FRAGMENTS FROM THE CENTRAL FLOWER

*

She waited by the kitchen window for hummingbirds
Something inside her counting down

The last of February as if sparkling
and the skyline was shivering

through threads of ice though summer was also

(there) between us

A lake of green mirrors

Floating as if counting as if

There were little sailboats

On little waves
On little waves
On little waves

There were times when the morning was still red
Still and red

In the bonsai garden
a conformity of twisted saplings
obeying my father’s will and wire
lignified lovely or lonely as a dwarf
one might have dreamed
as if cragged above the sea
as if the wind had carved
a samurai’s death poem upon its bark
one might have dreamed
as if counting down
a remembrance of suns
counting down the sea

Still and red
She read strange books
As if floating she read H.G. Wells in the morning red
By the yellow afternoon through the avens

Thoreau

On good days hummingbirds
Sequenced the flame in the central flower

Could have been hibiscus could have been

magnolia blossom floating

on little waves

**

The austere voice of our house, the vacuum of tongues and

Nobody asking

Are we culled or are we called?

Afterbirth of deities, blood symphony, gut-slag of empire, and more than a little murder, inc.
Mud monkey and tooth
Slippery when wet dreaming through the divine mirror
Nucleosides jetting on the rungs of a twisted ladder

So sorry Mr. Somebody but I think I’ll have
a fragment of cloud, a train in a house, a trained house

In the night of her garden a fragrant juggernaut leans on me

Afterwards the weather is lovely, the sky is empty, the sun sets in her mouth, etc.

***

The answer was forest of suns the distance irretrievable
Now a graceful curve of echoes follows me

Longing green light and a language to count outwards
the petals of the central flower

Also
As if
Counting pulse along
Volutes of the ram’s horn
Along the spiraling embossments of the pine’s cone
Counting down through lens-cored sea-depth a blue eye glinting on the nautilus’s mottled shell

Counting other sequences
Terms accumulating like steps
Round a perfectly round lake

Days of a December strung out like a sentence of light because by heart she knew

The first three Duino Elegies

Because she slept on stairs to provoke angels because she slept

Under strange strange skies in open fields

I wanted her to dream she was a bulldozer I wanted her to dream she was alone

The horizon arcing in the peripheral eye
Hued lavender, pinpoints of light and little crosses
A dream of architecture just below the surface

Her voice in the abandoned stone church
The crumbling wall as she spoke
Telling me of Uffizi, of Filippo Lippi’s
Madonna in the Forest
Of a hundred other staring madonnas and her staring back
Until her eyes began to drown
In sections of black canvas
As they began to move in waves
As a darkness on the sea
In her fugue she sat
On a marble bench and knew
She was disintegrating
The vast expanse of white between paintings
Was the only thing that brought her back
And I wanted to be a cloud

****

Draw out the allegory of snow
The spaces in the text

Where the words fall down
In purposeful white

Also
As if
Love leaving water
The music plays and I remain not I
Red Georgia on the road down the center line a spiral flowers open

Stars of the nights of August flamed out of the flower
I wanted to count them as if touching beads on a rosary

I wanted to touch her midnight on the shores of Dog Lake
Where soft-shelled turtles laid their eggs

and the waves were green longing and then the rain and

It never bothered me about how the together of our we

Realized a special sadness in the year of the locust

And we went

To the lighthouse at St. Marks
Its walls monarch-covered
In winged skin of orange and black and
We came as we were and oyster shells cut our feet
And when she got mad I tossed some Yeats her way

Something about her pilgrim soul and the changing lines in her face she was having none of it

Constellations, civilizations, trees, one leaf, a thousand leaves, little turtles and little birds

Except the majuscules fading out of gesturing language, made of silk and seasons, made of wilderness, made of nothing

But one old building on the highway, falling into itself, breaking me down, going close to the other going far

And eventually
(She was always)
a fretless guitar

*****

“ne pas effacer merci
La pluie s'en occupe
….please don't erase this
the rain will do it for you”
… words chalked in stone by Jan Elsv Zylberstein following his homage to Apollinaire on the wall at the end of the bride of Pont Mirabeau



Somebody asking
Are we culled or are we called?

Going close to the other is also going far

Where the waters of the Seine
Slow slowly flow
Under bridge Mirabeau

And our loves the leaving water
And I do not remain I

Poets carve Apollinaire’s words
on the wall at the end of the bridge

Slow flows the Seine
Under bridge Mirabeau
Telling us remember
Joy comes after pain

On bridge Mirabeau Apollinaire wondered the Seine
How violent is hope (days go by not I)

The tired tidal eye

Below the bridge Mirabeau
The waters wonder so

Also
As if
Celan in forgetting
Sunk down in the bitter
well of his heart (her black hair floating
beneath waves) and never to forgetting the camp violins, the Lagerkommandent’s blonde Margeurite
Black milk of a cemetery sky and only half the Holderlin, the golden hour gone and the birds do not awaken

Amidst all the loss there remains numbered
Among the almonds, as if sparkling
Flowering the center, an apocalyptic star



NOTES

1. The phrase “strange strange skies” is lifted from the Rolling Stones song “Moonlight Mile”.

2. The line “I wanted her to dream she was a bulldozer I wanted her to dream she was alone” paraphrases the title of a song by the Montreal group God Speed You Black Emperor.


3. The line “Realized a special sadness in the year of the locust” paraphrases a line from the Steely Dan song “Throw Out Your Gold Teeth”.


4. The line “Something about her pilgrim soul and the changing lines in her face she was having none of it” contains phrases out of the Yeats poem “When You Are Old”.


5. The line “ Except the majuscules fading out of gesturing language, made of silk and seasons, made of wilderness, made of nothing” was inspired by the Celan phrase “ like the dance of words made of autumn and silk and nothingness.”


6. Every section beginning with the words “Also / As If” is a Fibonacci Verse (in words not syllables) The first two follow the count 1-2-3-5-8-13, the last one goes to 21.

7. The bridge at Pont Mirabeau on the Seine is famous among poets. First there is the Apollinaire poem “Mirabeau Bridge” inspired by one of his loves and set to music by the Pogues. (Many many translations are on the web and the Pogues song is on You Tube). People have scratched the Apollinaire poem on the bridge as well as other poems. It’s been said that history placed its full weight on Paul Celan. Both his parents perished in the concentration camps of the Holocaust and he was imprisoned in a labor camp. In 1970, he apparently jumped off the Bridge Mirabeau (a place he often visited) to his death. Celan was a translator and admirer of Apollinaire and both Apollinaire and Celan were admirers of Holderlin. After Celan’s body washed up and was discovered, the following Holderlin quote was found in his study, only the first part was underlined "Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart." (underlined by Celan) "but mostly his apocalyptic star glitters wondrously." (not underlined).

8. In addition to using parts of the Holderlin quote in the 5th section, I also used (in that section) phrases either directly or in paraphrase from Apollinaire (Mirabeau Bridge), Celan (Death Fugue, Count The Almonds, and a quote of Celan’s I owe knowing to my friend James), and Holderlin (not sure from which poem but the phrase is “From afar rings golden at the hour of reawakening birds. So it goes”.

I'm just gonna' slip in behind, brizo