Stanley Moss

Day is carved in marble, a man reclining, a naked giant suffering. Preoccupied Day faces Night, who is a woman, huge, naked, Herculean, both pillowed on their uncarved rough marble bed. They need light to be seen, neither has anything to do with the sun or moon. Art is not astronomy, but the heavens are useful as gardening to poets, not useful as love or loneliness. If I write out of arrogance and ignorance a poem called Day, my chisel and mallet, words and pen, paper my marble, I must not confuse sunlight and Day, petals with hours. I could rhyme, perhaps by reason and chance describe the nature of Day. I might discover Nature is surprisingly sometimes moral, unexpected, a principle over which the lovers Night and Day quarrel. In my poem, faithful Night and faithful Day quarreled; rhyme told me they quarreled because Day is gold, Night hates the thought of celestial money, rages at the starless differences between cost and price. Michelangelo did not choose to make a sculpture Prezzo, or put the finger of God on a coin. Day and Night saw Danaë’s legs spread apart for Zeus to enter as a shower of gold. They are not household gods or saints. Better I write about things nearby, a chair, a stool, the principle I’m sitting on. Day is my dictionary. If my Day were animal, he might be a baby elephant who eats leaves. My good Day stays close to his mother, who is murdered for her ivory tusks. My Day is an endangered specie. I whisper into elephant ears,peace, my darling little Day. An owl hoots,your Day has no given name! True, I refuse names useful to many others: Sabbath, Sunday, Friday, Saturday. My Day is not baptized, circumcised, or blessed. I pick him up and hold Day in my arms. I put my head in Day’s open mouth. I tongue Day, and Day tongues me. Yes, although my Day loves Night, he tongues me in and out of bed. My Day knows Night carnally, lets Night know me. So I love Day today. And I love Night tonight.

The first thing I did against my will is see light. Older, in my mother’s belly with a good mind, I sometimes dreamed different kinds of darkness. I kicked, had sweet dreams and nightmares something like death, unborn happiness, blind hallucinations, memories I can’t name that still push me to act with unborn hands, all before breathing. What last thing will cross my mind after last rights and wrongs? They say the grand finale is like sleep, I may feel love’s nuts and bolts unscrewing — it’s best to be held tight. A pillow does not kiss. May I never waver in peaceful unmindfulness. I’ve seen passionate suffocation, I’ve felt exquisite pain. Far better doggerel: “Nurse, nurse, I’m getting worse!” Undone, I’d like my last thoughts to rhyme: I did not lend you my love. The end.

In Canada, on a dark afternoon, from a cabin beside Lake Purgatory I saw your two clenched fists in a tree— your most recent rage—until I came to my senses, and saw two small lighted glass lamps reflected through a window onto the maple leaves. Was it simply that I had stolen away in the wilderness to go fishing on your birthday, twelve years after your death, and you less than your rusty pliers in my fishing box? It is late August in the moral North. To answer your first question, I obey the fish and game laws of New York State, Ontario and Quebec. The odd branch has already turned red. As for me I have turned inside out, I cry for revolution against myself— no longer red, I’m parlor pink and gray, you, less than a thumb print on a page. Matters still outstanding: you will not remember— a boy, I cut school, sneaked out to the 42nd Street library to read among readers like a stray lion cub taken into a great pride. I have kept your Greek grammar, your 78 revolutions per minute recording of Rossini’s Barber you played to stop me from crying, almost my first memory. Your “valuable papers,” now valuable only to me, I fed to a fire years ago. Frankly I am tired of receiving letters from the dead every day, and carrying you on my back, out of the burning city, in and out of the bathroom and bedroom, you less than the smoke you wanted for a shroud. Let us dance with Sarah behind the curtain where God in his divine humor tells Abraham Sarah will at ninety bear a son, and she asks laughing within herself, “Will I have pleasure?” Take one foot, then the other … Imitate a departure if you make it not, and each going will lend a kind of easiness to the next. Father, you poisoned my father. I am standing alone, telling the truth as you commanded. (Without too many of the unseemly details, like the sounds of you in bed sucking, I thought, on fruit I later would not eat.) You, less than a seed of a wild grape. Today, in the last moments of light I heard a fish, a “Musky,” your nickname, break water. As I sing my song of how you will be remembered, if I could out of misericordia, I’d tie you to the mast and stuff your ears with wax. I regret some parts of the body forgive, some don’t. Father, do not forget your 18 inch Board of Education ruler on which I measured my penis, marking its progress. You kept it on your desk before you till your old age. One reason, perhaps, for the archaic Greek smile I wore on my face through boyhood. I never thought I’d dig your grave with laughter.

There’s wondering, idle thoughts, thinking over what was last said, some poetry in my head like traffic outside the window. In my forgetful marrow, I consider often lying words, like everything and all. Nothing is another matter. Nothing comes of everything and all. Something comes of nothing. I know the word no means no, yes, yes, except when they mean each other. There’s water, which means water, dishwater, that may mean worthless. It’s often better to say worthless when you mean it. I’ve come to meaning, that can mean reason for or reason to live, words I might say outright without first saying meaning. Then there is a mean man. How did mean come to have two meanings? Take a dictionary of homonyms and tell me how words got to sound alike with different meanings and spellings, a Sea of  Words which is a Chinese dictionary. Language has its ways, its altitude and latitude ... Stanley, baby, quit jerking on and off. I’m simply talking to myself. I am more familiar with the dark night and bright day of the body than the dark night of the soul. Light has an exaggerated reputation. Goethe’s last words were, “Mehr Licht!” Faust was dragged off to hell when he was content. Goethe preferred discontent, which needed light. The seed is contained discontent.

There are places for chaos on the page, meaningful, apparent confusion —temps en temps on the continent does not mean “time to time” in Kent, or Greenwich. From stone through weeds and parchment, through bad times, words made their way to the printed page. Bibles now not just for those who go to worship by carriage, but for those who pray with bare feet, some washed, some smelling of stables and excrement. I’m not sure the words ocean and sea mean the same to you and me. Ninety-five percent universal confusion, dark matter was born with the legitimacy of an onion, the roar of a lion. I sit in the rumble seat of judgment, I damn myself for entertainment, for wasting time on hopeless entertainment. I am guilty of snarling lines, Gordian knots in my “Shakespeare” fishing reels. I must untangle this because eels have hearts like us. The enemy is symmetry. In the spring of content, I trust glorious chaos. I smell in disorder the outhouse of order. I must have respect for what I kill and eat, Jesus gave them loaves and fishes, not meat. He added, “Waste nothing you eat,” he did not say, “Waste is chaos made by me, or my Father, one person who is three.” Rebecca, at the well, said, “Drink. Water your camels.” I swear, my hands each on a Bible, the only evidence admissible is invisible. At twenty, I was lost in the snow, a sleigh bell. Chaos is not a “sometime thing,” its face and back are turned to and from us, what I cannot see is beautiful, or an isthmus that connects almost nothing to almost nothing — the great unless, either/or. I grab on to metaphor, uncertainty, dark matter, gravity specific. The motto I nail to my door: The Devil generalizes, angels are specific. Chaos makes me merry, string or rose-by-any-other-rose theory, romance of the rose, roses that go with any other flower, from devil’s paintbrush to huckleberry. From fertile Chaos sprang Eros and Night: Chaos danced first with Eros, then jealous Night. Time carries a scythe, women and men sound the hour. I model for myself, I pose in north light. With helpers, his stevedore brothers, Hypnos and Thanatos, Charon still poles his familiar ferry across the Styx to an island where skeletons dance. Einstein said, “I too believe in appearance,” he didn’t think Old One plays dice, takes chances. You bet your bottom dollar the universe rhymes with another universe like verse. Yeats, Herrick, and Herbert would like that. To them, I lift my hat. Delphic chaos is wise, metaphoric thinking multiplies bunches of grapes, by tripod, by butterflies. Chaos is endless longing — God’s pussycat. In Prague, Mozart knew a starling who sang his piano concerto all along, except for one note he always got wrong.

I sing this morning: Hello, hello. I proclaim the bright day of the soul. The sun is a good fellow, the devil is a good guy, no deaths today I know. I live because I live. I do not die because I cannot die. In Tuscan sunlight Masaccio painted his belief that St. Peter’s shadow cured a cripple, gave him back his sight. I’ve come through eighty-five summers. I walk in sunlight. In my garden, death questions every root, flowers reply. I know the dark night of the soul does not need God’s eye, as a beggar does not need a hand or a bowl.

I teach my friend, a fisherman gone blind, to cast true left, right or center and how far between lily pads and the fallen cedar. Darkness is precious, how long will darkness last? Our bait, worms, have no professors, they live in darkness, can be taught fear of light. Cut into threes even sixes they live separate lives, recoil from light. He tells me, “I am seldom blind when I dream, morning is anthracite, I play blind man’s bluff, I cannot find myself, my shoe, the sink, tell time, but that’s spilled milk and ink, the lost and found  I cannot find. I can tell the difference between a mollusk and a whelk, a grieving liar and a lemon rind.” Laughing, he says, “I still hope the worm will turn, pink, lank, and warm, dined out on apples of good fortune. Books have a faintly legible smell. Divorced from the sun, I am a kind of bachelor henpecked by the night. Sometimes I use my darkness well— in the overcast and sunlight of my mind. I can still wink, sing, my eyes are songs.” Darkness is precious, how long will darkness last? He could not fish, he could not walk, he fell in his own feces. He wept. He died where he fell. The power of beauty to right all wrongs is hard for me to sell.

When you said that you wanted to be useful as the days of the week, I said, “God bless you.” Then you said you would not trade our Mondays, useful for two thousand years, for the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. I said, “Endless are the wonders to which I can only say ‘ah,’ that our ‘Ah’ who art in heaven can easily become the ‘ah, ah’ that comforts a baby.” Then you said, “Go make a living on metaphors for ‘ah,’” that I, a lunatic, secretly want to be the Lighthouse of Alexandria, a fifty-story-high collaboration of art and science, a mirror of light that might be seen five or ten days out to sea, Poseidon standing on my shoulders, the Library of Alexandria at my back, all the wonders of Greek Africa. I said, “Today is Monday. I want little more than to be a hand-mirror my wife carries in her purse with a hankie to stop my hemorrhaging humility.”

The Visconti put you on their flag: a snake devouring a child, or are you throwing up a man feet first? Some snakes hunt frogs, some freedom of will. There’s good in you: a man can count years on your skin. Generously, you mother and father a stolen boy, to the chosen you offer your cake of figs. A goiter on my neck, you lick my ear with lies, yet I must listen, smile and kiss your cheek or you may swallow the child completely. In Milan there is a triptych, the throned Virgin in glory, placed on the marble below, a dead naked man and a giant dead frog of human scale on its back. There’s hope! My eyes look into the top of my head at the wreath of snakes that sometimes crowns me.