Rosanna Warren

The whole trick of this thing    ...    is to get out of your own light. — Marianne Faithfull She said she sang very close to the mike to change the space. And I changed the space by striding down the Boulevard Raspail at dusk in tight jeans until an Algerian engineer plucked the pen from my back pocket. As if you’re inside my head and you’re hearing the song from in there. He came from the desert, I came from green suburbs. We understood nothing of one another over glasses of metallic red wine. I was playing Girl. He played Man. Several plots were afoot, all misfiring. One had to do with my skimpy black shirt and light hair, his broad shoulders and hunger after months on an oil rig. Another was untranslatable. Apollinaire burned his fingers on June’s smoldering lyre but I had lost my pen. The engineer read only construction manuals. His room was dim and narrow and no, the story didn’t slide that way though there are many ways to throw oneself away. One singer did it by living by a broken wall until she shredded her voice but still she offered each song, she said, like an Appalachian artifact. Like trash along the riverbank chafing at the quay plastic bottles a torn shirt fractured dolls through which the current chortles an intimate tune.

To Mary Sidney In your lace ruff you resemble a giant snowflake or a spider web pearled with dew. What poets you catch in your symmetries, at your long table at Wilton what wits (Spenser, Fulke- Greville, Drayton) pitch into the roasted piglet, stewed apples, carp. If you rowzed God up, He knocked you back on your heels, Lady— “O God, why hast thou thus Repulst, and scattred us?”—Through the high windows at Wilton seethe rumors of battle, Philip’s pussing thigh, death in the Lowlands. Mother Wrong, Daughter Strife stalk the cities; still you keep house with grammar, you salt the psalms for long preserving. “As smoke in wind, as wax at fire doth waste” the unjust dissolve. Your stanzas stay, still sting the tongue. Dawn finds you kneeling on stone, calling again the bleak God you believe will answer you. You mix medicines, you write in invisible ink. But Time trumps Fame which undoes Death which masters Chastity and Love—which leaves Eternity, your Master wrote, master of all. And like your lace, your lines shine, not pale, “but whitely, and more whitely pure than snow on windless hill that flaking falls, as one whom labour did to rest allure.” Translate us too, rough line by line, into your crystalline severe design.

When the mink ran across the meadow in bunched black parabolas, I thought sine and cosine, but no — the movement never dips below the line. The creature vanished into barberries. Absolute predator who cracks a rabbit’s spine in one bite. And my mind leapt along a track to a summer field where I walked years ago to a stony spit out into the North Atlantic with a young man I hardly knew, and his sister. He was bald, dying of a brain tumor. I ignored his illness and we spoke of history. He was gentle, scholarly. Why do I remember him when it was his sister I painted seated in tall grass, her forehead wide, brown hair framing her face, ocean a cobalt swatch behind? Islands humped in little arcs across the bay. That canvas is stacked in a closet. But it’s the dead boy I’ve stored inside me all these years, scared of the otherworldly light around his eyes. Scared and ashamed of what I didn’t know. Ashamed of my fear that made his death, when it came, unspeakable. So history bounds into the present, glitter-eyed, with musky anal glands and daggering eyeteeth. Because that boy wasn’t dead: he must be killed again.

The last string quartet (Leoš Janáček and Kamila Stösslová) She reads romances, she spells poorly, she’s full-breasted, broad in the beam, matron in a cloche hat, bulky knee-length skirt, apron, thick calves, white stockings, Mary Janes. Her heels go click click on the pavement. She has those dark Gypsy eyes and the wide laugh. He loves it when she tosses her head like that. And here she is in long skirt and embroidered blouse, posing by her dwarf ornamental orange tree on the balcony: high pale forehead, stacked dark hair, heavy jaw, bust cleaving forward like a prow. And here she is on holiday with her husband the businessman the perpetual traveller with the commanding walk and striped tie and blunt mustache. “Two decidedly Jewish types,” writes Zdenka Janáčková, J’s wife: they send her, in the last year of the war, bread, butter, eggs, semolina flour, geese from the husband’s military contacts. * “My dear dark dove,” J calls Kamila, “My little one.” * He has taken dictation from every fountain in Hukvaldy, where he was born to endless mumbled rosaries of water. He notes the gush and prattle of the Fox’s Well as the beech tree flashes its sleight of leaf, and fox kits hide in the rocks; the public fountain, “a fine of ten crowns on those who fail to replace the cover”: and when the cover is replaced the fountain closes her eyes; the castle fountain, handsome, broad and brimming, but scuttled into pipes for manor farm, brewery and slaughterhouse where the stream blurts out in blood; and the little well hidden through tall grass at Kazničov, springing up through the roots of three lime trees, “Helisov’s Well,” chants the little girl, and he notes that too, the quavering fall of the name; and watches water bugs skitter and green moss, darkling, at the bottom, and shards of sky. * Bread, butter, eggs, semolina flour, geese. Kamila knows nothing of music, she worries about her dress for the première of Jenůfa in Vienna. She has two little boys, Rudi and Otto. Otto the baby swims on her hand and she leans over him, soft as night, one eyebrow tilted up as at a dream of which she is hardly aware. * “She was of medium height, dark, curly-haired like a Gypsy woman,” writes Zdenka, “with great, black bulging eyes. The voice was unpleasant, shrill.” * —That once again he saw “her raven hair, all loose,” and she was barefoot in the house and she climbed a ladder to pick apricots from the tree and she refused the gift of the knitted silver bag “And your eye has a strange depth, it’s so deep it doesn’t shine.” * Night leans hugely. He sleeps alone, in his study, upstairs at the Organ School. Zdenka sleeps in their villa across the yard. * He who had scrawled on his cuffs, on envelope scraps, on market paper, in his little pad, robins’ trills, girls’ chatter at the railway station, fox bark, thrush whistle, hen cackle, kitten mew, bee hum, “the chord of stalagmites covered with hoarfrost,” the airy, bell-like patter of fountain spray, scored in a notebook years before Kamila in a notebook 2 A.M. 24 February 1903 his daughter’s dying words— Olga— dying, age 21— in a notebook— “Now I remember that I’m supposed to die” (a little string of quarter notes, B and middle C)— “What walks we took on the corso”—“We should say so much—” He tells her, “You are the most beautiful among them,” and she smiles, in his notebook she smiles. And, down to a G, “Something gets lost so well, no one can find it.” In a notebook— 2:45 A.M. 25 February 1903, Olga, her light hair spread across the pillow, sighs “A-y-a,” two drawn out B’s, scrupulously noted by her father, and in the margin, “God be with you, my soul.” * What can be assimilated into song? * The rivers of Lachia: the River Lubina falls from a ridge of the Radhošť Mountain into an abyss, to seethe of silver, crash of dark; the Ondřejnice dabbles through the village of Mĕrkovice, past mossy banks, shallow, beery-blonde, tepid, where goslings swim dunking for weeds and bugs; and the River Ostravice is the color of steel, and smites the wrist with cold: and all the Lachian rivers run through cello depths, horn hurtle, foam-spray of glockenspiel, clash of cymbals at the smoky inn where Sofie Harabisová flies from arm to arm in the glare, smoke, sweat and stamp of feet: “Where is the poet Šťastný or Professor Batĕk or Mrs. Marie Jungova now? Gone, all gone, those who took part that wild summer night, forty-five years ago!” * Kamila reads romances. “There’s no love just innocent friendship. My husband’s away all the time he’s always got things to do.” * “Your raven hair— I write these lines so they’ll be read, and yet unread because unanswered. So it’s like a stone falling into water—” “You’re the star I look for in evening—” “I was your shadow—” “Even thoughts become flesh—” in the fountain bubbling up among the lime tree roots, mumbling its prayers over and over, tonguing the stones. * Now after the war, no need for bread, butter, eggs, semolina flour, geese delivered by special connection and Czechoslovakia is free in the Sinfonietta, in the razzle of brass: “I’m really an ordinary woman Your heart would stop aching if you saw me more.” There’s Rudi, there’s Otto, and her husband always dealing in his antiques. No we cannot attend the première in Prague no we cannot. Now after the war. For that cold: boil three onions with marjoram and lemon peel and drink it like tea with sugar. Your raven hair. I was your shadow, when you reached for the apricots. * Gut scrapings: the bow scrapes sunlight from that summer day at the spa at Luhačovice where she sat on the grass “like an exhausted little bird”: “Dear Madam, Accept these few roses as a token” where she sat on the grass, scrape sunlight from the inner petals, scrape the dark from her pupil, so deep it doesn’t shine. Madam: “Silence goes to sleep under every tree.” Under the tilt of her shadowed brow. His baby son died those years ago and Olga’s hair spreads wide across the pillow where she sighs. He sleeps alone it’s like a stone falling. * Lullaby, bee swarms, gut scraping, fracture, a waltz falters, the schmaltzy tune with raven hair whispers, breaks off, and the hand she lets him touch, for the first time, she does not draw away the first time, “your little hand,” in eleven years, under the linden boughs. “That dark Jewess,” writes Zdenka, “I rather liked her at first, but I held my position. You know how artists are. They have to be handled. I would not let him go.” * “These letters were written in fire.” Zdenka must understand: Kamila is the Gypsy girl, Káťa Kabanová, the Vixen, Aljeja, the little hidden well by the lime trees at Kazničov, the military fanfare on the promenade, trumpet, oboe, piccolo squeal when the Austrians march out, the Empire crashes, and the country is, like the high-wire flute notes, finally, free. Zdenka must acknowledge this: These letters were written in fire. * By now Kamila’s boys have been stuffed into trousers, stiff collars, and neckties. They’ve grown leggy, their faces are plump. It’s a question of tempi slightly retarded, a vertigo the viola suffers, following the violins. Silence goes to sleep under every tree. The cello drags gusts of confetti, repetition, emotion is all repetition pulled by twisted horsehair out of gut. My dear dark dove, a form of mourning, that too is a form of repetition. Why don’t you write. So when, those last days, she has come at last, with little Otto, respectably to visit the upstairs room he has built and furnished for her in his summer cottage in Hukvaldy, furnished according to his dream— “I want to have the painting of those two cherubs, a writing desk, a communal table, a comfortable bed, perhaps of brass, a wardrobe with mirrored doors, a marble wash-stand, and four chairs, each from a different part of the world—” (the question is, what can be assimilated into song) she peels oranges, makes tea, they shop in the market and play and walk and August 8, on the walk up the Babí hůra Hill, Otto gets lost in the woods and ravines— Something gets lost so well, no one can find it— and Leoš seeks and seeks the child in drenching rain as if searching for his own son in the woods and ravines under the wing of her darkly tilting brow and returns fevered. In a notebook no one writes, no one scores his cough. 10 August 1928 J consents to go to the hospital in Ostrava pneumonia—deterioration—sedative What walks we took on the corso Something gets lost so well So it’s like a stone Silence goes to sleep under every tree I was your shadow I burned your letters but I keep the ash No one scored the sleep rattle in Ostrava 12 August 10 A.M. Sunday Kamila at his side, a heavy woman who spells poorly, broad in the beam, with thick knees and white stockings, who reads romances, who will die of cancer seven years later at 43 and be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Písek. “And I kissed you And you are sitting beside me and I am happy and at peace In such a way do the days pass for the angels.” No one scored the sleep rattle Sunday 12 August. Only then, by his order, Zdenka is told and arrives by train. These letters were written in fire.

(Lord Egremont speaks) It was a way of punishing the house, setting it ablaze in ruddy, golden flames; smoke in billows up the front stairs; walls cringing like leaves. I say, I am afraid in my own house. Do not believe I started this, it was that man, who was to portray the park alone, mind you, but then became enamored of the music room. And now what have we: floods of fire rolling from room to room, furniture wrecked in seethe, my wife Lady Amelia turned wraith, God knows what fish and drowning slaves cast up in the tide along with pocket Bibles, snuffboxes, antimacassars, the familiar bric-a-brac of the well-kept house. Where are Edward, Lavinia, Jane? Why is no one crying, “Fire! Fire!”? Am I alone? The man has no sense of proportion. He had himself lashed to the mast, once, it is said, on a steamboat off the harbor mouth in full blizzard: sailors blinded by snow, the boat crippled, led by the lead, they damn near died to a man, and he— he was observing “the light at sea,” he said. The painting? “Soapsuds and whitewash,” the critics described it so. But here, in our house, it is catastrophe of flame, not weather, he loosed. He is a man in love with last things, clearly, the last things, but never understood the first, it seems to me, and certainly not the genial medias res of decorous, daily life. What tea-times we’ve known in these chambers, what sonatinas, lieder of an evening, whist, Emmeline embroidering, the hounds calm at the hearth, now all dissolved. Perhaps there are no flames. A bloody haze arises, it could be my own eyes that fail. I hear nothing, but fear the upstairs rooms, cramped rooms I have not entered in ages, only remember the draughts, creakings, grime in closet corners, windows too tight to lean from, the smell of antique damp. And now, who knows what acts unroll on narrow beds, on floorboards warped askew? As steam is rising, rising? As heat buoys the house up into an atmosphere all of its own creation? Who are the participants? Where has Amelia gone? Why, in this furnace, can I hear no sound, or feel my own skin begin to peel?

Kitty Goes Kommando and the Goldman Rats — Phooey! That blue scaffolding holds up the sky. Who did we think we were padlocking in, or out? Give me that huge looping black script no one can read, a secret glyph, and just where someone has smashed the window, Jesus the Way the Truth the Life and a dented aluminum frame. He bent down, we know, and wrote something illegible on the ground. A toothy black-and-white dinosaur gapes. I like the crack in this wall of monsters where skylines topple and ogres twiddle train tracks in their claws like pipe cleaners. Down the long, semi-abandoned street in Queens calligraphy gallops toward the shop displaying, like guitar strings, seven different iron rods for gates. Hole in the wall, rose sound-hole, ribbed sounding board — always from fissures and gaps melody strains as trains thunderclank across the girdered overpass, a siren keens, and a solitary man ambles past amputated acacias fisting out with leaves.

I. When his dogs leapt on Actaeon, he cried (did he cry out?)—He flung his arm to command, they tore his hand from the wrist stump, tore guts from his belly through the tunic, ripped the cry from his throat. That’s how we know a god, when the facts leap at the tenderest innards, and we know the god is what we can’t change. You stood over me as I woke, I opened my eyes, I saw that I’d seen and that it was too late: the seeing of you in the doorway with weak electric light fanning behind you in the hall, and my room and narrow pallet steeped in shadow were what I couldn’t change, and distantly I wanted you, and, as distantly, I heard the dogs, baying. II. And yet the fountain spends itself, and it is in the clear light of its losing that we seem to take delight: you dipped your hand in its running braid to sprinkle my forehead, my lips. Garden deities observed us: three nymphs with moss staining their haunches, a pug-nosed faun. The wound in water closed perfectly around your gesture, erasing it, so that only the glimmer, swiftly drying, on my face recalled our interruption of the faultless, cold, passionate, perpetual idea of the stream’s descent— which, unlike ours, would always be renewed. III. I kissed a flame, what did I expect. Those days, you painted in fire. Tangerine, gold: one would have had to be a pilgrim to walk through that wall of molten glass. And purification could be conceived, if not attained, only after many years, in autumn, in a fire greater than yours, though menstrual blood still tinged the threshold and our ex-votos were sordid—scraps of blistered flesh taped to kitsch prayer cards—and neither of us knew the object of this exercise, except having, inadvertently, each of us, burned we recognized the smell of wood smoke, the slow swirl flakes of wood ash make in heavy air; and we were ready, each in a private way, to make the gifts the season required. Mine was the scene of my young self in your arms, eyes in your eyes, clutched in the effort to give each other away—when I glimpsed behind your pleasure, fear; behind fear, anger; and knew in a bolt some gifts conceal a greater gift. I have kept it. Now I am ready to give it back into darker flame in this season of goldenrod, the ardent weed, and Queen Anne’s lace in its mantilla of ash. And yet, how lumpishly, how stupidly I stand. How much that is human will never burn. IV. And if you should answer? I listened, years before I knew you, to the whine of wind through the high stony pastures above my childhood village; I breathed lavender and thyme and burned my bare legs on nettles, scraped them on thistles, and rubbed the sore skin till it reddened all the more. When we walked the uplands together, you burned your hand and I kissed the crimsoning nettle-rash. “We are the Lords of need,” you said Hafiz said, and I believed you, and we were. In the rugs of your country, carmine is crushed from insects, cochineal; saffron gold is boiled from crocus stamens; and indigo of heaven and fountain pools is soaked, hours upon hours, from indigo leaves. “Like the angel Harut,” you said, “We are in the calamity of love-desire.” The angel is chained by neck and knees, head down, in the pit of Babel for falling in love. Your carpets told a different story: scarlet and saffron blush as in Paradise, and God reveals himself in wine, flame, tulips, and the light in a mortal eye. All night you held me, sleepless, on my childhood cot in the stone house; all night the wind seethed through crags and twisted olive trees, high on the scents of thyme and goat droppings. “All night,” Hafiz sang, “I hope the breeze of dawn will cherish the lovers.” But the breeze of dawn is the angel of death. You are in your far landscape now, I am in mine: the wind complains and I can’t understand the words. And if you should answer? You, ten years away, in a different wind. “We are in the calamity,” Hafiz sang. “But tell the tale of the minstrel and of wine, and leave time alone. Time is a mystery no skill will solve.” We should thread words like pearls, you said, and the grateful sky would scatter the Pleiades upon us though we couldn’t see, and that was long ago. V. The carpet is not a story. It is a place, garden of crisscrossed pathways, labyrinth, fountain, pool, and stream. As though the fabric had ripped at the vanishing point at the top of the street of ashen façades and slate-sloped roofs, you stepped through the gap, out of your own world. I had already lost my world. We met in a torn design which we tore further, pulling the tall warp, thread wrapped tightly around our fingers until it bit the flesh and the rue de Lille unravelled. I know about design: it’s my job, arranging other people’s letters in star charts that phosphoresce in the dark between the closed covers of books. You knew about design from the holes blown through your country. We spoke in a language of no country on earth. You moved slowly, in shadow, teaching the shadows to echo my name. You ripped my shirt at the neck. Was it The Beloved I held, holding you? Down the middle of the carpet the river weaves a thousand gray glimmers into the deeper green. The river knows about mourning; that’s its job. How many years has it practiced? With such fleet fingers. A man woke me at dawn this morning, sobbing and cursing in the street, reeling from sidewalk to gutter and back again. On my long gray street, the rue de Lille, where I still live.