After Huchel
“Der Garten des Theophrast”
A long time ago, in a galaxy far away,
a stream that has cut a narrow valley
revives, with day-long rain in a secular drought,
and gamely continues towards the sea.
It knows its few infrequent inches
will not create the vertiginous
canyon it wants before the rising
ocean and a tilting continent
absorb its efforts, but it does its best.
The path above it, prostrate in the heat,
welcomes the shade of current leaves
above precedent leaves becoming dust,
the structural terror of a scampering
mammal-equivalent, and the steps
of poets heading to a conference.
In a tea-house floating over the valley,
Lord Vader addresses them about
his usual topic, the Dark Side,
this time in relation to art.
Applause is loud but discussion
brief, for he must fly to take the surrender
of another disillusioned group of rebels.
Left alone, the poets fall to murdering
deceased or uninvited reputations.
The phrase, “There’s less in him than meets the eye,”
ignites, however, querulous debate:
“That’s such a mysterious idea … What is
that ‘less’? How known? What then
would ‘more’ consist of?” A beloved,
at least a not-yet-savaged eminence
rouses itself: “I often find it
wise to refuse a connotation.
For example, the word ‘secular’
might inversely suggest the sacred,
but I use it only to mean ‘lasting.’”
A younger talent, squirming in his robes,
his face impassive, thinks
of empty-headedness and Empire.
At dusk, favored participants
read. A noted writer of love-poems
to someone finally as faceless
as Darth Vader, mumbles, sullenly transported;
a platonist essays the theme of Transience.
L’estate
My dislike of nature has passed the bounds of reason.
In the skim-milk light of 6 AM,
windows open
for “air,” the humidity
pretends to be connected to life,
as blandly benign as the name of a right-wing party.
Some torturers start slow
and polite. But by noon
it has doffed its black jacket or white labcoat
and is as dirty as those it torments.
Long before the disaster, many people,
not just sensitive ones, wondered
if the world would survive them.
(Some hoped, some feared.) I have to get out,
and walk beside the new shore.
In the surf, amidst crap,
something flops – the tentacled
football Wells imagined
thirty million years hence, in The Time Machine.
It’s probably hungry, and capable of evolving,
and I hate it deeply and hobble off.
If I thought the earth would end with me,
would I think great thoughts? But why should
that terminus be unusual?
We are born in terror and die drugged.
Intimations of Childhood from Recollections of Early Immortality
I remember my meltdowns
as thoughts. Tears, screams, etc.
reflected the disquieting
existential coldness
of those thoughts. They represented
a rebellion of the body
against the mind as much as against conditions.
Scissors with rounded points,
drying tubs of paste and crusted paint,
gold stars, patriotic images,
and charts of well-formed cursive – all
those deadly pre-electronic
traps were already
the past, I knew, and inappropriate.
The most uncomfortable
aspect, however, was a sense
or confused view of myself,
largely disembodied
at a desk somewhere, firming up
the above distinctions, sitting
for hours, cutting and pasting.