The false explanation of time

Michael March

Η απατηλή ερμηνεία του χρόνου

The false explanation of time

The Jewel

There is this cave
In the air behind my body
That nobody is going to touch:
A cloister, a silence
Closing around a blossom of fire.
When I stand upright in the wind,
My bones turn to dark emeralds.

James Wright 

To my Daughter

TO MY DAUGHTER

Give me another life, and I’ll be singing
in Caffè Rafaella. Or simply sitting
there. Or standing there, as furniture in the corner,
in case that life is a bit less generous than the former.

Yet partly because no century from now on will ever manage
without caffeine or jazz. I’ll sustain this damage,
and through my cracks and pores, varnish and dust all over,
observe you, in twenty years, in your full flower.

On the whole, bear in mind that I’ll be around. Or rather,
that an inanimate object might be your father,
especially if the objects are older than you, or larger.
So keep an eye on them always, for they no doubt will judge you.

Love those things anyway, encounter or no encounter.
Besides, you may still remember a silhouette, a contour,
while I’ll lose even that, along with the other luggage.
Hence, these somewhat wooden lines in our common language.

Joseph Brodsky

So Forth (1984)

High on Laughing gas

High on Laughing gas
I’ve been here before
The odd vibration of the same old universe 

The nasal whine of the dentist’s drill Singing against the nostalgic
Piano Muzak in the wall
Insistent, familiar, penetrating 

The teeth, where’ve I heard that Asshole jazz before? 

It’s the instant of going
Into or coming out of existence that is Important – to catch on
To the secret of the magic
Box
Stepping outside the universe
By means of Nitrous Oxide Anaesthetising mind-conscious
The chiliasm was an impersonal dream – One of many, being mere dreams 

The sadness of birth
And death, the sadness of Changing from dream to dream The constant farewell
Of forms ...
Saying ungoodby to what Didn’t exist 

The many worlds that don’t exist All which seem real
All joke
All lost cartoon 

Allen Ginsberg, 1963

Phoenix Song

then I shall never grow up

not if child means a sense of wonder

and my head in the wind rain rain

I will not wither in the blaze of time

but prove myself a phoenix

(ashes like powdered stars)

born again and again and again

Lenore Kandel

I won't be able to write from the grave

 Fanny Howe 

Goodtime Jesus

 James Tate

Sea Chanty

My mother hates the sea 

my sea especially 

I warned her not to

it was all I could do

Two years later 

the sea ate her

Upon the shore, I found a strange

yet beautiful food

I asked the sea if I could eat it 

and the sea said that I could 

Oh, sea, what fish is this

so tender and so sweet?

Thy mother's feet

Gregory Corso

And If I Fall

There’s this cathedral in my head I keep
making from cricket song and
dying but rogue-in-spirit, still,
bamboo. Not making. I keep
imagining it, as if that were the same
thing as making, and as if making might
bring it back, somehow, the real
cathedral. In anger, as in desire, it was
everything, that cathedral. As if my body
itself cathedral. I conduct my body
with a cathedral’s steadiness, I
try to. I cathedral. In desire. In anger.
Light enters a cathedral the way persuasion fills a body.
Light enters a cathedral, the way persuasion fills a body.

Carl Phillips 

Things

What happened is, we grew lonely

living among the things,

so we gave the clock a face,

the chair a back,

the table four stout legs

which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues

as smooth as our own

and hung tongues inside bells

so we could listen

to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles

the pitcher received a lip,

the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us

was recast in our image;

we gave the country a heart,

the storm an eye,

the cave a mouth

so we could pass into safety.

Lisel Mueller, 1996

Choose Something Like a Star

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud—
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to the wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, 'I burn.'
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

Robert Frost, 1916

The Dissolving Fabric

He who has his own wound

cannot speak of it.

Nor is there any geography which

takes cognizance of it.

To know and then to heal

that is the rule.

But discipline is not sufficient

despite our speculations.

And there is no one, not the god

who understood it.

And the fact is that she withdrew it,

the fact is that she owned it.

She possesed her own life, and took it.

Paul Blackburn, 1955

Archaic Fragment

I was trying to love matter. 

I taped a sign over the mirror: 

You cannot hate matter and love form. 

It was a beautiful day, though cold. 

This was, for me, an extravagantly emotional gesture. 

.......your poem: 

tried, but could not. 

I taped a sign over the first sign: 

Cry, weep, thrash yourself, rend your garments— 

List of things to love: 

dirt, food, shells, human hair. 

....... said 

tasteless excess. Then I 

rent the signs. 

AIAIAIAI cried 

the naked mirror. 

Louise Glück 

Small Song

A. R. Ammons

echo

 

echo 


In the way it was in the street 


it was in the back it was 
in the house it was in the room 
it was in the dark it was 

 

Robert Creeley

Chaplinesque

 

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered and too ample pockets.

 

For we can still love the world, who find

A famished kitten on the step, and know

Recesses for it from the fury of the street,

Or warm torn elbow coverts.

 

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk

Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb

That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,

Facing the dull squint with what innocence

And what surprise!

 

And yet these fine collapses are not lies

More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

We can evade you, and all else but the heart:

What blame to us if the heart live on.

 

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

And through all sound of gaiety and quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

 

 Halt Crane, 1933

The Ring

The Ring

 

I am learning to speak, again.
Astral, spectral, half-in-dream.
I make my way through the jig-
saw of a cruel and perfect grammar.
Or, just barely. And I have stopped
making work that can’t disappear.
But the music is too much for me. I can take it
but only in minute and fixed increments.
Baby food in a spoon, measured in bite-fulls, 
or a capsule I swallow only in daylight, 
mid-day after classes. I take it, a sweet 
obscene ointment, cosmetic, or
medicine. The most nourishing.
delicate gold capsule of infinite
emollient and sorrow, I swallow
the power and it enters me.
Like ink spilling, or voracious,
an appetite, and all-consuming.
A memory or a snapshot, its flash-light, 
illuminating, it takes me, and then
it erases everything.

 

Cynthia Cruz

Leda, After the Swan

Perhaps,

in the exaggerated grace

of his weight

settling,

 

the wings

raised, held in

strike-or-embrace

position,

 

I recognized

something more

than swan, I can't say.

 

There was just

this barely defined

shoulder, whose feathers

came away in my hands,

 

and the bit of world

left beyond it, coming down

 

to the heat-crippled field,

 

ravens the precise color of

sorrow in good light, neither

black nor blue, like fallen

stitches upon it,

 

and the hour forever,

it seemed, half-stepping

its way elsewhere--

 

then

everything, I

remember, began

happening more quickly.

 

Carl Phillips,1992

Nocturne With Seven Isles

I.

From here, I climb the narrow island

through moon rock, shallows wide and white

                          as desert and survivor-littered:

jellyfish cruel and translucent in sea grass,

sand dollars melting black velvet.

 

Even the sea cannot contain itself:

 

I reel in a small sunfish, hook-torn

at the gills; I still toss him back,

as if by returning alone –

as if salvation –

 

only the limp float of his bright underside

              remains, a thin slice of flame among reeds.

 

I taste the salt on my lips,

                           wonder if this is how it began

              for the woman who turned

against God to watch her only city burn.

 

II.

 

We unearth places we once lived, the house

              sundered by lichen, drawers withering

              with summer herbs, the mammal

                           scent of soured boots,

              cedar fronds rotting

                           rooftop gutters. Tell me

about the brass bed frame,

              what love once wracked there

                           and of its leaving. Tell me

of each fountain swan, feathers greened with sea

              air. Sing me the names of everything lost,

              each ash and wing. Invent them if you must.

 

III.

 

I listen everywhere for the psalm

that echoed off the stone walls

in the winter chapel:

yet is their strength labor and sorrow;

                                    for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Ives’ dissonant harmonies like walls shuddering

inward – we spend our days as a tale that is told –

I sand the music as if the melody

could sculpt our sinews back to bone.

 

IV.

 

Months tide shores of unanswered letters;

I write you as if you were dead.

 

I think of collapse, its Latin roots

meaning to fall together – imagine

 

cathedral arches, spine-sharp

                            leaning toward and toward
              to imprison saints radiant in shards –

 

Now, too late, I understand

              I did not mistake desire

but its direction – somewhere beyond –

              a music half-remembering itself.

 

Look how we fail in increments

                             like last century’s estates, opening

              into stone arches;

                             even as we refuse

to go, see how the body takes us there, without

              our blessing or consent.

 

V.

 

after the festival           you exhaled                sprawled

on the basement floor             quiet  for once

possibly content                                    for an hour we breathed

late light  there two solitudes                pooled together

then                    unlike time and time before                I just turned

the brass knob and watched you leave           our rucksack history

slung over your shoulder           in that silence             we discovered

the door          we’d razed cities and sabotaged bridges to find

 

VI.

 

I excavate a lamp

from the basement –

how satisfying to draw

the shade taut, to tear

bulb from carton and pull

the chain. To make light.

              I need to see

                          what I agreed

                          to leave;

 

is it the light

I love or is it leaving

everything else in darkness?

 

 

The empty room asks:

Now, then, what do you want?

 

VII.

 

Here, tangerines like paper lanterns

wait for night to rob their glow.

Oil on the canal as if from a dreamer,

beneath. Here let us claw

match and flint; let us ask with fire

what the water has forgotten.

 

 

 

Leah Silvieus, 2016