To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Friday, January 21, 2011

Jerome Rothenberg: from Divagations, A Work in Progress

[A series of new poems with footnoted variant readings, scheduled for publication as a Big Bridge Press E-Book with drawings by Nancy Victoria Davis.]

DIVAGATIONS (1)
The Birth of Time

Results run backward gathering in force until they end up in some sort of cavern miraculously well lit & everyone there feels surprise & wonder.

They are more like phantoms than like little men: a symptom of the way they cough & breathe.*

From the depths the girl at center rises, edges toward the stooping man & calls him father.+

She is a distant runner, trained to smash against the wind & carry on until some place draws nigh – where the whole point of speed is relaxation.#

It fits & lessens our predicament, although no final strategy permits it.

Even so.

My hand in yours allows a sleep in which each dream is like a hole in paradise.^

The more you fall through it** the more it takes you to the birth of time.++

* bob & weave........+ [maybe the stupid man is what you meant.]
# execution..... ^ a holy paradigm. .....** stall in it .....++ of rhyme.


DIVAGATIONS (2)
A Field on Mars

Hunted from their places,* fierce+ & hungry# hordes & nomads plunge into our streets.

The word is desiccation, somewhere that was fertile once, & now, battered by a hostile wind, becomes a field on Mars, a world more lonely than the world allows.

Behold the grandmother, her skin a dirty grey^ as if the light were of a foreign color, absent, hidden from the hole in which she dwells.**

These are no children’s games – or are they?

Cards slapped on a table, thrown against a wall, brought as a pack down on the willing skin.

Saints alive!++

The call to battle rattles the savage mind, a premise from the present yet no less exotic.

Granted: that their funds are toxic comes as no surprise; that the lack of means betokens a further struggle; that nations once deprived rise in their millions.##

It is a thought on which to dwell, shaken^^ from sleep.

* pastures.... + skinned..... # angry.... ^ [trying to see it in his mind]
** she smells..... ++ [words that her ghost called forth] .....## with
their minions .....^^ rousted

1 comment:

Ed Baker said...

NEAT!

I 'read' "exotic" as "erotic"
&

" millions"
as
" minions"

NOW

back ti Mills' Mr. Pip ...
Great Expectations


"familiar figures on the river"