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The Object of White Noise: The Oak Park Sestina
Loneliness, I remember you before Polonius’ talk of friendship in old verse,
final ellipsis in short taps and kicks, gusting metaphor extending itself, to think
of death early on, at once counterpoint and bargain end to life, as if to say
long marches were tedium, as Stein’s invitations to garden parties, as want
as insatiable, ripped off book covers, on the quarterdeck or bowsprit, to see
larger ships, castle view beyond Pont Neuf, its elbow of a park, where I read
something of 12 rue de l’Odéon, as concrete a place as Mary’s Avallon, a read
open as Sylvia Beach’s hand, firm shake, first kindness, like the first verse
sciolti da rima, where rhymes recede, caesurae percolating, as the poet sees
rather than hears his words, oblique, their cello and echo, Rodin’s Thinker
in a new tableau, left arm extended like a big wing, fast updraft, as if wanting
flight as escape, denouement, hurtling towards the poplar, rising obelisk to say
this is the way Marlowe wrote of undying dandelions and mirrors, to say
Milton’s Aegean isle was like any other mapped dot, as open an autumn read,
as dismal and removed and blank a slate and stare, singly at Artemis, and want
a new fabric, sky and land, less architrave and Phrygian cadence than verse,
that invention meant movement, a rotation clear of the drydock, of thinking
what virtue to make into a creed, what rendered scruple to surface and see
in the light of day, not to decorate or scaffold, but in burning, to truly see
and intend the words, creation for all its vagaries like a tremulous saying,
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a haiku is diego velázquez at home
lacquer table, black
plums like olives, mangosteens –
notions, orbs, backlit
yellow cabs, standstill
empty corridor – we sleep
airport of violins
how was life, cut up?
the cubist years of whitman
bread, fish paste, fondue
shared snacks over tea
you must need something – love notes?
blue shower curtains?
the way north is named?
tin soldiers stashed, old poster
rhetoric blinking
* This poem first appeared in the journal, "Umbrella Factory".
today big credo
not this leaf moment, white, washed
out, fragment visit
not the eclipse, pitch, pivot
when you look away, thistlepD
not this, modern rust
avenue talk to built crowd
loud and backed and stone
alone, ice, gin, eyes, ajar
pebble in paper, cupboard
not that, still life, sink
you in slip of pink, above
this ribbon city
but for memory, not now
cerise, kitchen, tile, dislodged
but today, return
unsaid the misshaping red
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two sonnets and starlings in a cluster
i.
near this gate,walk in procession
orange sand in front, in a crystallized state
sandals in a single row, in a single line
in a hurry this sandfly, eager desire
in line with recollection, if possible no more blood
if possible, a manipur bush quail
in sandalwood, fully mottled in front
a sandbank, an open stage, walls of pali and sanskrit
yogesvara and ibn arabi in a daydream
a greenery of many types, of a long past
of the same sound and movement –
in front a love spell, from long ago
as tentative and bold, as insistent
as the starlings gathering, scattered grain
ii.
love ties like henna, lifted inside, out
where? where? there, in the vial –
there, an act, an air pocket
an orange-faced orchid ignored
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read and prophesy, he said; patrick white, joyride nor sorry astride —
of a juniper berry and clove-wing heart, cradled in pink coral from the reef
of his weathered eyes and rescue and leaving — that solitary line a bouts-rimés
what desert-fat(er-figural nothings;
but bobbing whispers, no wheel
the triple-nozzled lamp filled to its brim
and eventually, his backward glance and sigh
* This poem first appeared in the literary journal "Dear Sir". Its title, “nihil obstat?”, meaning “nothing stands in the way” in Latin, was written after I encountered White’s 1976 novel, A Fringe of Leaves. This poem is a novel-to-poem idiomatic/ekphrastic translation that experiments with hybridity and transformation, in an attempt to explore the difficulties of textual equivalence.
holy noise, etchings / across this year’s chinese garden
excitation à la mode, an applied form
spirits on the move
high water;
vibrations in a pursuit; a persuasion
a displacement of this type, static, charted
internal; a sensation, an oscillation
of functions now frequented
wholly
by the ancestral
pumps / chains / pulleys / turbines
a sudden wave, velocity;
it is time —
amoral exemplar gone,
quaker belts and springs
*******
on bourne bridge:
what did the boreal owls say?
what did the number indices say?
what did they say about wuwei?
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casualism is a kuhi in the water
small life is beyond
mention, or examination –
the bald eagle mats its fur
relief of gold flare
bold starburst, a prominence
down the steps is an alley
today’s west feeling
like broken nails, storm door
brass hinges undone
up the steps is a garden
chance the ascent two by two
wall fountains at back
and behind them, a coach box
its sacred heart and secrets
belief like lost sound
how is the truth to be said?
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The German tavern made of timber, stacked logs.
Heavy against the sky, seated on long grass.
And an old stone. Between the stable and the pier
the cypress tree like a mother pulling up her hair.
You hear the knocking of three quatrains
against caesurae, their cadence an echo
of some fable told two hundred years ago.
A washcart falls on its side in the rain, three wheels
unbuckling, thick oak tumbling in big thuds
storm’s velveteen curtain east of the ridge.
Two barristers hold their coffee close to the face
leaning against the maypole, ribbons wet down
thin like another old willow, its shivery shadow.
The boy and girl exchange small, handmade letters
one sealed with candle wax and a thumbprint.
The other folded in with blue flax and dried myrtle.
“Wildflowers are hardy, simple. Little to look at.”
He looked out into the lake, then back to the pier.
Beneath their feet, a lavender spread of harebells.
* This poem was first anthologized in "Writings from the Heart: Stories and Poems from Around the World".
There, Albert Gleizes hangs onto the shouldered architrave,
fingers straining against the old gypsum. The archivolt widens
into an atrium with flower beds. Blood irises. And magnolias.
From Iowa, then Hanover. Gleizes now nibbling at honeysuckle.
There is a minotaur, hands thrown up in mid-air as if flagging
the two men in black to stay behind the white and blue line.
Two libraries have risen out of nowhere. Miles of books, tomes
littering the horizon like an archipelago, like old tortoise shell.
Huelsenbeck insists on interjecting his aria with something odic.
Let him draw the clefs as triangles, surfeit of sweet things.
Let him draw his instruments as unaccompanied and strong.
Let the parasol moments remain sudden and flaring, like joy.
Let him break the square corners of this body, now shanty
in its cupboard construction. Its edges and angles frozen, riveted.
Blake’s giant angel, keyed up to its own dark irony. Is it there?
Has all of the garden been drawn in – its bramble, acacia, cypress?
Gleizes knows the garden will percolate a warmer summer,
new world of sunnier days, an open esplanade, its champagne
the shade of stratus clouds. Two builders downing their beers.
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A complex number doesn’t have to be truer than binomial theory, right?
Continental philosophy doesn’t have to be truer than an inward turn, right?
The sound of a bass clarinet doesn’t have to be truer than the sound of a sitar, right?
In The Little Shop of Antiquities, she wrote about relics and artifacts, touching them, letting their glow go to the riverbank and send back their sparkles. How the material object moves the spirit. The incomprehensible magic, the shapeless wonder, the familiar history in a middle to high passage.
Their irresolute beauty like an oiled and torched mirror. Slowly crumbling, then shattering.
Was it a wink or a squint as he scraped the bacon bits off the top of the bun?
Was it a duck or the snow or buttons of bark flaking themselves off?
Was it a shout to hurl itself over to the other side of the asphalt?
And who returned the question like an echo into the wind and orange dust?
* This poem first appeared in Fuselit, a literary journal out of London.
this sky and its soft position and release
under the umbrella fire, a silhouette scales the brackish
the fire like our auburn outlook, th)s small room of crimson
reds and whites under the rafters, another clothesline of flags –
on it strung all our sibilants like a mother’s soothing
our spectacle under a skyline where thumboo’s poem lies clerical
to the left; no error or erasure, a smudge in the poet’s eye
so he stares into his counting fingers to say it’s all right
it’s all odic trumpets and sentiment, the ballad a knot and tassel
and how it convenes the angels, their soft consonance rapt
between books and undersongs and covers to scale the watercourse;
we see his high hat turned on its side, now light and ornamental
we scale too the beams that yaw and bend and stay the weight;
beyond the box and underbelly, the young faces wanting more
of the happy struggle and run; the wide bottle is half-empty
the tall jug too, the big white pillow a new bed, a kind one –
it negotiates us into our bodies of thought and thus, urgency
the clay now bricking the kiln, our past stowed under its orange
as are we; they paint us ochre wall colours issued into soft sciences
so the pain is no more evident, no more its own dictum
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