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aemperatrix · 4 years

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Keats Is Coughing

by Marianne Boruch

Everything is made of everything. — Leonardo da Vinci

I found Rome in the woods.

Fair to admit it’s mostly tundra to the west in the park, past Toklat the Denali I revised, low grasslands engineered to freeze deep by October — this being Alaska — the great

Tabularium close to the Temple of Castor and Pollux I rebuilt that same summer — not superimposed, exact as any scheme

in secret — the Arch of Septimius Severus at the gravel bar where fox drank from a river turned stream, a Theater of Marcellus near the ranger station where one raven, such a brat, complained of my Circus Maximus, Trajan’s Column, my Baths of Diocletian, too many spots soaked in unpronounceable Latin.

I really did, I shouldered bits of it, a ruin-hushed haunted business, my brain a truck bed, a lift, pulleys big as a whale’s heart, expletives of cheap wonder all over my woodlot and expanse. One self-anoints to embellish day, years, life thus far, and think oneself so...

Then busted —

by a raven!

Well, that’s memory for you, that’s so-called civilization for you, to layer up, to redo the already done.

I mean it’s a fact, the puny life span we’re allotted. And proof — Denali in August, fireweed, spunky scrawny first Latinate — Erechtites hieracifolia —

giving off flowers to mark what weeks left, little time bomber, time traveler, ancient slips red-flagging the countdown to winter by climbing its own stalk.

Something perverse about that. Something perfectly fiendishly self-conscious about that.

•

From the start perverse, any premise. Ask...We can’t know. To be compelled

makes an occasion. Rome’s grand past horrific, fire and ash, swamp into bog, lust and bloodlust —

The Alaska Range dreams lurid as Rome, the worst way below being fire, summer snow at night off the highest peaks by noon as distant from our cabin as the size of a hand if I held up the one with an eye in the middle

to know how this works. Some have the power to raise from the dead a before, before scary and beautiful back to mystery cults, in caves, rubble far under a Roman street, the altar to Mithras still slaying his bull, crumbling the stonework.

All things being equal. But they’re not. Agony, it’s older. Ask the moose at Denali, the snowshoe hare, the lynx,

such a wily courtly lot. Ask Ovid banished to his hovel on the Black Sea, aching for Rome’s exalted rude cacophony, each exiled month a big thick X down

Februarius, Aprilis to home-shattered sick enough

for an undersong. Look it up! Undersong: a strain; a droning; the burden of a song — Maybe that lowest common denominator is contagious. Rome or Denali, a mash-up of lunge and cry out, predator and prey throwing coins to a fountain, footholds made first by a hoof, pickpockets at buses and trains, nuns queuing up their no-nonsense, thorny brambles, raggedy spruce groves, a look, a nod to sell loveless love on the street, a chain of mountains in choral repeat, saints stained to glass, how ice gouged rivers from rock-bound, the one-lung rapturous common-sense Pope all outstretched arms, his little popemobile circling the thrilled at St. Peter’s up on our rickety chairs to see in six, seven languages how radiant — Cross my heart, he was. And Keats, Keats is coughing.

•

You find the fossil record everywhere. In woods, tundra, under streets, in cadaver labs. Not those bright transparencies, wistful orderly page after page in biology, a lie, a kind of flip-book romance. It’s the one big mess of us in us, the generous extraordinary dead prove that, signing a paper, giving themselves away to be cut, disembodied for the knowing it, sunk to their chemical depth in some afterlife, opened on a table by kids really, belabored doctors-to-be, our shabby shared wilderness to untangle, bones joints arteries valves, The Dissector in hand, weirdest how-to book on the planet. For Keats too, 1819, his scribbled roses and sunflowers in margins, his training, his anatomy theatre, looking down and later: still London, then Rome (he who gets it, body fails, second floor, beside the Spanish Steps). Heart, not my heart anymore. Forgive me. I’m worse than the hopelessly confused misnamed English sparrow, descendant of the great weaver birds of Africa, a finch that lost the gene

for nest, how to beneath, to across so intricate, precise, bringing bringing sticks and hair and bits of shiny paper. Undersong: the burden of a song. Poor bird. Poor sweet muddled middle of it. I watched morning after morning, his offering... It’s Keats who made claims about beauty and time. His bed at the last too low for the window, his must-have tell me, what’s out there —

I admit: a ridiculous layering, Rome in Denali. Just because? Because I went to both in short order? Two continents, an ocean apart. My mother loved hand-me-down expressions — never the twain shall meet. They do meet. To repeat: that’s civilization for you. Happenstance and right now drag along future and past and why the hell not the Denali, the Rome in any of us, no two states of being more unalike, worn-out compulsion to collect and harbor, piece together, stupid into some remember machine.

Such fabulous unthinkable inventions we’ve made to merge or unmake: the trash compactor, the poem, all tragedy and story, pencils sharpened to

a point that keeps breaking, wilderness gone inward as

an ocean-going ship’s container, a Gatling gun, the AR-15 of the seething deranged, the H-bomb, Roman legions to Canterbury to blood-up fields into legend then dig the first plumbing but

how can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all!

(Thank you, Firesign Theatre, brilliant wackos, old vinyl on a turntable still in the game... )

Fine. Fuck it. Start over.

•

See the sheep on high ledges, the arctic squirrels below.

See the way Dante saw, sweeping his arm across Vasari’s great painting as Boccaccio looks off, the plague sealing city after city. Dante

in hell, steady-luminous those fact-finding trips to service his worldly Inferno.

Winter sleeps through. August at Denali, bears shovel it down a razor-edged maw — twigs! berries! more stems! — Fate hoards to prepare, sub-zeros, fattens into...

See the park’s camper bus, 92 miles how most of us jolt and slow, crossing hours more daylight than night all summer, rattling tin can with its exhaust and hissing gravel, the fear landslide an undersong just-possible, how we zigzag a mountain. Look!

Nearing a bear, the young caribou abruptly hesitant, shy as a leaf —

No! Don’t! Do not! That grizzly huge, bent to his ploy just these berries around here, his ignore ignore, sure, quiet-tense as a trigger, and we of fogged scratched windows so hard to open —

stop! The bus stopped. Jesus. The thing curious, closer... They’re not

that smart anyhow, a stage-whispering drunk from the back of our imperial realm, mile 62, the Park Road.

What did Venus decree in her temple up whichever narrow street in Rome, the Ancients’ stink of slops, standing water, a bear chained to a slave (out of slav, by the way, backdrop is horde, human spoils)

both shackled to a grindstone for a later mob and roar.

Here’s what we saw: the little caribou in reverse wanders sideways and safe. Our bus one big sigh or like a wheezing asthmatic the brakes unbrake.

Bad dream, bad dream, the undersong start to all fable if for real we’d seen that kill back to lions off their continent cornered, bloodied in the great amphitheaters, rearing up, a nail to hammer’s bite and blow. The wilderness in us

is endless. Near the cabin, near evening, a warbler in the fireweed hawk saw or heard, his switchblade clicked to — I was and I was whirling feathers, either bird — Every hunger is first century. Forever-thus feral cats at the Forum about to leap too. The Forum, last homage I shoveled holes and rocks to remake, mile 82, while the haymouse riddled the meadow down deep, her catacombs.

•

Time + beauty = ruins. Perfect shapes in the mind meet my friends Pointless and Threat and Years of Failure to Meld or Put to Rest. Ruthless is human.

I ask a composer: How to live with this undersong thing over and over, how to

get rid of it, the world of it —

He looks at me. What undersong thing? And shrugs I’ll put it on the test! Let students define it.

So I dreamt such a test: Go there. To Rome. Half-doze against a wall two thousand years of

flesh sweat insect wing ago, stone laid by hand, by a boy when a whip, a whip, a welling up, his will not speak.

Have at it. Please explain. Please fill in this blank.

Grief punctures like ice, moves like a glacier to flat and slog and myth, low blue and white flowers we hiked trail-less. The rangers insist. They insist —

never follow or lead, never lay down a path.

From above the look of us spread out, our seven or eight a band, little stray exhausted figures as over the land bridge from Asia,

circa: prehistory keeps coming, older than Rome, both both underfoot, understory, underway

miles below numb, it’s burning.

•

To see at all, you time and this time and time again.

The spirit leans intrigued, the other part bored, then there’s want, then there’s wait.

Once a city began with a wolf whose two human pups would build, would watch it fall, nursing at her milk for centuries in marble in bronze.

She stands there and cries of that pleasure, by turns a blood-chill. The tundra. At night.

A snake eats its own tail, forever at it on a fresco. A real snake leaves his skin near the gravel bar. Some words sting, some are sung. Another life isn’t smaller.

#marianne boruch #poetry #keats is coughing #poem #cuvinte potrivite #i need to lie down. i. i—#long post

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libramoon2 · 7 years

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[evening dionysian]

working title: [evening dionysian]

Dancers dance musicians play Enchanting sylph narrates stories while seductively moving to sinuous back beat, tick of chimes. Occasionally emphasizes subtle percussions with intense expressions, leaps, cunning stumbles, falling to crawl into spellbound speech. Scheherazade myths, archetypal passion escapades, poignant weeps, salient shouts to power. Exquisite meditations on mystic climes, spirit and form. Merry masks, sparkly costumes, paint and glitter as embellishment to the tellings. Theater as intimate ritual. Anything could manifest.

Pisces murky androgeny Libra emits graceful beauty Scorpio at home in passion Deeply attractive Complicated self-hatred urging service and demeaning. At core strong self-belief expressed intuitively. Stories from the collective well, mystic ether, imbued in earth, exhaled by flames. Centering, sense memory trances exhibits as sinuous performance.

This world is ending …

Even happy families share dissonance, complex histories, emotional triggers. Happy families learn to thrive, profound mutual respect as guide, resort to good humor for smoother passage. Why fight, divide strength from where it is better spent? Folk who pull together by choice rejoice in shared communion.

Outside self-circumscribed worlds Diverse perception of views Sight with wide spectra of hues

She heard him crying, a lost child in the night. In her prophetic heart she knew only she could comfort him. But she was only a child who was never allowed to be lost. How could she comfort this lost boy when she had no freedom to reach out? Late in quiet dark, after her people, asleep, would not be checking on her, she opened her window and made daring escape. Wandering in the outside dark, she listened for his cries. At first she discerned wind among leaves and branches, small creature forays, clash of metal against pavement, perfumed strains from afar. Then, yes, whimpers, ragged rhythm past exhausted weeping. He was huddled, hidden, on the alley side of a cold brick building. Seeing him, frightened, lost, she did not know what to say. He smelled of rancid sweat and fear. She did not know how to speak. She cried. She emptied herself of every caustic tear, every regret held for guilty ransom, every sadness kept inside so no one would fuss. He looked up at her watery face and asked with amazed concern: “Are you lost, too? Because if we are lost together, really we have found each other. We don’t have to stay scared and alone.” She looked around, realized that in al her blind wandering she had lost her way. She had no idea where they were. She knelt beside him. They smiled and hugged. For that precious while they became beloved kin. Perhaps some special night they’ll meet again.

Mythy visions to transcribe; thought fragments to form. Myths we live, and how to rewrite them.

She knows she has awakened. Every effort of her body pinches, aches, demands refuge in self-talk, reason, mental override of pain. Carefully, she measures out tools of destruction, what she must carry in her pack into the city, to her place of destiny. Doing what one can to make sense, have meaning. Life is short, ugly, pointless, unless you get that call. Trying to act cool with familiar friends, laying low, hiding from everything that doesn’t allow relevant existence for dregs like us. Recognition? Commendation? A scrap of real notice? To sacrifice this humorless joke to Godly cause, that’s got to be imbued with meaning, to be holy. How not find zealous courage, so dishonor numbing a drug, one point of focus. All my sins, my impoverishments, inadequacies, forgiven in ultimate atonement. God can love me. I am made pure in His sight. A tool, a weapon, no matter how lowly, bestowed sacred purpose in this great fight. My parents, my kin, vindicated, their suffering denied nobility avenged. Cleansed in adventure’s icy plunge, only ever young in throes of romance, a chance for breathless rush of brief immortality.

. question everything accept or reject with clear awareness and flexibility

. purity of essence is to will one thing

. She didn’t like her skin. So hard to blend in. She didn’t like her body, jutting awkwardly, too bulky, not compliant to conscious control. She ached to let her spirit free from matter’s burden, to ooze out onto open air. Her envisioned wish took her to aerial glee, and no more. “What would I see, outside of eyes, no biological boundaries?” Her attention, turned to this yearn for omniscient sight, was caught, held strong and seduced. Ever present, ever expanding through every crevice of her consciousness, she became inured to matter’s inadequacies. She desired entirely. No one could reach her, though no one tried. She trance-walked through her duties and habits with none to notice any lack of aliveness, lack of any impish spark within her eyes. Self-consumed, obsessed, absorbed in apotheosis, physical possibilities no longer matter. Her spirit no longer held to this room, this body. Blind to her unseeing world, enraptured in unfiltered light, colors far beyond our rainbow.

. A brave and learned man hired out to guide a motley assortment through a narrow, rocky passage to a settlement in need of laborers. At this time, he was a stranger to settlers and these prospective immigrants. He had an idea of joining their project, but felt nag of doubt enough to only commit as far as hiring out for specified work and pay. This Job – this man who gave his name as Job – was curious, clever, aloof because caught up in thoughts complex, calculating, critical, cynical, contemplative, entertaining. He spoke as necessary for terse communication. He listened as if a subtle etching of rain on sand. He sucked in sounds and all their meaning to nourish his chattering brain. Though his behavior, demeanor, presentment appeared distancing, others tended to respect his leadership, his abilities. Even those who mocked or boisterously complained in private camaraderie in which he did not join agreed that he bested them at coming through. After their passaging, safely gathered at the settlement, words and gestures of gratitude lauded upon him were spontaneous and sincere. As settlers and new arrivals met together to discuss their common project, ask questions, give opinions, figure out teams and chores, Job continued his passage. Busy in their plans and adaptations, no one noticed him disappear.

. Capture my imagination Take me for a ride self-discipline, acknowledge without judging

Philip, he so tired, exhausted, can’t bear the nattering. Silly people, spew of soft-heart advice. Stupidly happy people, smug in their hugs and white smiles. Philip recedes into deep, dark hate – so mired and convoluted spirals down his mind. Lethargic impulses, held back, kicked down, pounded to weakness as he grew in twists and turns. “Don’t look at me.” He hears his silence scream. Horrid beast snarls, whimpers. Philip aches to hide from his own mind, beastly child whining, cringing around cutting steel for comfort. Snappy, happy babblers burst like saliva balloons, insult, annoy. “Don’t speak to me. Don’t daintily pretend you understand; oh so precious extended hands, limpid eyes question, judge, sentence to demented status. “I am fine, or will be when you all leave me alone. Ignore my retreat into secure solitary recrimination, whip lash of vengeful sin. You know you don’t really want to be let in, to feel the wrath I am. Scatter, you flesh-covered delusions who choose to disturb my sleep, my darling nightmares’ stomping victory. You clearly don’t need my input to be complete. Complete fools – go do your better things. Enjoy your day. I’ve no more to say, to share.” Aloud? Allowed? He allows himself to voice complaint aloud. And the folk crowd ebbs out beyond his self-fixed point. “Express your truth,” he silently affirms. People may listen.

Imbibe trance Fall into story Record intimately

Become one story Imbibe trance intimately Record while falling

face shifter. story spinner. dervish zeitgeist possessed. defined by shades, by shadows, by negation.

Sammy scary loco crazy. They say he got the paranoid schizophrenia. What he got is commandos tracking his thoughts, grinning. Party of demons who been with him, telling him what to do, clever talk when he needs to answer some fool. He’s got my nightmares, but can’t shake them awake. No one wants to listen to me or him when we say what’s real. They want us to be kids, whatever that is. They want us to make them feel alive in their self-comforting fantasies about responsibilities. What is Sammy responsible for or to? Because he suffers disability, because he can’t break through Hell’s circles, flames of purity. I walked from Hell. My mind still burns. I am strong, a born survivor. He survives as he can. Is that weakness, or alternative dimensions habitated? I am amazing, mobile, continuing, sensibly explaining, harmoniously relating, conversing like a pro. I struggle. I hurt, it feels unbearably. I work until I want to scream, become explosive screaming. I stifle, call up mania to work on. Efforts only I applaud – amazing me! Nothing spectacular to entice the jaded they. Sammy is spectacular. I am seriously amazing. I won’t let them blind me.

. They walk in and out of patterns, broad swath of night. No designated home; no one has to accept them. They walk. Dust, dirt, soot, effluvia collect, protect in the sense of repel. In safe dark none encounter to harass. Those alive by day buried in bed. They walk without notice or plan. This is their closest approach to sleep, hypnotic glide through distance. Landscape undifferentiated by visible presentation. Footsteps feel clearly what comes under, it seems by instinct — or possibly familiarity. They walk on perhaps forever with no where to stop. Pit stops. Beg for food or find leavings. Play merry fool, eyes gleaming, lips voice hands form expressive grand soliloquies, hoped fee implied (implored). Sustenance they afford varies by mood of kindness, unswayed by desperation. Exhaustion only dulls, removes any attractive shine. As air blows colder, nights freeze over, they seem to dissolve into neverwere. Empty shadow, haunted tingle bereft of cause. “They were never us, nothing like us.” Unspoken song bears rhythms of walking unseen.

She awoke in a body, young, womanly, driving consciousness on hold somewhere like dreamless sleep. It was her occasional brief invasion to feel in touch with mortal concerns. She is to be a bride, again. Foolish, innocent yet of so many regrets and betrayals to come. She is ready to exult in the veil and it symbolic lift. Happy to perform, darling of her audience of familiars. Happy day, swept clean of trepidations, of all yesterdays and their burdensome effluvia. Today is always hers. These ceremonies, traditional duties and pleasures, bind her to cults, cultures, accumulated lore and intuition. Not creature, but weaver – still she is inseparable from the story. Today she again assumes bridehood. Tonight, awash in festivities, again she removes her spell of possession. This new bride returns to a familiar world, changed. No longer civil child nor spiritual supplicant, she has ascended. People see her differently, treat her with more deference, more distance even as they proclaim her their precious chosen intimate, ply her with cherished secrets as if her allegiance would add value. Her bearing carries an air, an enhanced spirit, a subtle awareness, unspoken by any inner voicing. Language is a human art.

Gathered on picnic table benches behind the home, hot in sunshine. Karen explains, fact by fact, how Gus became her inseparable soul. They beam together. He gives consoling hand to shoulder as she grieves children left with their father, her ex’s condemnation, stern paternal assertion of power. Saving his kin from this unrepentant whore. Karen cries, again – unrehearsed habit. She carries sadness; leaks occur. Gus hardly speaks. His troubled eyes, weary stance, gentle pull and pass of their pint bottle as he glances with deep countenance to each face around is eloquent conversation. Sweat smells, condensed alcohol, burnt tobacco, drying shit from local dogs, passing fumes from the road out front, all permeate, help set the mood. They treat the stranger in their midst as a friend of long acquaintance, just another straggly member of a morphing crew. “Ain’t we all strangers of long acquaintance – everybody a wrapping of layers, appearing in colored bits along our drowsy companionship. Strange friends, welcome distractions, smoky mirrors that let us see as we discern.” Bonnie and Denise giggle at Big Dan’s pedantic speech. They solicit contributions for their liquor store expedition. Enough gets thrown in to make it a go. Go, girls. We’ll be waiting, celebrating what we can because here we are.

#short takes #flashes of vision #theatre of imagination

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