[PAIRINGS is a
sequence in which two (sometimes more) poems meet on the page in the way that
persons might meet on the street. For the most part, they stand across the page
from one another in the way that people stand across from one another as they
speak. They have things in common and things that separate them. In many ways
they illuminate each other. The “unit” in these pieces is not the individual
poem but the meeting––sometimes the collision––of the poems. Cell phones
destroy the formatting of Pairings so they need to be viewed on a proper computer
screen. (J.F.)]
Pairings
63: The Pretense of the Normal
Drowning in the waters of stupidity is
there such a thing
No lifeguard on duty as
heart-provoking
I listen again or
emotion-provoking
Not to politicians but to poets to
go with
Who can be as thoughtless as
politicians thought-provoking?
I think of Paul de Man
Who made many mistakes in his life
And who may be faulted on many
counts
But whose mind remained
Quicksilver.
No one who met him
Failed to feel it.
How does a mind like that
Exist
In this world
Except by subterfuge, deceit, exile,
cunning, charm, playacting,
The pretense of the “normal.”
Pairings
62: W.B. Yeats
w.b. yeats sought Gone
at 73,
a foundation Poet
of Ireland,
in the ancient Poet
of the Other World,
stories Looking
for its traces
of the peasantry In
the Wind
for the new Among
the Reeds.
Irish None
like him
Culture For
the passion
which he and lady
gregory would create Of
renunciation
and which would have the
beauty
“O what a sweetness strayed
of the old time To
barren Thebaid”
when the men and women
heard “The
foul rag and bone shop
“the sounds of above.” Of
the heart”––
did they not reject Three
books
the world? Quote
that line
eat your porridge,
child And
leave “foul” out––
or the fairies will
take you None
like him
did the peasantry not
say For
the continual
in its beautiful Recognition
myth making That
language
in its music Always
goes beyond itself––
in its deep Innisfree
imagination Haunted
by the words
in its fear Of
a 3rd-century Neo Platonist––
what an ancient The
immense distance between
Mystic said, This
world
what Homer and Plato
said And
that other
what Plotinus said From
which
what Porphyry said The
“voices” came.
what Spenser Shelley
Blake said— Love
of the woman
what escaped the lips Love
of the woman as Symbol
of the Unknowing The
tragedy
in the deep time That
spirit
when the wor(l)d was
spoken Lodges
itself
into being In the mire
Of
flesh
And
that a woman
Must
grow old––
Not
“unity”
But
the fierce knowledge
That
all we have
Is
the power to know
What
we cannot be or emulate.
The
swans
Leap
up in the pool
And
descend again, and leap again.
I
love him for the clarity of his
Monumental, daring, unerring Vision.
I
have lived with him throughout my life
Lived
with the symbols
The
magic that leapt about his table
Lived
not where he walked
But
where he thought
In
that sky to which
Helena
Blavatsky
Brought
him:
Demon
Est Deus Inversus
.
In
the dark you entered in 1939,
Did
Plato and Plotinus welcome you?
Did
your soul rise, a falcon in the air
Ignoring
cries to bring it back to earth?
Did Cúchulainn hhonor show you
the
That
killed in battle frenzy the hound of Culann?
Did
Emer soothe the wounds that ended
you
And
bind them deeply with a purple cloak?
Did
honeybees ignore you in that dark
Where
wild swans flew and fire sweetly
burned?
Did
all the gyres end, did darkness sing?
Did
you become a consecrated bone?
Nothing
is true, dear love, nothing is true.
Poet
of Ireland
Poet
of the Other
World
