cool, nor even, nor odd,
nor like, nor unlike, some posited God
to whom it would cling as its Maker and King.

Nor, for that matter, like anything.

--November, 2003

(for Henry More and Theodore Geisel)

Orang Outang

Man of the woods,
nearest cousin.
Pliny’s satyr:
Hands off our women.

Dame of the woods,
in blooming estrus.
Thy forest-flower
sets the troupe a-howling.

Mimetic brute,
counterfeit human.
Nature’s bidding
fouls thy bedding.

Quimpanze, Pygmie,
Jocko, Pongo.
Homo sylvestris
aus dem Königreich Kongo.

Clasp my bosom, babe.
Look in the mirror.
Do that trick, now:
Go with fire.

(For Olfert Dapper)

Sveta

[Originally published in Pod znamenem radosti, 1998]

Sveta, you are a witch,
darting no sly come-hither stares,
still fewer bold geh' unten dares,
but only humid, earthen glances
concocted out of dew, and pitch.

Before you there was nothing,
only bluest sky, and bluer sea,
'til you took me to the night-dark forest,
at sea and sky's black boundary.

We came into a backward place,
God's other creation, life's travesty.
We were welcomed by a viscous race.
'Twixt plant and brute, not flesh nor leaf,
they bade us stay in their rotten fief.

And how the elegant stink-horn stunk,
as the velvety earth tongues lapped!
Let us lie in the humus, you said, just to nap.
And bearded tooth, and hairy parchment,
beamed with joy, in stalk and cap.

What else could I expect from life?
To slink like Grendel back to my mother,
and die where I was born?
Under the sea, a thermal vent my wet-nurse,
and sundry invertebrates the succession of  my sitters.

No.

The future lay on the forest floor,
among the mushrooms, your natural kin,
the smiling greeters at death's door,
whose form is just congealed sin;
whose love would gently guide me in.

(Kola Peninsula, 1997)

Translation

Stefan George
from the Buch der hängenden Gärten (1895)

Speak not always
Of the leaves ·
Violent breeze ·
Of the smashing
Of ripe quinces ·
Of the coming
Of destroyers
At year's end.
Of the quiver
Of the darters
In bad weather
And the lights
With the flicker
Transient.

Translation

Heinrich Heine
The Homecoming

XXI.

How can you sleep peacefully,
Knowing, I live still?
When the old anger comes again,
I'll bend this yoke to my will.

Do you know the old song:
How there once was a dead knave,
Who grabbed his beloved at midnight
And pulled her into his grave?

Believe me, you magnificent,
You all-too lovely kid,
I'm still alive, and stronger,
Than any dead man is!

Address to a Mirror

By Justin E. H. Smith

Hail myself! Hail the iron law of my development! In just five years I have increased fat production by ten percent, and average snore decibels by twice that. In keeping with actually existing conditions, I have also reduced shampoo use to austerity-era levels, and increased fourfold the daily repetition of tales of the courage I showed in youth.

And hail my future! In five years’ time, I will surpass my father, that running-dog of the Oak Park branch of State Farm Insurance, in nap-minutes per afternoon, in handfuls of Costco pretzels, consumed without deliberation, as the will of the hand and the mouth dictates.

And the ear-hair harvest will enjoy record yields, as Ninelle procures the latest machine for its removal --the removal of actually existing hair-- which works as well in nostril as in ear, the greatest achievement yet of the November 11 Technical Innovation Shock Brigade: The Nozdromat-5!

Lo, but the future burns bright, like the titanium-laptop glow that has spread from capital to province in just ten years, and in another ten will glow in every room of every apartment bloc, in every corner of our steely bathroom. Ninelle will have only to brush the warm screen with her breath, and it will perform her very toilet for her.