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Draft 63: Dialogue of self and soul
first appearance: “Draft 63: Dialogue of Self & Soul.” The Poker 4 (Summer 2004): 50-54.
I don’t know what to do about this rampant hunger. I’ve read Akhmatova and live as if in vigil, cold and stark, watching the ramparts of my country for some shift inside the walls. You say “as if” as if you sought a metaphor. Dark striated shadows flood the mind: It is All Rift. Crime awakens crime. Recoveries bargain and lose. The only rule: Abandoned in and by what Is. In Swan, Denab pulses, implacable, immeasurably more luminous than our sun. Another strand of the unutterable lump of knot, the shock of breathless starlit air. For if we took this fullness in— something would change? Nothing would. Denab is too remote. And about others, as for their blood on the fruit, as for preventable pain, perversely too close. We lack imagination of the unimagined. Yet “unimaginable” is Secret Twin. I yearn to see the moon, to have clouds break apart. Instead they close. No metaphor. All flatness. No results. This ran aground, cannot go on. Is it possible to begin twice? No, not sing. Just start. Then how will you select your emblematical initial for the First Word in that newly freshened book? Will it be poetic O of moon, the charismatic location for today, in suspension inside time, pre-colonized, one letter beyond N and completing the NO perfectly? Or perhaps the P of Paralysis? Don’t mock this; do not mock its desire. It simply needs to be forgiven. 19 columns of impacted writing are indexed under 26 letters. Why zero in on one? I’d hardly say that letters do not matter, their brilliant serif-im as fire, but thinking only of design, of mystical nets, will not absorb the imprint of our time. One begins already restless, enmeshed, trapped, in fact, in endless twists. It seems to me no gesture does enough. The palette is plethora; grief the news and rage. The poem’s magic eye is startled by the page where it should lie in peace. Or so they say. I never made that claim. Tonight the planet earth, one total thing, will cast a brownish stain over our intimate, the big-faced moon. Clouds are in the way. And I’m resisting allegory. Still, this is the moment of penumbra. Here is the traditional theme for the scholar-amateur who contemplates a waterfall, or anything, really, that might be seen as generating signs for self-same self to read. Sitting huddled on a city-deck walking the plank of your life, cold, even in May, supposed to see an eclipse, you barely catch a glimpse. There is no Ought; just Is. Trying then to read what Is upon this murky path scraped along a brilliant stone a.k.a. our clay and iron clod, magnetic mite that moves its milky blue inside some arc—is fearsome. Better to say “illiterate in these signs.” My eyes, my heart are stone. You say you want to see what you do not see. Or can’t interpret whatever you do see. Pathos this motif. There is the said, the unsaid, the barely said, the next within the text, the fear. A page turns somewhere else. Vision’s blocked at every turn. Accept it. This failure is the vision. What’s the covenant? who is propitiated? who assuaged? who profited? The judge fell off his perch and broke his neck. He heard the news and lost his balance. That was the end of valid judges. Now we are led and judged by monsters. Where is my place? There’s nothing more for you than where you are. The saturation of stupefied unhappiness inside your stumbling heart. We’re caught inside our time, a tunnel in a cave. No litter is neutral; no hope is uncorrupt. Would cloud-caught moon just reach that open patch of sky so I can catch the eclipse? The here and there do not match up, the what I want and what I get. 10:28, 15 May 2003. Such yearning to see this little slice of time darken preternaturally. It looks to be going into deeper umbra What is darker; what is lighter Will these clouds move? Was this the hope, or that Am I seeing it? a smudged nuance risen at the bottom of the moon? The meniscus bubble of brown light makes time visible in space and a thousand miles of darkness pulls like a dinghy across the luminous surface. Such strange stakes within the endless. August-December 2003 Notes to Draft 63: Dialogue of self and soul. There are a few citations from W.B. Yeats’ “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” and “Ego Dominus Tuus.” The Biblical allusion (one of the patterns of the “line of six”) is 1 Samuel 4. |  |
