Charles Stein: A Poem and a Note from "From Mimir's Head"

The Hat Rack Tree

Your old hat

sits

on the hat

rack tree

as the plumes

of the tree

grow dry

and wind unravels them.

"No wind

is the King's wind."

Now you go to buy some new

hat. Should it be

just like it?

A new hat sits like a plume

on the hat rack tree.

There is a bird

on that lady's hat.
Pluck its felt?

Or shred the brittle veil

that hangs from the brim?

It is a crow

(not my crow).

Something not alive

on the hat rack tree.

What can I do with this?

What can I sell?

Come all comers

to the hat rack tree

and see the lady's hat with black stuffed crow.

Odd--but the crow's eye lives

with terrible rays

and the feathers shine

with a glint of green--

Wind  in the branches

wind in the plumes

strong enough to knock your

hat off. Knock your hats off.

If you were a King

and owned a tree

would you become a crow

with its terrible shining

and charm the wind

into your hat

and wear it

out

to see the world?

A lady's veil

conveys her shining.

She is nervous.

Nor does she glean

the thing on her hat.

Note

The thinking that goes into a poem or that can be awakened as its “further life” — like the fuzzy temporal location of particles in quantum reality — exists more like a cloud than a thing. Do these thoughts precede or succeed their poems? But the poems themselves do not have unique temporal onset: they link on to each other and to the texts and thoughts that environ them, in the problematic temporal topology of textuality itself, appearing after the fact yet in the guise of that which uncovers “meanings” in, of, and from them.

These notes, then, are the “further life,” in my own thinking, of the poems themselves. I certainly could not have produced the thought in the poems before I produced the poems—but the notes show the poems to be the “further life” of texts and thoughts that, in a literally “cymatic” sense, have “influenced” them—i.e., flowed in them, or flowed them in.

 [There follows his note on the poem, above, with a further addendum: “In our collaborative ‘dialogical’ writings, George Quasha and I frequently use the phrase ‘the future life of the work’ to characterize discourse, art, work, conversation, or any vital experience arising from some work that ‘furthers’ its creative impulse(s).”]

The Hat Rack Tree

My father kept a grand hydrangea bush. It had magnificent floreate plumes in summer, but a scraggly hierarchy of clipped and naked branches out of season. Good for nothing but a rack to hang your hat on, he called the naked bush his “hat rack tree.” Like the skeleton of a way of thought, I thought; a (kabbalistic) tree of life that, seeming to assert nothing, serves as a cognitive scaffold, a schema to hang your images on.

♦

Donnings and doffings of often headless hats haunt the forest. Hats suffer the fates of the identities they betoken and effectuate. A short poem in The Hat Rack Tree reads:

My hat had vanished.

When that cat that
sat up looked straight at it,

that hat had had it.

The cat’s intensity vanquishes the identity that is the target of its massive concentration. I found the following item among forest notes from the early ’80s too late for inclusion in The Hat Rack Tree volume:

The forms
fall off
the hat rack
tree.

The hats
go back
to the sky.

As the poem strikes me now, there is celebration here of a liberative moment, when the fixities of appearance fall away, and the icons of identity levitate, or the principle of structure, imparted by the tree to that which hangs upon it, exchanges secrets with the indeterminate.

The closing and title poem of The Hat Rack Tree turned out to be the first in a series of poems. I repeat its publication here to be true to the sense of that series.

♦

“No wind is the King’s Wind” (page…)

A refrain from Confucius (is it?) in Pound’s Canto whatever, primes for me an open inquiry into contingency, randomicity, spontaneity, and the forces of morphogenesis and order.

♦

The demagogue and technologist would put the wind under his hat; while the magus or the Taoist would ride the wind.

[Posted here in celebration of the recent publication by StationHill Press (Barrytown, New York)  of Stein’s FromMimir’s Head.  Like all of Stein’s major gatherings of poems this forms part of an ongoing work called the forestforthetrees.]