Gjertrud Schnackenberg

1 When Clumsy harks the gladsome ting-a-lings Of dinner chimes that Mrs. Clumsy rings, His two hands winglike at his most bald head, Then Clumsy readies Clumsy to be fed. He pulls from satchel huge a tiny chair, And waggling his pillowed derriere He hitches up his pants to gently sit. Like two ecstatic doves his white hands flit Tucking his bib in quickly, then, all thumbs, They brush away imaginary crumbs From knee-high table with dismissive air. With fists wrapped round his giant silverware He shuts his eyes and puckers up for kisses. In such a pose Clumsy awaits his Mrs., Rubbing his hungry ribs. But oh, alack, Quite unbeknownst to Clumsy, at his back The circle of a second spotlight shows That No-No has delivered fatal blows To Mrs. Clumsy since that happy time She summoned Clumsy with her dinner chime. And there is Clumsy’s darling lying dead. How like a rubber ball bounces her head As No-No drags her feet-first from this life. Then No-No dresses up as Clumsy’s wife, Her scarf now silhouettes his long hooked nose, His long bones rattle in her frilly clothes As No-No brings a tray of cups and plates Into the light where puckered Clumsy waits. Hearing her footstep soft makes Clumsy take The pucker from his lips and sweetly break Into falsetto greetings, then resume His lips into a kiss. But this is doom, And hideously silent No-No stands. When Clumsy parts his eyelids both his hands Fly up as if on strings and Clumsy screams, The tears squirt from his ducts a dozen streams, His mouth blubbers, inelegantly smeared, “Where is she, No-No? Oh, I am afeared!” Then No-No lifts up Clumsy’s trembly chin, And leans to hiss with loud stage whisper in The big pink ear of Clumsy, “My dear friend,” No-No enunciates. “This is The End.” 2 Disguised as Doctor of Philosophy In academic haberdashery By dint of hood and black capacious gown, No-No wipes off the blackboard up and down, His black sleeve floating outward with each lunge, The black streaks glisten from his dampened sponge, While Clumsy sharpens pencils two feet long To little stubs and wets them with his tongue, Then smooths his pad of paper with gloved fists. He lifts his sleeves a fraction at the wrists And twirls his hands around like windmill sails To soothe his nerves, then drums his muffled nails Until the Doctor claps his hands rat-tat And picks his pointer up and points it at His eager pupil with the jumbo ears: “Compose a paragraph.” And Clumsy clears His throat a dozen times to soft aver, “I don’t know how to write with letters sir.” At which the Doctor hides with sleeve a smile Most uncontrollable and fraught with guile, Until, authority regained, he says, “In that case you may dictate sentences Which you most wish to write, and I’ll record Your words for you to copy from the board.” Now Clumsy tries to think of what to write. He cranes his neck around stage-left and -right, He gazes toward the rafters thinking hard And sometimes shakes his head as to discard Ideas he finds less than adequate, Then caroling a joyous “I know what!” He pulls a giant lightbulb from a sack And holds it overhead and puts it back, And in his vast excitement both his hands Pull up his earlobe-anchored rubber bands To lift from scalp his tiny frizzy wig: “I’d like to start with ‘God is very big.’ ” Erupting laughter nearly knocks quite down The Doctor in his nearly empty gown, He whirls on heel and cuts his hooting off: “My theologian! Fellow philosophe! Your disquisition has the resonance Of truth’s unique, unutterable sense But yet, being pedantic and antique, This mind of mine must tinker, weigh, and seek, And wonder if together you and I For sake of scholarship should specify How big God is?” Thus groping for the truth About the size of God makes pink smoke poof From Clumsy’s ears in jets, and fire alarms Go off backstage as, lowered head on arms, Full sixty seconds Clumsy cogitates. The Doctor snaps his chalk in two and waits. Clumsy looks up and No-No utters “Yes?” “Bigger than the biggest clouds, I guess.” “Bigger than clouds! Dear fellow! I should say I never would have thought of God that way! Then let’s begin.” And No-No sets the chalk Tick-ticking on the board like time-bomb clock While Clumsy wraps his pencil finger-wise And sets it on the page and squints his eyes At No-No’s blackboard words so white and clean And neat and straight with spaces in between, And then, his page two inches from his nose, He copies out in crooked uphill rows: “I, Clumsy, hereby give and wittingly My soul to No-No for Eternity.”

My father at the dictionary-stand Touches the page to fully understand The lamplit answer, tilting in his hand His slowly scanning magnifying lens, A blurry, glistening circle he suspends Above the word “Carnation.” Then he bends So near his eyes are magnified and blurred, One finger on the miniature word, As if he touched a single key and heard A distant, plucked, infinitesimal string, “The obligation due to every thing That’s smaller than the universe.” I bring My sewing needle close enough that I Can watch my father through the needle’s eye, As through a lens ground for a butterfly Who peers down flower-hallways toward a room Shadowed and fathomed as this study’s gloom Where, as a scholar bends above a tomb To read what’s buried there, he bends to pore Over the Latin blossom. I am four, I spill my pins and needles on the floor Trying to stitch “Beloved” X by X. My dangerous, bright needle’s point connects Myself illiterate to this perfect text I cannot read. My father puzzles why It is my habit to identify Carnations as “Christ’s flowers,” knowing I Can give no explanation but “Because.” Word-roots blossom in speechless messages The way the thread behind my sampler does Where following each X I awkward move My needle through the word whose root is love. He reads, “A pink variety of Clove, Carnatio, the Latin, meaning flesh.” As if the bud’s essential oils brush Christ’s fragrance through the room, the iron-fresh Odor carnations have floats up to me, A drifted, secret, bitter ecstasy, The stems squeak in my scissors,Child, it’s me, He turns the page to “Clove” and reads aloud: “The clove, a spice, dried from a flower-bud.” Then twice, as if he hasn't understood, He reads, “From French, for clou, meaning a nail.” He gazes, motionless. “Meaning a nail.” The incarnation blossoms, flesh and nail, I twist my threads like stems into a knot And smooth “Beloved,” but my needle caught Within the threads,Thy blood so dearly bought, The needle strikes my finger to the bone. I lift my hand, it is myself I’ve sewn, The flesh laid bare, the threads of blood my own, I lift my hand in startled agony And call upon his name, “Daddy daddy”— My father’s hand touches the injury As lightly as he touched the page before, Where incarnation bloomed from roots that bore The flowers I called Christ’s when I was four.

Overture More loudly to inveigh against your absence, Raising the volume by at least a third, Humbly I say I’ve written this immense Astonishing “Sonata” word by word, With leitmotivs you’ll wish you’d never heard, And a demented, shattering Cadenza. I’m pained to say that scholarship insists Cadenzas are conclusion to Concertos, Not Sonatas—true Sonatas close With what pedantic musicologists, Waving their Ph.D.s beneath my nose, Persist in calling Recapitulation. My double ending is a Variation: I couldn’t choose between them once I chose To write two endings, so, because I wrote a Recapitulation and Cadenza, My piece concludes two times—and then it ends Again because I’ve added on a Coda. To brush up on Sonata structure: first, The Exposition sounds two melodies, Deeply dissimilar, in different keys, Major and minor. Part Two is a burst Of brainstorms scholars call Development, In which the two themes of the Exposition Are changed and rearranged past recognition, Distorted, fragmented, dissolved, and blent Into chromatic superimposition, Till, imperceptibly, two themes unite. And then, if everything is going right, The piece concludes in Recapitulation. Exposition Theme One: My life lacks what, in lacking you? Theme Two: Does the material world exist? (Ideally your neurons should resist, As yet, connecting Numbers One and Two. But note the skill, the frightening mastery, The lunatic precision it entails To merge these separate themes, the way train rails Converge as they approach infinity.) Development I dreamed that an encyclopedia Opened before my eyes and there I found Analogies to sort of stack around My what-is-life-without-you-here idea: Like nous detached from Anaxagoras, Like cosmic fire glimmering without A Heraclitus there to find it out, Like square roots waiting for Pythagoras, Like One-ness riven from Parmenides, Like Nothing without Gorgias to detect it, Like paradox sans Zeno to perfect it, Like plural worlds lacking Empedocles, Like Plato’s chairs and tables if you took The furniture’s Eternal Forms away, Objects abandoned by Reality Still look the same, but look the way things look When I behold my life without you in it: A screwy room where chairs and tables lack Dimension from the front, the side, the back, Like finity without the infinite, Where tea parties are held without the Hatter, It’s like a single point withdrawn from Space, It’s like a physicist who cannot trace The ultimate constituents of matter— There is no evidence Matter exists. Thus do I introduce Theme Number Two. And I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true: The physical eludes the physicists. They’ve chased down matter past atomic rings Into small shadows, and they’ve lost it there. It seems that they can’t find it anywhere. They stalk imaginary floating things Like amateurish lepidopterists Round babbling brooks and mossy fairy knolls. Their net strings map out squares of empty holes. Behold them snatching something in their fists: Their fingers uncurl, cautious, on the sight Of Nothing crushed against the sweaty hand. But then I’m prejudiced, you understand. Not everyone on earth believes I’m right. But lest you think I’m kidding, or perverse, I went to hear a Lecture just last year About some things which I hold very dear: The smallest pieces of the universe. The Lecturer referred to them as Quarks. He seemed impervious to the mystery Surrounding their invisibility. I asked, when he concluded his remarks, “But are Quarks physical?” You’d think that he Were someone nearly martyred and I’d said Our duty’s to die peacefully in bed. He took his glasses off and blinked at me. Were I John Milton, I would now destroy This moment of high drama and deploy A thirty-line Homeric simile. But I’m not Milton, nor was meant to be. He put his glasses on, and said, “Of course.” Now, I may be the south end of a horse, But logically and analogically, And physically, and metaphysically, And, if it gets to that, religiously, And absolutely scientifically, I don’t believe that Quarks can pass the test Of Being There, and since they’re fundamental, Why, then, the world’s a dream, and dreams are mental, And since in mental matters East or West I need you for this dream’s interpretation— Stop looking at your watch, for I’ve divined, With these two themes uncomfortably combined, It’s time now for the Recapitulation. Recapitulation Frankly, I’m disinclined to reassert The themes my Exposition indicated. Stuffed shirts there are, and hordes of overrated Experts who would slay or badly hurt With airy wave of hand my insights; no, I will not play to them, I’ll not rehash My song though they with hard and cold cash Should bribe me, or should tell me where to go. My complex principles are explicated Under “Development.” So let them laugh: I’ll not permit this section to be half So convoluted as anticipated. Cadenza Sing, Heav’nly Muse, and give me lyric flight, Give me special effects, give me defiance To challenge the Academy of Science On fundamental points, and get them right; Give me the strength to can the Latinisms, To forge analogies between the thing Nature abhors and my apartment; sing To vanquish literary criticisms If possible and literary sharks. And even if you feel submicroscopic Elements exceed me as a topic, Please try to back me up regarding Quarks, Thereby to advocate my metaphor (Absence the vehicle, physics the tenor) So that the Universal Void coincides With showing—I daresay, with showing off— The consequences of his going off; By showing everything, in fact, but slides. Coda Me heart detests, reviles, denounces, loathes Your absence with a passion like a furnace. The shirt of love, said Eliot, will burn us; And normally I’d add, “Love’s other clothes Burn just as badly”—but, because I’ve bent A rule or two, I won’t extend this figure; Good taste prevents this piece from getting bigger; Please see above for everything I meant.

Simone Weil, 1909-1943 Only the stones at first Seem to have a part in this, And the little height of the grass As it gains a fraction-inch By gripping the shallow soil With all the shocking might Of hunger and of thirst, As if the soil itself Were all that's left on earth. I think the grass alone Can hold within its grasp What matters to it most, And still it looks bereft, And famished as the stones. I watch a stream of moths Proceeding on their ways, They carve out tortuous paths As if they were intent On entering unseen And ever-smaller doors. So four years into the war, And cut off from the ones Whose circumstance you felt And suffering as yours, You carved yourself a path Through ever-narrowing doors Of hunger and of thirst, And entered them day by day, Refusing all at first But that ration of food Your people could obtain Behind the lines in France, And then refusing that, From summer into fall You cut your ration back To send your part to them, Your part diminishing To rations cut in half And cut in half again, And then nothing at all But water at the last Sipped for the nurse's sake, You finally lacked the strength Even to lift your hands: Father, I cannot stand To think of them and eat. Send it to them, it is theirs. Send this food for them, For my people still in France. And turned your face away, As famished as the grass. Only the stones at first Seem to have a part in this, And the little height of the grass As it gains a fraction-inch. But hidden in the grass As if the grass itself Were giving out a cry, I overhear the finch Begin her native rhyme And toil to paraphrase Her version of your words. It seems she tries and tries Until the words come clear, It is theirs, she seems to say, Or that is what I hear, And again: It is theirs, it is theirs. And the plover joins in praise With her fluttering, murmured prayers: Send it to them, it is theirs. And the blackbirds breaking wide Take it up in their dialects To sing you in their way, I swear I can hear the words, Send it to them, they say, Send it to them, it is theirs, Then all the birds of the air Give thanks above your grave, As if they were your cause And those you meant to save, As if the birds were there In attendance at the end, And, seeing the sacrifice Had borne your body up, So wasted as it was, To your chair in Paradise, And saw, before they fled, Your first breathtaking act Before the heavenly feast, The bread set at your place: To refuse to eat till none On earth has less than you, Though God in pity take Your hands and lift them toward His table for your sake. Father, they have no food, Send it to them, it is theirs. And the birds returning here Give tongue to what they've heard, They tell the grass and stones And the stream of moths who carve Their tortuous paths in the air. But how in giving thanks Can we calculate the worth Of one who chose to starve? You held within your grasp Our hunger and our thirst. And the little height of the grass As it gains a fraction-inch Seems to have a part in this. It grips with a shocking might What matters to the last, As if the soil itself Were all that's left on earth, And all the earth were held Within its famished grasp.

The epitaphios of Thessaloniki From those few famous silkworms smuggled Into Constantinople in the head of a walking stick Silk waterfalls Poured from the ancient bolts Into now-destitute reservoirs Of church treasuries in Aachen, In Liège, in Maastricht, in Sens, In the Sancta Sanctorum of the Vatican, Bright rivers seeping past The age when a teaspoonful of Silkworm eggs the size of one grain Could endow a church, The age when the letters in the words Of sacred testaments were Unreeled in the coastal cities of Asia Minor, When a bookworm conspired To wrest a maze of empty roads Through the words My Lord— That ancient, flickering text Once permanently affixed By blind but face-picturing, speechless But law-breaking wooden shuttles, Now a heap of gold wires displayed With a crumbling silk vestment someone Plucked from a shovelful of dust During one of those treasure hunts conducted In the burying grounds, in other eras, A shovelful of dust Now blowing into your eyes, As if a storm wind from Paradise Blew the rumors of this death So hard you must cover your eyes Before the museum case. The late afternoon tugs At a gold thread you can hear fraying When you close your eyes, A thread you feel your way along, A thread at which the invisible globe pulls, Leading you to the end of the world Where there is a pile of Clothes stolen from the grave, Where your fear is relegated To a masterwork of silk slaves— That He is dead. Here death is only a flash of worlds Unfurled from a rifled Church treasury, and you are invited To walk this alluvial wave of gold, To walk in the labyrinths Of the angels’ howls, To run your hands along the walls Of the silk thread’s passageways, To feel with your fingers The angels’ barbaric, stifled, Glittering vowels Tightly woven with gold wires. If you were to tug at one, Unraveling the angels Into a vivid labyrinth of thread From the fourteenth century Backwards to the scissors blade A seraph takes to a fragile Filament of gilt According to a law still unrevealed, The shroud would disappear In the gust of a little breeze From this door left ajar Into the next life, The threshold we cross with closed eyes— Where angels hide behind their backs The saws with which they mean To saw the present from the past, Oblivious to the scarlet threads That prove to be hidden among The filaments, those red rivers Running through the theme of time So shockingly—so before you set foot there, Take heed. This is the work Of Byzantine silk slaves confined To the palace grounds at Constantinople, And you must beware. There was a way station On the Silk Road Where the authorities executed Traitors in a wooden box In innumerable, unspeakable ways. When you touch this shroud from the east You take that hundred feet of road. You must walk softly past. You must try not to look. The torrent of words—later, later. Here tongues are cut out, And that is why the howling Is mute, Gilded, herringboned. Because although this is death, It is the work of slaves Whose task was only To expose the maximum amount of gold thread To the ceiling price of so many nomismata Per square inch, in a swift mischief Of curious knots, of mazes Flashing past, of straight paths Made inextricable, So look again. The angels wring their hands Over a statue. They are deranged, But not by grief. They mourn Not a body, but a work in bronze. They do not bring a mortal to the grave. But we onlookers who grieve and grieve— We cannot relegate this thought To a glory woven cryptically In heavy silks; We cannot consign it, sweep it off, For we cannot weigh In our palms the empty cocoons, We cannot study Within the secret workshops Of the silkworm, We cannot touch the boiling Water where the spools whirl, We cannot learn firsthand The bleakness of the craft With which God made the world, We cannot recount the legend that, When they met face-to-face, both God and the worm laughed.

Bethlehem in Germany, Glitter on the sloping roofs, Breadcrumbs on the windowsills, Candles in the Christmas trees, Hearths with pairs of empty shoes: Panels of Nativity Open paper scenes where doors Open into other scenes, Some recounted, some foretold. Blizzard-sprinkled flakes of gold Gleam from small interiors, Picture-boxes in the stars Open up like cupboard doors In a cabinet Jesus built. Southern German villagers, Peasants in the mica frost, See the comet streaming down, Heavenly faces, each alone, Faces lifted, startled, lost, As if lightning lit the town. Sitting in an upstairs window Patiently the village scholar Raises his nearsighted face, Interrupted by the star. Left and right his hands lie stricken Useless on his heavy book. When I lift the paper door In the ceiling of his study One canary-angel glimmers, Flitting in the candelabra, Peers and quizzes him: Rabbi, What are the spheres surmounted by? But his lips are motionless. Child, what are you asking for? Look, he gazes past the roofs, Gazes where the bitter North, Stretched across the empty place, Opens door by door by door. This is childhood's shrunken door. When I touch the glittering crumbs, When I cry to be admitted, No one answers, no one comes. And the tailor's needle flashes In midair with thread pulled tight, Stitching a baptismal gown. But the gown, the seventh door, Turns up an interior Hidden from the tailor's eyes: Baby presents like the boxes Angels hold on streets and stairways, Wooden soldier, wooden sword, Chocolate coins in crinkled gold, Hints of something bought and sold, Hints of murder in the stars. Baby's gown is sown with glitter Spread across the tailor's lap. Up above his painted ceiling Baby mouse's skeleton Crumbles in the mouse's trap. Leaning from the cliff of heaven, Indicating whom he weeps for, Joseph lifts his lamp above The infant like a candle-crown. Let my fingers touch the silence Where the infant's father cries. Give me entrance to the village From my childhood where the doorways Open pictures in the skies. But when all the doors are open, No one sees that I've returned. When I cry to be admitted, No one answers, no one comes. Clinging to my fingers only Pain, like glitter bits adhering, When I touch the shining crumbs.