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scrapofpaper"I'm free, I think. I shut my eyes and think hard and deep about how free I am, but I can't really understand what it means. All I know is I'm totally alone. All alone in an unfamiliar place, like some solitary explorer who's lost his compass and his map. Is this what it means to be free?"
--Haruki Marukami, Kafka on the Shore
"The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory."
--Henri Bergson, qtd. by Haruki Murakami in Kafka on the Shore
"The Weather in Space"
Is God being or pure force? The wind
Or what commands it? When our lives slow
And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls
In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm
Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing
After all we're certain to lose, so alive--
Faces radiant with panic.
--Tracy K. Smith
"My God, It's Full of Stars"
1.
We like to think of it as a parallel to what we know,
Only bigger. One man against the authorities.
Or one man against a city of zombies. One man
Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand
The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants
Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run.
Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop,
This message going out to all of space.... Though
Maybe it's more like life below the sea: silent,
Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics
Of a outmoded design. Some like to imagine
A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,
Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,
Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing
To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best
While the father storms through adjacent rooms
Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come,
Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.
Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.
All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils
In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.
The books have lived here all along, belonging
For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,
A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.
2.
Charlton Heston is waiting to be let in. He asked once politely.
A second time with force from the diaphragm. The third time,
He did it like Moses: arms raised high, face an apocryphal white.
Shirt crisp, suit trim, he stoops a little coming in,
Then grows tall. He scans the room. He stands until I gesture,
Then he sits. Birds commence their evening chatter. Someone fires
Charcoals out below. He'll take a whiskey if I have it. Water if I don't.
I ask him to start from the beginning, but he goes only halfway back.
That was the future once, he says. Before the world went upside down.
Hero, survivor. God's right hand man, I know he sees the blank
Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone.
He sits straight in his seat, takes a long, slow high-thespian breath,
Then lets it go. For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth. And:
May I smoke? The voices outside soften. Planes jet past heading off or back.
Someone cries that she does not want to go to bed. Footsteps overhead.
A fountain in the neighbor's yard babbles to itself, and the night air
Lifts the sound indoors. It was another time, he says, picking up again.
We were pioneers. Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth
Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone
One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.
Our eyes adjust to the dark.
3.
Perhaps the great error is believing we're alone,
That the others have come and gone--a momentary blip--
When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,
Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel
Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,
Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,
Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones
At whatever are their moons. They live wondering
If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,
And the great black distance they--we--flicker in.
Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,
Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on
At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns
Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want it to be
One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.
Wide open, so everything floods in at once.
And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,
Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.
So that I might be sitting now beside my father
As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe
For the first time in the winter of 1959.
4.
In those last scenes of Kubrick's 2001
When Dave is whisked into the center of space,
Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light
Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid
For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid,
Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off,
Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent
And vague, swirls in, and on and on....
In those last scenes, as he floats
Above Jupiter's vast canyons and seas,
Over the lava strewn plains and mountains
Packed in ice, that whole time, he doesn't blink.
In his little ship, blind to what he rides, whisked
Across the wide-screen of unparcelled time,
Who knows what blazes through his mind?
Is it still his life he moves through, or does
That end at the end of what he can name?
On set, it's shot after shot till Kubrick is happy,
Then the costumes go back on their racks
And the great gleaming set goes black.
5.
When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, and bright wide.
He'd read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled
To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise
As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.
We learned new words for things. The decade changed.
The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is--
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
--Tracy K. Smith
"The Museum of Obsolescence"
So much we once coveted. So much
That would have saved us, but lived,
Instead, its own quick span, returning
To uselessness with the mute acquiescence
Of shed skin. It watches us watch it:
Our faulty eyes, our telltale heat, hearts
Ticking through our shirts. We're here
To titter at the gimcracks, the naïve tools,
The replicas of replicas stacked like bricks.
There's green money, and oil in drums.
Pots of honey pilfered from a tomb. Books
Recounting the wars, maps of fizzled stars.
In the south wing, there's a small room
Where a living man sits on display. Ask,
And he'll describe the old beliefs. If you
Laugh, he'll lower his head to his hands
And sigh. When he dies, they'll replace him
With a video looping on ad infinitum.
Special installations come and go. "Love"
Was up for a season, followed by "Illness,"
Concepts difficult to grasp. The last thing you see
(After a mirror--someone's idea of a joke?)
Is an image of the old planet taken from space.
Outside, vendors hawk t-shirts, three for eight.
--Tracy K. Smith
"Cathedral Kitsch"
Does God love gold?
Does He shine back
At Himself from walls
Like these, leafed
In the earth's softest wealth?
Women light candles,
Pray into their fistful of beads.
Cameras spit human light
Into the vast holy dark,
And what glistens back
Is high up and cold. I feel
Man here. The same wish
That named the planets.
Man with his shoes and tools,
His insistence to prove we exist
Just like God, in the large
And the small, the great
And the frayed. In the chords
That rise from the tall brass pipes,
And the chorus of crushed cans
Someone drags over cobbles
In the secular street.
--Tracy K. Smith
"The Largeness We Can't See"
--Tracy K. Smith
"Old Food"
A woman stands in a dreamed cemetery where her daughter lies.
It was Marie; one of them was. A woman stands near a rectangular
plot marked off in pencil. Now the color deepens to turquoise.
Surrounded by dusty gold calligraphy gone past its meaning.
Marie lived in a gully at the dump on the outskirts of town, in a palm-
frond shack, with her dogs. She walks to the Buy-Rite: past a real cemetery,
towards the tracks, but turns; she enters the Buy-Rite. Leroy, the liar,
sells her food, then tells lies to everyone about her; years later
no one remembers the lies. Wasn't Leroy counterfeit like all kings.
Marie isn't counterfeit: nor is where you are now, in this thicket
of polished ribbony ink spelling near-certainty. Okay, Marie is dead.
She inhabits the texture of everything, even manuscripts. An angel
flowers whitely before you. You've got to make a life, you can't die,
nothing dies. One lie, that she cooked lizards and ate them.
She got everything at the Buy-Rite; she didn't have money, did she?
Something must have come in the mail. Or he gave her old food.
--Alice Notley
"I'm Watching"
--Alice Notley
"Hell"
Hell was dripping with the blood from the sores on my thighs--
The girl said let me tell you you are a monster. I refused to
put on her monster mask; I have my own culture. But she put the mask
in her eyes. Then I entered hell.
Your face is made of rotten wood and your eyeholes are gouged out;
you have sores on your thighs because you're ugly; you
will never look like poetry because they aren't healed. You're too old.
There's too much food in hell; a man's in charge of sharks for our food,
some of which are still alive. He says he'll poison those. I have to get out of
your hell; I suppose the sharks bit my thighs; I have nothing against them.
The problem with the girls: they're afraid of this. Though they cast me into it. It's just hell. I give up
on being afraid and on sequential time. Everything's happening all around me,
not in a line. Anyone but me
Anyone but me gets to be the human. Well then I won't be. Join a different
company. Room of luminous visionary beings: why not?
--Alice Notley
"Nothing Like the Earth"
--Mary Ruefle
"Zettel"
A piece of paper fell out of the book
and drifted to the floor.
It was the first time I had witnessed
a birth, and I was shocked.
What a magnificent cause.
My entire brain plunged into thoughts
connected with the tiny object.
Do people become people for different reasons?
Ever yours. Evermore the imperial tether of
adult tenderness, the full radius of listening
at night, paired with horses grazing on ice:
the way a snow flea jumps on snow, following
one hoof, one print, one word, one minute
to the next. You need never know.
It was very quiet then for a long time,
after I bent down and picked it up.
--Mary Ruefle
"Concerning Essential Existence"
The horse mounted the mare slowly and precisely
and then stopped.
He was profoundly disturbed by a piece of straw.
He was profoundly distracted by the sad toy
upside down in the tree.
He was profoundly disengaged by half a cloud
in the corner of his wet eye.
And then he continued.
Nothing is forgot by lovers
except who they are.
--Mary Ruefle
--Haruki Marukami, Kafka on the Shore
"The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory."
--Henri Bergson, qtd. by Haruki Murakami in Kafka on the Shore
"The Weather in Space"
Is God being or pure force? The wind
Or what commands it? When our lives slow
And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls
In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm
Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing
After all we're certain to lose, so alive--
Faces radiant with panic.
--Tracy K. Smith
"My God, It's Full of Stars"
1.
We like to think of it as a parallel to what we know,
Only bigger. One man against the authorities.
Or one man against a city of zombies. One man
Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand
The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants
Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run.
Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop,
This message going out to all of space.... Though
Maybe it's more like life below the sea: silent,
Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics
Of a outmoded design. Some like to imagine
A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,
Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,
Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing
To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best
While the father storms through adjacent rooms
Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come,
Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.
Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.
All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils
In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.
The books have lived here all along, belonging
For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,
A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.
2.
Charlton Heston is waiting to be let in. He asked once politely.
A second time with force from the diaphragm. The third time,
He did it like Moses: arms raised high, face an apocryphal white.
Shirt crisp, suit trim, he stoops a little coming in,
Then grows tall. He scans the room. He stands until I gesture,
Then he sits. Birds commence their evening chatter. Someone fires
Charcoals out below. He'll take a whiskey if I have it. Water if I don't.
I ask him to start from the beginning, but he goes only halfway back.
That was the future once, he says. Before the world went upside down.
Hero, survivor. God's right hand man, I know he sees the blank
Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone.
He sits straight in his seat, takes a long, slow high-thespian breath,
Then lets it go. For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth. And:
May I smoke? The voices outside soften. Planes jet past heading off or back.
Someone cries that she does not want to go to bed. Footsteps overhead.
A fountain in the neighbor's yard babbles to itself, and the night air
Lifts the sound indoors. It was another time, he says, picking up again.
We were pioneers. Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth
Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone
One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.
Our eyes adjust to the dark.
3.
Perhaps the great error is believing we're alone,
That the others have come and gone--a momentary blip--
When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,
Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel
Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,
Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,
Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones
At whatever are their moons. They live wondering
If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,
And the great black distance they--we--flicker in.
Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,
Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on
At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns
Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want it to be
One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.
Wide open, so everything floods in at once.
And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,
Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.
So that I might be sitting now beside my father
As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe
For the first time in the winter of 1959.
4.
In those last scenes of Kubrick's 2001
When Dave is whisked into the center of space,
Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light
Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid
For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid,
Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off,
Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent
And vague, swirls in, and on and on....
In those last scenes, as he floats
Above Jupiter's vast canyons and seas,
Over the lava strewn plains and mountains
Packed in ice, that whole time, he doesn't blink.
In his little ship, blind to what he rides, whisked
Across the wide-screen of unparcelled time,
Who knows what blazes through his mind?
Is it still his life he moves through, or does
That end at the end of what he can name?
On set, it's shot after shot till Kubrick is happy,
Then the costumes go back on their racks
And the great gleaming set goes black.
5.
When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, and bright wide.
He'd read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled
To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise
As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.
We learned new words for things. The decade changed.
The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is--
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.
--Tracy K. Smith
"The Museum of Obsolescence"
So much we once coveted. So much
That would have saved us, but lived,
Instead, its own quick span, returning
To uselessness with the mute acquiescence
Of shed skin. It watches us watch it:
Our faulty eyes, our telltale heat, hearts
Ticking through our shirts. We're here
To titter at the gimcracks, the naïve tools,
The replicas of replicas stacked like bricks.
There's green money, and oil in drums.
Pots of honey pilfered from a tomb. Books
Recounting the wars, maps of fizzled stars.
In the south wing, there's a small room
Where a living man sits on display. Ask,
And he'll describe the old beliefs. If you
Laugh, he'll lower his head to his hands
And sigh. When he dies, they'll replace him
With a video looping on ad infinitum.
Special installations come and go. "Love"
Was up for a season, followed by "Illness,"
Concepts difficult to grasp. The last thing you see
(After a mirror--someone's idea of a joke?)
Is an image of the old planet taken from space.
Outside, vendors hawk t-shirts, three for eight.
--Tracy K. Smith
"Cathedral Kitsch"
Does God love gold?
Does He shine back
At Himself from walls
Like these, leafed
In the earth's softest wealth?
Women light candles,
Pray into their fistful of beads.
Cameras spit human light
Into the vast holy dark,
And what glistens back
Is high up and cold. I feel
Man here. The same wish
That named the planets.
Man with his shoes and tools,
His insistence to prove we exist
Just like God, in the large
And the small, the great
And the frayed. In the chords
That rise from the tall brass pipes,
And the chorus of crushed cans
Someone drags over cobbles
In the secular street.
--Tracy K. Smith
"The Largeness We Can't See"
When our laughter skids across the floor
Like beads yanked from some girl's throat,
What waits where the laughter gathers?
And later, when our saw-toothed breaths
Lay us down on a bed of leaves, what feeds
With ceaseless focus on the leaves?
It's solid, yet permeable, like a mood.
Like God, it has no face. Like lust,
it flickers on without a prick of guilt.
We move in and out of rooms, leaving
Our dust, our voices pooled on sills.
We hurry from door to door in a downpour
Of days. Old trees inch up, their trunks thick
With new rings. All that we see grows
Into the ground. And all we live blind to
Leans its deathless heft to our ears
and sings.--Tracy K. Smith
"Old Food"
A woman stands in a dreamed cemetery where her daughter lies.
It was Marie; one of them was. A woman stands near a rectangular
plot marked off in pencil. Now the color deepens to turquoise.
Surrounded by dusty gold calligraphy gone past its meaning.
Marie lived in a gully at the dump on the outskirts of town, in a palm-
frond shack, with her dogs. She walks to the Buy-Rite: past a real cemetery,
towards the tracks, but turns; she enters the Buy-Rite. Leroy, the liar,
sells her food, then tells lies to everyone about her; years later
no one remembers the lies. Wasn't Leroy counterfeit like all kings.
Marie isn't counterfeit: nor is where you are now, in this thicket
of polished ribbony ink spelling near-certainty. Okay, Marie is dead.
She inhabits the texture of everything, even manuscripts. An angel
flowers whitely before you. You've got to make a life, you can't die,
nothing dies. One lie, that she cooked lizards and ate them.
She got everything at the Buy-Rite; she didn't have money, did she?
Something must have come in the mail. Or he gave her old food.
--Alice Notley
"I'm Watching"
I'm watching the show on a rotten TV, catching the story
through red and blue specks--images double often, and
the sound's dubbed, they're made to speak a foreign language.
This is one of my favorite kinds of art. What's going on?
Eve Love is Marie's reprobate daughter, or is she? Is Leroy
vicious, even bad? Should I keep calling him by his real name?
Who am I?
Momma didn't like the name Ruby--
it sounded cheap--though she liked a particular woman
with that name: I'm avoiding telling you some things about
really real people, realer than I am. Leroy told her Ruby'd
died, and Momma was shocked--I told you she was sick, he said;
but Momma hadn't known that she should believe him that time.
Me, I'm not very real. I've worked at that: I can't stand
the fiction of living. I'd just as soon be like Marie, my one
remaining hero. Real. She died out there at the dump
and wasn't anything like I'm saying. Once, a woman from town
gave her a ride and asked her if she was happy. She said she
was doing what she wanted to do. She wasn't crazy you see.
Eve is not Marie's daughter, though maybe someone is.
Is there Mercy? An image of Tara once arose from my chest to help me out...
But I'm not crazy, though sometimes women I dream about
imply that I am. I'm intact. Really intact. Are you?--Alice Notley
"Hell"
Hell was dripping with the blood from the sores on my thighs--
The girl said let me tell you you are a monster. I refused to
put on her monster mask; I have my own culture. But she put the mask
in her eyes. Then I entered hell.
Your face is made of rotten wood and your eyeholes are gouged out;
you have sores on your thighs because you're ugly; you
will never look like poetry because they aren't healed. You're too old.
There's too much food in hell; a man's in charge of sharks for our food,
some of which are still alive. He says he'll poison those. I have to get out of
your hell; I suppose the sharks bit my thighs; I have nothing against them.
The problem with the girls: they're afraid of this. Though they cast me into it. It's just hell. I give up
on being afraid and on sequential time. Everything's happening all around me,
not in a line. Anyone but me
Anyone but me gets to be the human. Well then I won't be. Join a different
company. Room of luminous visionary beings: why not?
--Alice Notley
"Nothing Like the Earth"
If it is winter in the book spring surprises me when I look up and though I know there is nothing like the earth though I know the lilies in the yard throw open the doors of the heart with wondrous force and I am a buck-merino a dandy little buck-merino jumping with felicity over the fence and I shall not want He maketh me lie down on the bed to read so I do not know which is the ephemera the lilies or the boy in winter whose fate is at a toss Can anything save the appalling youth brightened with intense pulse or that deep & wailing cry allotted to his crow? Yea, though I walk through the valley of these things there is a rich fever that never foams a swatch of fastidious root fastened to a rock like a hand gripping a doorknob unable to move a tentacle of intent that may yet restore the song of the lute to the lily or the glory of the crow to the boy
--Mary Ruefle
"Zettel"
A piece of paper fell out of the book
and drifted to the floor.
It was the first time I had witnessed
a birth, and I was shocked.
What a magnificent cause.
My entire brain plunged into thoughts
connected with the tiny object.
Do people become people for different reasons?
Ever yours. Evermore the imperial tether of
adult tenderness, the full radius of listening
at night, paired with horses grazing on ice:
the way a snow flea jumps on snow, following
one hoof, one print, one word, one minute
to the next. You need never know.
It was very quiet then for a long time,
after I bent down and picked it up.
--Mary Ruefle
"Concerning Essential Existence"
The horse mounted the mare slowly and precisely
and then stopped.
He was profoundly disturbed by a piece of straw.
He was profoundly distracted by the sad toy
upside down in the tree.
He was profoundly disengaged by half a cloud
in the corner of his wet eye.
And then he continued.
Nothing is forgot by lovers
except who they are.
--Mary Ruefle
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