Unfolds
herself from the chair.
Each
line a decision.
“Already
the years will pass without me.”
This
time of year no nights are green,
Maid
Marian.
Lost
thoughts
now
revealed in all their nakedness.
The
lover and his loss.
Ramblings.
Mutterings.
Here
on Treasure Island.
Sea-sick,
the
Lord of the Isles
the
King of Skye.
Simultaneity
of forms.
The
desperate lives of squirrels.
The
random wilderness,
the
stories we never told.
As
a Jew among Christians
it's
never forgotten.
The
map of the world a map of scars.
Songs
of a leaping girl.
Remember
how terrible this beauty,
and
what its cost.
Sometimes
the simplest tunes.
Heroes,
for the children
who
survive.
Your
fate is Fate.
Your
fate's to be fated.
Those
rhyming twins the Sun and Moon
whom
a dream hath possessed.
“You
may talk to god,
but
not to me.” And he,
“I
am the only god
you
need to talk to.”
Bring
your name and nothing more and come to me
here
in the mountains.
POISE
Starting out
with
a version
of there.
And
something else had happened.
It's the
simple things
that get
forgotten.
Of
poverty
a
virtue
among
his tribe.
The
little girl protests her innocence,
realizes
it’s hopeless,
stops,
and
frowns.
Does
mind speak
in
this figurine?
If
you wish, I can tell you
what
you want to know.
Trick.
Tricked out
and
in.
So
deft, she seems
to
play an air
one
strains
to
listen for.
With
a sigh,
Relents.
It had been
too
long.
Here
it is, without a cause
in
the world.
He
prophesized:
you
were offered
an
end of time,
but
it didn't happen.
Hold
your breath
and
it will still be there.
Prepare
for other times.
WHAT I
MEAN TO SAY
My heart
is not my own,
he said,
re
membering.
Little
enough to say.
Small
dog
alone
in the cold
cries
for its master.
Teach
acceptance to a crippled child.
They
clothe their skins
with
skins. “My skins,”
they
call them.
Like
a tune gone inwards.
In
the in and out of sleep.
“You're
the machine that squeaks,”
she
tells him.
One
learns the figures of the dance.
A
table precise as an altar. Why not?
And
eats the slain.
A
woman
in
water.
“So
you say,”
she
said.
Sprawled,
or
athwart upon.
Hunger
pangs. “We all feel them,”
she
told her children, “never mind.”
And
went about her chores.
The
same
woman,
late
and
soon.
A
smear of meaning.
HE
EXCAVATES
In the
story a man digs a hole. Finding nothing,
he digs
further, through eruptions and earthquakes and rising seas
and
swamps and glaciers.
Nothing,
no bones, no shards.
Autumn
turns to winter turns to spring.
This hole
the only
thing that's ever been there.
And on a
day that's not
the
anniversary of anything, he's done, enough,
and
notices the sky, the plants, the breeze,
the hills
that fill his yard,
and
smiles. He thinks,
I'll
place a marker here.
The
serial exile's procession of names.
Last
chances are last chances.
Distill
in silence.
All
dead, these brief creatures,
says
the tree.
Gray
day red head in a green
glade
bobs above the privet.
The
light
picks
out a moment
from
the edges of cities.
Not
the ball, but the arc
it
traces, as a white thought
carries
the wind.
In
the morning she looks in the mirror,
and
sighs. Stains
of
whatever histories.
The
moment's gravity. And the sun
has
also marked her passage.
Reflections
of clouds
and
reflected on clouds
and
reflections of clouds.
Cried
and cried,
and
then she died.
Little
enough
to
save from the wreck.
[note. A writer of remarkable skills & insights, Weiss has written of the
present venture: “I’ve joked before that my work isn’t so much
composition by field as composition of field. A Suite of Dances might be composition by notebook. It’s an
extension of the way I’ve worked for the past 25 years. Probably I’ve been
reacting to an anxiety felt by translators, historians, and archaeologists in
the absence of context. This is close to context in the absence of event.
Though I hope that there’s something like an architecture, perhaps musical,
holding it together. The title suggests, for me, at least, the baroque, when
suites of dances were a major form, and my understanding of baroque art in all
media as an attempt to experience the heterogeneity of event not as chaos but
as something like a grand, encompassing chord. The selection above is part 24
of 28 named parts, filling 200 pages.” An earlier section appeared previously in
Poems and Poetics.]
No comments:
Post a Comment