Keith Waldrop

1 She would sigh, if she could think of anything intolerable. her numbers fold, in planes she can not describe. Does she close her eyes for that faint red of processes? Come to me, by instinct or for mathematics’ sake. 2 She moves in a metaphor of action. Heaven, she says, is hell remembered. Outside her gaze, I’m stranded on fraudulent heights. No tune I know is far enough out. 3 Man is a matter of walking upright, but she suggests happiness. Her whole power is one the side of vagueness. Everything I need to know about her is just before me. What can I learn that is not already gone? 4 Mountains rule the world because she’s from the hills. When she stands perpendicular to the sun’s rays, her light is confined. If she turns, the objective weakens. We shall not all rise, but all be modified. 5 I see her long after she has gone away. There are whole systems she doesn’t respond to. If you look long enough everything is hydraulics. Out of a series of partial images, she is the one that detaches. 6 If I could remember her, we might build. Will my words be fan- tastic enough to count? Whatever happens now, we have been opposite. Please believe me, I would seek you if I had the distance. 7 Given time and invention, she will surface. She will scratch, meditate, and some story will suffer. I refuse to believe things unsupported necessarily fall. She deprives my dreams of un- reality. 8 The hardest step to take is always the next. She is written across her face. We are what we are, momentary coincidence. She is body, speaking through body. 9 She will claim, for instance, King Solomon planted baobabs in India. And it may be true. A fine long rain penetrates farther than storms. Food is necessary and also logic. 10 Sometimes I’m angry, and not at anything in particular. She has seven divisions, but no borders. I could change your name, since you always wanted to be fictional. Another unsolved dream, under the bridge 11 She has, it would seem, no natural inclination to rise. She is whatever I cannot get rid of. She’s whatever refuses to be information. She is my absence, my only secure reference. 12 Just when I’m ready to let go, satisfaction is satisfaction. Curious text, where we’re commanded to acquire Nirvana. Nothing but impatience could prompt our abrupt recognition. she says virginity of the mind can be restored. 13 Let me not praise her past her due. She is a heap of pebbles in exquisite random. Her laughter rings empty, where there were crowds. My arms around you, my love, are phantoms. 14 She appears sometimes to be talking about other data. It is as if she knew a separate category. I tell her, weeping’s no proof of the resurrection. All of her is curved and alters. 15 She can only be pictured as catastrophe. She con- fuses concepts with irony. Her thought spreads, like children running home. She finds comfort in the most outrageous limbs. 16 The moon, according to her, is a symbol for shine. Residues provide the passion of thought. Her reflexes condition my mythology. She is the energy of my indexes. 17 When she snarls at me, my senses sharpen. Who could expect her, without lying? She is a color outside the octave. Her rituals divide my life from its labors. 18 She makes the right answer sound foolish. The righteous glory in their un- certainty. Two nuts represent us in divination. The only thing she comes home in is twilight. 19 She sits in the street, making detours. Her history is rich in in- decisions. She is present, inclusive, untransformed. I do not pretend to know how the flood came. 20 A hymn describes the monotony of her expectations. She was created from the sweat of peacocks. Children defend themselves with shame and experience. All her objects answer to the same name. 21 Better a blank wall than simple dark. The play in her muscle de- termines where my eyes focus. She sleeps at the curve of my spine. She wouldn’t believe me, if I were to tell her.

A great crime: she has plunged a dagger into the heart of her mother. Strange. The strangest thing: a mocking little pride with a sinister click as of a fitting together of bad pieces. Beyond knowing. The mesmerist’s only child. A certain indication of anemia, too much candy, and her charming eyes. A privilege to be near her. My inspiriation. I risk an approach, what I call “the light of day.” Movements, with perfect indifference, turn place and shrink.One might have seen less:

Herr Stimmung—purblind—moves in corporeal time. Think how many, by now, have escaped the world’s memory. Think, how all his wandering is only thought. Having once tried to live in the quasi-stupor of sensation, now he picks his way through areas of spilth, seeking the least among infinite evils. His hope: intermittent. To a person so little conscious, what would it mean to die? Though he feels, true enough, death’s wither-clench. Thinking always of something permanent, watching the while how everything goes on changing. He has seen where Speed is buried. Eyes exorbitant. He has the tension of male and female: active, divided. Anger and lust. What he eats tastes exactly like real food. He would search out interphenomena, if he could decipher the interstices. The broken line. Immediate havoc. Circular heaven. Square earth. He cries world world, and there is no world. He claims superiority over the other animals, being the only one who can talk, the only one to have doubts. Herr Stimmung knows a whale is big. Its skeleton might shelter a dozen men. Not existing, not subsisting—in sisting. Not object, not subject— e ject. (He works within opposed systems, every one of them opposed to system.) “Fillette”—in confusion he addresses himself—“n’allez pas au bois seulette.” He knows who is allowed to wear what kinds of beads. He knows how fruit trees are inherited. All his self-objects lie in the inoperative past. Herr Stimmung springs from a long undocumented ancestry. He has a special attitude towards terror.

Afterward, to tell how it was possible to identify absolute space, a matter of great difficulty, keeping in mind always that not all old music is beautiful and therefore it’s necessary to choose. Ice loading and unloading as the ice caps wax and wither. Brutal and uncouth from the beginning even unto time, space, place, motion. How are we to obtain true motion? I predict a fiasco—and a fiasco with catcalls. Wind circulation in the case of plants, predators in the case of animals, affecting their distribution on the ancient land masses. And who will conduct the chorus and orchestra? Many things exist at once. Predilection and preference. Begin with the storm. A very agile, beautiful voice. With tremendous temperament. The earth’s magnetic field weakening. Even the princess is drawn into the violence of the action, extremes of joy, mad ravings, almost requiring the conventions of opera. Thus, thus; we parted, thus to meet again. Thus in a ship, under sail, since the sun itself is moving, supposing Infinite Space to be (as it were) Sensorium of the Omnipresent. Reduced to a few feet of ground, we begin with great delight to plant a garden. The Czar is in that garden. Quiet eruptions, safe enough to attract tourists. We suppose other bodies annihilated. Upon any conditions supposed, taught to describe accurately, I detest everything that smells of theory. If we look at similar coral reefs, the past location of the same precise environment can be traced. But there the comparison breaks. And from these relative motions will arise the relative motion of a body on the earth.

I In heaven there is no more sea, and houses no longer need a widow’s walk. And no more widows, there being neither marriage nor giving in marriage. How the air hangs lower and lower on this—I hope —hottest day of summer. A faintly rotten scent the ground gives off brings to mind lilacs that have budded and blossomed. There are no more blossoms, perfume and purple gone for a year, as if forever. In heaven there are no tears, salt water wiped away entirely. One moment I breathe contentment. And then unreasoning sorrow pulses through me, an imperfect tension, as if unending. I have time on my hands. In heaven there is no more dusk, dark, dawn, meridian. And what I know now and for certain: neither the day nor the hour. II It seems clear enough that there is in the brain a particular pain-center, where sensations of every variety check in, to emerge as anguish and hurt. Thus there is not, as we might suppose, a multiplicity of pains, like an arsenal deployed against us, but one pain which puts on, as in a ritual theater, different masks. It need not, even, be a great number of masks, some few faces peopling an endless repertory. From one fairy tale to another, is not the witch the same witch, whether poisoning an apple or fattening the children? III The doctrine changes, blows here and there, hot, cold. One more notion sweeps across the state in gusts, fiercely at first, settling then into a mild rotation. It puts things in motion. It dies down, while pressure somewhere else is building. Called to, across a chasm of thin air, I shape the air to answer. My moments force themselves apart. Breathe out. Breathe in. But as long as you are alive, there is a dead space in your lungs, never emptied, never needing to be filled. The spirit there, stale and sustaining, holds open every possibility, urging none. Ghost money: money to burn. IV On the earliest known sundial, the finger of shadow moves through symbols of the cosmos, but there are no lines drawn to mark off the hours. It does not, in the modern sense, “keep” time, but celebrates its flight, its recurrence, its brightness. V Hermaphrodite, sleeping. Predominance, in the visible, of the right hand —but the eyes now closed. What could there be to dream about, for one already complete? A perfect asymmetrical stability. No need to see or even to look. To know, without having to ask. From any point on the periphery, advancing always towards the body. Both sexes. And both asleep. VI A scream from outside broke our argument and I ran to the door, rushed out onto the sidewalk almost, I thought, before the scream had ended. The night sky, above the street lamp, had a sheen of some dark metal. Sirens—which seemed this evening more frequent than usual, and more strident—state the theme, you have said, of our instant: the howl of a machine hurrying to disaster. And all day, in the violence of delivery, ordinary trucks rattle our sashes. The street lay empty, mercury lit, silence giving us no indication of which way to turn.

I Fate is cleverer than the king of Babylon. Shadow of yew fall through windows onto the floor of the nave and touch the pillars with tattered shade. You claim the dearest wish of your life is to sink into a soul-freezing situation of horror.  The music of a crash caught in the hollow of a wooded hillside. 2 Grave, questioning sweep—chiefly the weird that arouses our keenest hopes. The garden of dreams contains a summerhouse, hazy period of my growth. There are bodies, not greatly extended, called seas nevertheless, because of their depth and violence. I’ve some little doubt about this ceremony entirely embedded in a cup of grassy hills. 3 Pardon me for loitering. I was sleeping soundly when I was roused by the loud clang of what turned out to be a large brass candlestick, flung against the banister. Unprotected, destitute of the means of self-defense, you hug to yourself the consciousness of vanished beauty. The sea is un- certain, on the main and also along the coast. 4 Strange rooms. Through these experimental years, who can describe beauty in the dead of night? Complain of frivolity or of portraits exactly like ghosts. The waters of the great surrounding sea will completely evaporate when the sun opens the fifth of its seven eyes. Oh yes, I take pleasure in backgrounds, bringing them forward. 5 These are only a few of many legendary details, called from the distant future where each thing has its end, including sea, sun, the eyes. You live in another season—even now I feel acrobatic instincts. Large strange rooms. A silver cup from his household plate, a sky of the same gray tones, a great wilderness of books. 6 When the sea subsides into utter calm, changing clouds caught in its clarity, then fishermen say the sea is thinking about itself. A dark back room, looking down upon a narrow courtyard—waking out of some dreams of specters, bellowing the most frightful shrieks, forgetting only at the sound of somebody’s voice. 7 You light me to bed with your light, and never a night but I am prey to ghostly visions—a tenderness no usual in my family. The lion pauses a certain space of time, amid a sea of divers thoughts, choppy half desires, memoranda of search and hunger, very peculiar ideas of the world.

after this, the cold more intense, and the night comes rapidly up . angels in the fall . around a tongue of land, free from trees . awakened by feeling a heavy weight on your feet, something that seems inert and motionless . awestruck manner, as though you expected to find some strange presence behind you . coming through the diamond-paned bay window of your sanctum . a crimson-flowered silk dressing gown, the folds of which I could now describe . deathly pallor overspreading . describing the exact nature of your nightly troubles . discomfort at seeing a surface spoiled . echo and foretaste . the entrance blocked, not only by brambles and nettles, which have to be beaten aside, but by piles of faggots, old boxes, and even refuse . expecting every moment to see the door open and give admission to the original of my detested portrait . fantastic wigs, costumes, other disguises . filling up the width of the street . frequent tussles . the glitter of silver and glass and the subdued lights and cackle of conversation around the dinner table . high-backed carved oak chair . I have omitted in my narration . . . . in a great raftered hall . in a tableau vivant, as an angel, sewn up in tights, with wings on your back . light your candle and  open the window . lines of your dress, with a hint of underthings . looking up, our problem still unsolved . luxurious with heavy silk and rich rococo furniture, all of it much soiled with age . many questions about the stars, of which you gave me my first intelligent idea . meanwhile, the snow, with ominous steadiness, and the wind falls . my weakness for the Ypsilanti Waltz, which I did regard as the most wonderful of compositions . neat strip of fine turf edging the road and running back until the poison of the dead beech leaves kills it under the trees . never venturing farther than a sandy beach, but losing everything at sea . not crawling or creeping, but spreading . not just out of repair, but in a condition of decay . only a foul trick after all . on the face of the judge in the picture, a malignant smile . profound impressions of unearthly horror . rambles and adventures among the rocky banks . the rope of the great alarm bell on the roof, which hangs down . rough horseplay and quarrels . sashes that splinter at a touch . the serpentlike form of the seraphim . something uncertain at work among the monuments . the thing on the bed, slowly shifting . till this particular day has passed through all the seasons of the year . the vicar, who used to tell us the story of Robinson Crusoe . waves and their whelps . while with a sickening revulsion after my terror, I drop half fainting across the end of the bed . with a pair of great greenish eyes shining dimly out within the lattice fronts . with painted carvings of saints and devils, a small galvanic battery, and a microscope

An aging house, well yes he understands that—but suddenly down it falls. And he is in a garden. And there are animals. And he is in a garden and there are trees. And there are stones on fire. And, well, he walks up and down on them. But this is the Hebrew and, not a conjunction, merely some un- translatable particle. Cenotaph (there is no body here). (Somehow I can’t imagine digging a separate grave for the heart.) And everything is cast down—plants, animals, garden, stones, fire, Tyre with its river called Litany—along with himself. The living organism, he hears, is a symbol of the psyche. Thinking is inward seeing. So Wittgenstein thought, and also Swedenborg. Die, well yes he knows he has to, but thinks of it as being killed—or killing. As if at a distance—he lives, not in life, but across from it. And it comes to pass. And he tries to distinguish life and its contents. And they wheel around him, the cars, as if he were standing still.

The wind dying, I find a city deserted, except for crowds of people moving and standing. Those standing resemble stories, like stones, coal from the death of plants, bricks in the shape of teeth. I begin now to write down all the places I have not been— starting with the most distant. I build houses that I will not inhabit.

for Ihab Hassan 1 Closing the door is supposed to open some inward source—as with, for example, the prayer- closet: the text says go in and “shut thy door.” It's a stroke of luck when traditional wisdom so matches the turning of the season. 2 I've ofen thought of writing a poem of grotesque length (an epic, yes) and setting the entire argument the instant after Gautama's enlightenment, while it seemed to him he would pass directly into Nirvana, while the powers of good trembled thinking man was lost. It was only an instant, because of course the Buddha reconsidered. 3 Bulls for the bull-fight must (this is absolutely essential) be innocent. The very brightest are certainly, by human standards, stupid, but after a few fights the dullest among them would learn not to charge an empty cape but turn and massacre the fancy-pants who dances there for a bloody crowd. But, as Hemingway noted, the bull never survives. I can't, myself, get excited about “life and death, i.e., violent death,” and have never been able to work up much sympathy for the brute who runs with his head down or for the show-off, who has it coming. I'll probably never develop a taste for battle or get seven novels written or kill myself. 4 History is hard for me. I’ve no sense for it. 5 The world—and if ever there was a self-evident proposition, here it is—the world is a big fish. I've caught it in my net. And now, long into the winter nights, wearily, I study my net. The fish stinks. 6 A friend talks passionately in favor of silence. I listen to him. He says, “Silence dissolves the categories” and “Silence renews the potential of consciousness.” And it strikes me that I should say something. But I've never been able to argue. And whenever there’s been a choice between speaking and keeping still, I’ve kept my mouth shut. Well, usually. And only after a certain amount of prodding I’ve produced the necessary conventional sounds, feeling the thread of words I spew inordinately fragile, certainly nothing to depend on. Whereas the craw of silence is vast and, anyway, already has us—it’s the scorching sunlight of a Nilescape or the wind across the Great Plains, burying us. Friend, waist deep in dust or sand, maybe we’d contrive a gesture. 7 I passed the peak of my energy at the age of—it's hard to believe— twelve. Since then, little by little, I've collected the furniture of my house. I teach meanwhile, and I study, but no one knows my specialty. 8 XMAS [after Pessoa] A God is born. Some other Gods die. Truth has neither come nor gone, only the Error has changed. We have now another Eternity, and the world is no better off than it was. Blind Knowing plows a sterile plain Lunatic Faith lives a dream of worship. A new God is nothing but a word. Seek not. Nor believe. All is occult. 9 Time is molecular—so much for Zeno—and each moment brings everything out of nothing. In the beginning (each beginning) the universe is only a point—no dimension—and then it’s a world, for a moment, and each moment is apocalypse.Continuous creation it used to be called, and now we say expanding universe because (I forgot to say) each moment is more. Whatever else it may be, it's always more. No wonder the poet cries “Oh,Oh,” or, on a higher level, lyrical verses. But don’t worry. I’m not violent. We all live in a residue of bright pulsations, a gob of time, an after-image. 10 How naive can you get?—I was wondering, when the Great Year comes around to this point again and the next me sits signing his poems Keith Waldrop, will he remember back across the void of Decembers to where I drift into these speculations? And a moment’s thought answers my stupid question: I remember nothing. 11 When I think of the books you could fill with what I don’t know,oof. The pressing need’s for a phenomenology of ignorance. Everything has horizons, and they’re not just out of sight, they loom. Yes, and they beckon. An open door is plain and simple, like a wall. A closed door is an invitation. But if the knob is turning . . . ? Well, I’m closing in, or opening up. I’ve been so bloody finicky the mysteries catch me sometimes with my lids down. But I’m preparing. I need many voices for my revenge.