(no subject)
For scythia: original poetry-- Orpheus wandering through the modern landscape. For those who are not familiar with the story of Orpheus as it concerns Eurydice:
Orpheus was the greatest musician the world had ever seen. He loved Eurydice. One day she died of a snakebite. Anguished, Orpheus crossed Styx, charming Charon and Cerberus in his descent, and pleaded with Hades for Eurydice's soul. His music was so fair that Persephone supposedly shed tears; this greatly astonished Hades, who was so amazed that he granted Orpheus's wish. There was, of course, a catch: during the ascension (I can only assume this spatial relationship,) Orpheus is forbidden to look back, and will have to trust that Eurydice is following him. And of course, just at the very boundary between the two worlds, Orpheus forgets his promise and looks back in wild ecstasy--Eurydice has already vanished.
Orpheus
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
T.S. ELIOT “La Figlia che Piange”
This was the joke full-scale
Told with seasaltcopper, burning burning burning.
He knew, he knew. He went anyway.
It was the continental summer, still he went bruising
The silence with cicada shells, holding
The soft grasses, his ankles on the rolling
Scarlet heat like two silver ribbons, watching
Her swaying dance to heat drumming.
The July blue sky crackled, split.
His uncle handed him the mandolin years ago,
For which he made a case that’s now falling apart.
He can play three melodies, carries
It everywhere. She thought it was Darling.
She had even said, when are you going
To marry me? I’ll say yes, you know.
She wore a yellow sundress. He
twirled her hair and said pleadingly
But your father-(Of course, you know that
Father doesn’t approve of musicians. No one ever does!)1
O He knew! He knew this.
He ran when she fell, caught her,
And missed. Her fell cry, lost
In the ripe crops, came ripping
black, deep, beginning some haunting
composition if he only had the time.
Oh! She pressed, silent
Soft to earth and the snake that bit her, docile
Singularly, momentarily, with her
Dolor eyes receding darkly, her whole disjunct
Body dissipated as if melting from the poison.
He knew, then. To begin a direction was
Probably easy: Tiresias pointed the way
With his dirt-covered blindman’s stick.
He dusted her body, and lying
Shielded in the first few nights, screaming
At the sticky milky timescape, picking
Through the grassblades, chewing
The uneasy moisture that rose,
He waited for the decay to cease, the
Stink to sink, and her soul to rise.
He played the mandolin, same
Three damned melodies, same
Three struck sentences, same
Three moaning sounds even the crows
Had fled for silence. He followed them.
Ah, adieu to the boys of Jarama,
Along the 61 north an hour you hit Clarksdale,
Wind south there and it’s Ramsdale2
Backwards up the Congo you hit an oil-mine,3
And if he’s careful enough he’ll
See the river.
(“My boy!” his dad used to say and never
Mean it; an old convention of
A patrimonial hierarchy. “Stop fiddling
With that piece of wood, and come here,
My boy, step into this light.”
He fit to them fives different verses
And a burden, and he, too, disliked
All this fiddle.)
Still following the blind wiseman
He waved a ferry down: not that this
Worked on Thames River, but the gray bald man was
Whimpering so loud he could not hear the question
-Where are you going
I’m not sure. To London, L.A., Peloponnesus
Take me beyond Boreas, if you dare
Take me to Tiananmen Square.
-WHERE ARE YOU GOING
I don’t know, man, just move,
Row your boat, Michael, to that shore
To the enchanted East!
Hey, sir, just across that dusty river
That lusty month, the cruel breeding
Lilacs, the poppyflowered grave,
The flamebound ether feeding
With many a violent and strange octave
Bound here-bound there-
You don’t know, do you now,
How quick turns the hangman’s lime
To your clay to your hanging man
To his poor abstracted time.
HURRY UP IT’S TIME
WHERE ARE YOU GOING4
At the end of it all, it was the river
That knew the direction. He was washed to the
Doorsteps that read: KNOW THYSELF in relief
Letters. A cellophane jazzman
Played something the marriage of
Coltrane and Gauthier, and Stephen,
The hero, waited brooding by the window
Looking over the green sea, the white breast
Of the dim sea. Below him, guarding
The double-wing door waited the Ungeziefer
In the velveteen dark-a screaming
Comes across the sky; the condition
Of madness, fallen toward the flame growing
To fill the thoracic cavern-
A casual world, a half-world.
He remembered her and broke
His wedge of cheese, which he ate
And fed away the remains. Above him the blank
Shade, a dark with eager snarling
Pupils, twisting out its locomotive screaming
Came flaring, too, so far and intimate
Into the Dark that he thought of
Hobbes, the animated orange
Tiger, who wanted kisses to keep under his
Nightly dreams of Kafka.5
Still, he went on, in a shared hitchhike
Ride-his entire vehicle was turned
Inward, bound inside, to the blank unhappy
Shade, swelling, the lone dolphin of a shoulder
And hunger in his eternally rubbish
Limbs, his forever parched tongue.
He metered out his time and threw
Potato salad as Solomon had once done,6
Wearing his wig of blood, his blue
Turned Algiers murder, the same
Resonant water of four unhappy knocks.
He came to neon streets of Paris,
The grotesque shade of the oxidized gargoyles,
The city in its own dust, wanting to
Be pure. He saw it all-even
The paleeyed boy stretching to
His wings full span: his full possession7
Of truth, beauty, and the senses.
He moved through the Seasons and
Nights of Hell, hailed the collaged
Hallucinations, and came singing
To the throne room in the Shade’s
Narrow grove, still plucking the mandolin.
He sang those plaintive chords, lifting
To the deathsick, bare brief world,
To the highest guardswoman
In her Bacchanal river, her Cydnus
Boat. He played her the mandolin, same
Three damned melodies, same
Three struck sentences, same
Three moaning sounds that her throat fell
Dry in all that was said and her tear fell
Like a pin to the floor. Gosh, you’re good!
She came. She clapped, skipped, danced with
Nuptial veil and a clutch of whitestars.
O but he played on, plucking the
Skin with his plectrum, clawing
Out the long, sustained notes, churning
The ichor, the secretive ambrosia, gnawing
The varied, senseless thoughts.
Nothing moved but Sisyphus and his
Rock, the Coney Island
Minds, the incomprehensible floating cities,
The deathplanes of impossible life,
The freeways like lost necklaces, the soft night,
The vile bodies, the free and unbound
Fear, and all of it, all of it dust.
Nothing moved but he turned back,
And nothing moved still, but the silence,
The disintegration was already taking place,8
The sudden nothingness, and her soft
Sad uncertain eyes rustling in the haze
Backwards up, to the farmland aloft
Forever gone, to the direction of his unfocused gaze.
NOTES:
1 Poets and musicians alike, alas!
2 Ramsdale, it seems, is another place of a famous Faustian deal.
3 Of course, this parallel between Marlow’s fateful voyage and the quest for petroleum has absolutely no political motivation.
4 A small part of this, other than the Styx connection, is to manifest this strange, haunting vision of London as the Unreal City.
5 As my friend pointed out, Hobbes is indeed wise for an animated orange tiger.
6 I just wanted to make it clear that Solomon is not the Old Testament one, but Carl Solomon, whose actions have represented the riotous energy that comes from the overthrow of all traditions.
7 If any one person had wings, it was Rimbaud.
8 Trocchi said this in the last line of Young Adam, after the crime, the trial, and the judgment. The justice had already gone and the room was silent. It was dry, oppressively so, and meaningless.