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Draft 60: Rebus
first appearance "Draft 60: Rebus." Literary Review, 48.2 (Winter 2005): 81-94.
The task is to see the riddle. Martin Heidegger A moonlight fall across the ground makes the dark nouns brown. Owl passing through this place frightens the dark, a moment rent. Quotidian = astonishment. This wind arrives from outer space. How to articulate fermented strangeness, how tell the junctures charging us? What syntax exposes these relations these helixed twists of filament? To juncture we are sentenced inside a suppurating, blow-hard time. It is the res, rebus conjugation that offers of as pigment. What visits us announcing where we are? To say “angel” gets misunderstood. But even a handkerchief, even a spent bulb speak doubly at once of loss and of ineffable winged flashes of time. Not possessions of possessives but things requiring our Being, equally breaking, slashed and torn. Who speaks; who writes? The dead. But they stay silent. Who then moves words along a little screen, blue-gray like sky? C’était, ma soeur, la providence awry. The living. Toggles of shame and flame leech their veins. Between these riddles, Things present themselves like speech. House bridge well tree gate jug window tower They say: it’s so beautiful couldn’t you do better? Or: you have made it; but then you insisted on worship. Thereupon destroy. Suddenly from this mattedness in and out of nowhere in a fettered place the pure Too-Little swivels inside out becomes an awe, Too-Much. A plethora. Magnetic urgency. Hinges of light, hallways, staircases turning, spaces of being, force fields of ecstasy. Now we feel surges of the overwhelming; now we have a different angle on things. Major dreams with guns. Must rescue children. Everything I saw then was premonitory. Everything goes wrong. Like a stone a grey bread grows stale. Can’t cut it, can’t soak it, unspeakably hard, it’s a twisted loaf we thought was fine; it is the rock of our politics looming on the table. I wanted another desire, one bread after another the green or greener guide of lune I wanted a whirling list of hopes hopes hopes hopes whole alphabets of H’s to evaporate and leave the sweet encrust, a deep powder, a power inside the poetry and inside the mind. I wanted— it doesn’t matter because I could not get it easily or even did not understand myself in this, wanted a new kind of climax at the center of day, the Of specifying itself, as juncted connection, as counter-force, as transformation. It seems as if I’m not living on earth any more at least the one I know. The name of this place is— Loss of Wishes? Uncounted Dot? No-taste Fruit? Headless Doll? Barbed Window? Burning Book? Over-padded Chair? Are these new Constellations in our bell-vast sky? Some They want to own the sky as proof that They own us. Our Of is our resistance. The poem offers an exchange of rebuses, not a game. This is not simply the world as such but a world stained with other times the riddle of rubble that still speaks of uncanny shame, of alternatives that did not happen. It’s strange now that the Constellations lie upside down as if tumbled from behind turned into another hemisphere: the W of Cassiopeia now an M, and it stands for moaning and muttering, for occluded humming and for wolfish maps. Why such misery, why such merciless management? Klage, Klage. The disinherited. Malarial muck for drinking water. The twisted limbs of children servitude, desolation. I wanted to show you things, the patient code of things in a row to read— rock, rope, doll, well, road crystal glycerin rebus of an empty snakeskin. What will we show now? To whom shall we show it? If I were to cry out, who would hear me? June-December 2003 Notes to Draft 60: Rebus. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1922), especially certain lines, have long haunted me. Taking (on) some version of his lines and phrases and some of his situations finally became inevitable. I have underscored the citations, mainly using the A. Poulin, Jr. translation, sometimes with slight modifications. In his Preface to the Houghton Mifflin book (1977), Poulin says “I hope someone else will find a word or phrase to steal from these versions.” He meant other translators, of course, but I thank him for his generosity in any case. The epigraph from Martin Heidegger, Epilogue, “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Donor Drafts are on the “line of 3”: Of, Philadelphia Wireman, and Of This. |  |
