Stanley Moss

You are Jehovah, and I am a wanderer. Who should have mercy on a wanderer if not Jehovah? You create and I decay. Who should have mercy on the decayed if not the creator? You are the Judge and I the guilty Who should have mercy on the guilty if not the Judge? You are All and I am a particle. Who should have mercy on a particle if not the All? You are the Living One and I am dead. Who should have mercy on the dead if not the Living One? You are the Painter and Potter and I am clay. Who should have mercy on clay if not the Painter and Potter? You are the Fire and I am straw Who should have mercy on straw if not the Fire? You are the Listener and I am the reader. Who should have mercy on the reader if not the Listener? You are the Beginning and I am what follows. Who should have mercy on what follows if not the Beginning? You are the End and I am what follows. Who should have mercy on what follows if not the End?

In fresh snow that fell on old snow I see wild roses in bloom, springtime, an orchard of apple and peach trees in bloom, lovers of different preferences walking naked in new snow, not shivering, no illusion, no delusion, no bluebells. Why should I live by reality that murders? I wear a coat of hope and desire. I follow fallen maple leaves abducted by the wind. I declare I am a Not Quite, almost a nonentity. I fought for that “almost.” I lift up and button my collar of hope. I simply refuse to leave the universe. I’m all the aunts in my father’s house and all my uncles too. I had fifty great-great-grand-grandmothers who got to Paradise, like Enoch, without dying. Once my friends and I went out in deep paradise snow with Saint Bernards and Great Pyrenees to find those lost in the blizzard that God made for Himself because He prefers not seeing what happens on earth. With touch He can hear, taste, smell, see, and He has fourteen other senses there are no words for. Memory, He said, is a sense, not a power. Who am I to disagree with Him? There are some vegetarians among you, so I will tell you what He eats. It’s green, and cows and sheep eat it too. He picks His teeth. I think I heard Him say, “Gentlemen don’t void in swimming pools or the ocean. I like your dirty jokes, I prefer them in meter.” He told me to carry on. I thought “On” was a Norse god. He said, “No, it’s just a burden that gets heavier, the burden makes you stronger.” “Isn’t on the Japanese debt to ancestors?” I countered. He resents hearing the prayers and praise of sycophants. “How come you are speaking to me?” I asked. He speaks Silence, languages I call “Night” and “Day.” His politics? “Nations” to Him are “a form of masturbation.” Original blasphemy amuses Him, describes His coitus with living creatures, mothers, His self, a whale, a male praying mantis dying to mate. He likes to hear, “do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you.” Instead of a prayer rug, I stitch Him a pillow of false proverbs: “in the house of the hangman talk of rope.” I asked Him if I ever did anything he liked. “You planted eggplant too close to the cucumbers and they married. I blessed that wedding, sent roses by another name.” “How come you speak to me?” I asked. He said He was not speaking to me, “Consult Coleridge on the Imagination.” He waved, He did not say goodbye.

(after the Russian) The piano has crawled into the quarry. Hauled In last night for firewood, sprawled With frozen barrels, crates and sticks, The piano is waiting for the axe. Legless, a black box, still polished; It lies on its belly like a lizard, Droning, heaving, hardly fashioned For the quarry’s primordial art. Blood red: his frozen fingers cleft, Two on the right hand, five on the left, He goes down on his knees to reach the keyboard, To strike the lizard’s chord. Seven fingers pick out rhymes and rhythm, The frozen skin, steaming, peels off them, As from a boiled potato. Their schemes, Their beauty, ivory and anthracite, Flicker and flash like the great Northern Lights. Everything played before is a great lie. The reflections of flaming chandeliers— Deceit, the white columns, the grand tiers In warm concert halls—wild lies. But the steel of the piano howls in me, I lie in the quarry and I am deft As the lizard. I accept the gift. I’ll be a song for Russia, I’ll be an étude, warmth and bread for everybody.

The thing written is a sexual thing, may bite, tell a truth some have died for, even the most casual initialing is a touch of love and what love goes for. A sometime thing, it smiles or has an ugly grin, on the page or wall may be holy and a sin. Writing wants, must have, must know, is flesh, blood, and bone, proof we are not made to be alone. Beneath a dove and rainbow some bank their fire, wrap their erogenous zones in barbed wire. Writing may dance in ink flamenco, kneel before the cross, right wrongs, fall in love at first sight, honor the naked languages it holds tight, kidnap, suck or be sucked for hire, may look and look or sneak a look, it has eyes, can read, is remarkable. From the tower of sexual babble, when dreams were the beginning of writing, the angel of dreams descended, stair by stair, the stone watchtower became the first stone book. Writing never speaks word, may ache to talk, and yet each letter of any alphabet is a fragment of desire, like half and quarter notes on a staff, or a hawk, may swoop down, fly higher and higher to catch a word, and then another word. The sexual thing may be all love or malice, eunuchs writing in the Forbidden Palace where poets dressed in rags, or silk and lace. The thing written touches, kisses, cuddles, may be democratic, autocratic, medieval in the 21st century, feudal, imperial, animal, sexually digital, a Serf, a King, a Queen, la chose écrite est une chose sexuelle. I had a woman beautiful as the letter l . There is the passion of letters, each may mean another thing, be defaced, after a while. Writing leans forward, there is a certain optimism in the written word, a sexual sunrise that is not daybreak. Words, words, a carnival of wordplay on St. Nobody’s Day. Reader, look, there is an S, a snake on the cross of the letter T. The letter of love is still the open-legged V. How can I dot the i with humanity?

1. Aging, I am a stowaway in the hold of my being. Even memory is a finger to my lips. Once I entered down the center aisle at the Comédie Française, the Artemis of Ephesus on my arm, all eyes on her rows of breasts and me. “Who is this master of her ninety nipples?” the public whispered. Now the ocean is my audience, I see in secret my last secret. 2. Mid-December, my old felt hat that I could have imagined myself leaving behind in a restaurant for eternity blew out into the Atlantic. The damn thing so familiar I saw myself wearing it even into the deep, an aging Narcissus, in white foam and northern sunlight, on my way to becoming a conch. It is like seeing music this growing from flesh and bone into seashell: undulating salts become a purple mantle, and the almost translucent bivalve of memory and forgetting closes.

I have not used my darkness well, nor the Baroque arm that hangs from my shoulder, nor the Baroque arm of my chair. The rain moves out in a dark schedule. Let the wind marry. I know the creation continues through love. The rain’s a wife. I cannot sleep or lie awake. Looking at the dead I turn back, fling my hat into their grandstands for relief. How goes a life? Something like the ocean building dead coral.

Good morning, electorate. We are on good speaking terms but do not speak, which means we must be self-reliant, there are many matters at hand. We’re not close enough to know each other’s good news, bad news, private matters. There are silent streets off public gardens for intimacy and come-what-mays. There is library silence and deadly silence that is a private matter. There is happiness written in white and silent writings, meters overheard. Silent are the voices I no longer hear — after the first word spoken I’d recognize who’s there. There is a playwright’s staging called “business,” silent instructions without dialogue, and the silence that says, “none of your business,” but I have an office, a religion, that holds me responsible for everything. I hardly lift a finger to stop the slaughtering. It’s a little like putting a nickel or a dime in a cup and writing this against death, raking leaves against the changing seasons. My memory is like the first sound picture, The Jazz Singer. I am screening: it must have been October, 1927, I remember skipping along Liberty Avenue, before I learned to dance, I sang, “Hoover in the ashcan, Smith in the White House.” Later in Catalonia I danced the Sardana — with its opening and closing circles that made free and equal the young and old, while the soulful tenora, a revolutionary woodwind, played the dance forbidden by Generalissimo Franco. Further back again toward first silences — alone in the Charleville of my den, I smoked Rimbaud’s clay pipe, I thought “I will never die.” I’m simply telling the impossible truth that made my later studies more difficult. When I first shaved my fake oxtail beard invented by Cervantes, I fought back day-reasoning without understanding such dreams were my squire. I returned with Sancho to Granada, my forefathers’ home, my forbearers’ caves, banderillas in the bull’s neck of my mind. When I was young and difficult, Lorca’s photo near my bed, I saw Twelfth Night, sang Mozart arias, read history textbooks my father wrote. Loyalist, I shot fascists, not Iroquois. I found an old photo of Belmonte, the matador born with deformed legs — he stood so close to the bull the beast had to charge around him. His sword in a cape of silence, he stood erect, motionless, a gypsy in a suit of lights tailored by Goya. Interval....Intermission.... I visited a zoo of languages on the soon-to-be-sunk Statendam, in February touring the Mediterranean with my parents, from the pillars of Hercules to the Bosphorus. In Barcelona, I sided with the brave bull who entered the ring deceived, never having seen a man off a horse, the bull, however noble, sure of death. • I want my work to have the “taste of self”: In the bright, silent mornings of my soul, I refuse my royalties: a bull’s ears, tail, and severed foot. God does not ride a horse, Jesus preferred donkeys. I feed my donkeys carrots, play them operas. A trio, they bray with joy. Because it’s common sense I make noise for the Lord. He wants our kind to read, sing, speak to each other, to rejoice and play to beat the band, horns, drums, bawdy noisemakers. We should give Him the time of day, among sounds, unhearable, bang away, weep with the uncountable suffering others. Among the multitudes, in the swarms, the schools, the hives, rejoice, boo, snore, make noise for the love of noise and questioning, praise Him on Doomsday, He hears the noise of all the world’s blinking eyes. I believe to live as a silent flower is worthwhile. I cannot speak the languages of trees better than birds, who out of gratitude and affection learn arboreal grammar, accents, pronunciation, whatever the weather, but I try because I love a good oak — still, I cannot better the birds    ... “Affection” for my neighbor is easy, “love” difficult. Silence can be affection, silence a perfect herald. Still there is speechless love and silent conversations called gestures, helping hands, sometimes only a loving telephone call. There are equators, latitudes, and longitudes of silence, useful compasses, lighthouses, red and green buoys, red light to port, green starboard, silent foghorns. I remember silent remembrances. Is partial light the opposite of silence? The sun is noisy, gossips earthly languages. Shhh. Trying to find truth. I’ve heard late-night laughter in Roman streets, screeching pigs carried upside down to slaughter. From time to time the living whisper, scream, “Help me! Murder!” Roots tremble. I never heard the noise and silence of mass murder. In Asia and Africa, there are English wildfires. Greek and Latin are still smoldering, flaming African syllables on every tongue. Love, silence, reflection, and revelation in the jungle and pine-barren ashes. I lift my head to music I call gods, whole notes, scales, clefs, and rests that are saints, mullahs, rabbis, atheists, pagans. So I will ask to collect my dead and wounded and you will never hear from me, the unheralded herald, anymore.

Today in Rome, heading down Michelangelo’s Spanish Steps, under an unchanging moon, I held on to the balustrade, grateful for his giving me a hand. All for love, I stumbled over the past as if it were my own feet. Here, in my twenties, I was lost in love and poetry. Along the Tiber, I made up Cubist Shakespearean games. (In writing, even in those days, I cannot say it was popular to have “subjects” any more than painters used sitters. But I did.) I played with an ignorant mirror for an audience: my self, embroiled with personae from Antony and Cleopatra. Delusions of grandeur! They were for a time my foul-weather friends— as once I played with soldiers on the mountainous countryside of a purple blanket. 2002

for Yehuda Amichai 1. Snow clouds shadow the bay, on the ice the odd fallen gull. I try to keep my friend from dying by remembering his childhood of praise to God, who needs us all. Würzburg: the grownups are inside saying prayers for the dead, the children are sent out to play—their laughter more sacred than prayer. After dark his father blesses and kisses him Güttenacht. He wakes to go to school with children who stayed behind and were murdered before promotion. Now his wife lies beside him. He may die with her head on his pillow. He sings in his sleep: “Her breasts are white sheep that appear on the mountain, her belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies.” Awake, he says, as if telling me a secret: “When metaphor and reality come together, death occurs.” His life is a light, fresh snow blowing across the bay. 2. A year later in Jerusalem, he carries a fallen soldier on his back, himself. The text for the day begins: “He slew a lion in the pit in a time of snow” Seconds, minutes, hours are flesh, he tells me he is being cut to pieces— if they had not made him turn in his rifle … He sees I can not bear more of that. Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of hands in sleep and we drink to life. Chilled in desert heat, what keeps him alive: soldiers—his wife, his son and daughter, perhaps the ashes of a girl he loved in childhood. Outside their window a Sun Bird and Dead Sea Sparrow fly from everlasting to everlasting. Later he covers my head with his hands, blessing me, later unable to walk alone he holds onto my hand with so much strength he comforts me.

to W.S. Merwin I said, “Nothing for the last time.” You said, “Everything for the last time.” Later I thought you made everything more precious with “everything for the last time”: the last meditation, the last falling asleep, the last dream before the final makebelieve, the last kiss good night, the last look out the window at the last moonlight. Last leaves no time to hesitate. I would drink strong coffee before my last sleep. I’d rather remember childhood, rehearse forgiveness, listen to birdsong or a Spanish housemaid singing, scrubbing a tiled floor in Seville— I’d scrub and sing myself.O Susanna Susanna, quanta pena mi costi. I would strangle the snakes of lastness like Herakles in his crib before I cocked my ear to Mozart for the last time. There is not sky or clouds enough to cover the music I would hear for the last time. I know a bank whereon the wild thyme of everything for the last time grows, covered with deadly nightshade and poison hemlock. No last, no first, thinking in the moment, years ago, you prepared the soil in Hawaii before you planted your palm trees, then shared most of your days and nights with them as equals. You built your house with a Zen room. I made no prayer when I dug a hole and pushed in a twelve-foot white pine, root ball locked in green plastic netting. I did not cut the netting, so twenty years later a tall, beautiful, white pine died. I lynched the roots. To save my life I would let them seize, cut out a bear’s heart, I would partake in its flesh. But you would die before you’d let them kill that bear. Again, I say, “Nothing for the last time.” You say, “Everything for the last time.” Sailor, I would have killed a stranger to save the world. Sailor, you would not. We kissed goodbye on the cheek. I hope not for the last time. Home, I look into my brass telescope— at the far end, where the moon and distant stars should be, I see my eye looking back at me, it’s twinkling and winking like a star. I go to bed. My dogs, donkeys and wife are sleeping. I am safe. You are home with your wife you met and decided to marry in four days.