It is spring and the
flowers are blossoming everywhere.
Silence passes over
the streets
(the sole sound in the
neighborhoods,
the operatic bel canto
of an endless mockingbird)
like the ripples from
a stone that falls
into a neglected pond.
They expand
slowly over the
besieged city
dark and cool at the
bottom of the sky:
over the clumps of
office towers,
the chasmed streets,
the glistening rails,
the darkened restaurants
and bars,
the wordless cafes,
the tidy, disappointed
sidewalks,
the hush of missing
crowds,
the intersections of
empty crosses,
the stillness of the
churches
where the bells ring
above empty naves,
storefronts closed
behind their shields
of plywood painted
gray,
white, black, as if to
say,
“We are at war, our
ships are gray,
our will is black, our
hopes are white,”
until they splash the
hospitals
and there break
with desperation,
grief and fear,
and the stone that is
held against fear,
skill, courage, will,
the hard
love of a determined
yet frightened intent,
arrayed against an
insidious invasion
riding the air like
gossamer,
defending as with ax
and pike
or mangy hides of a
long-dead age
and howls of
execration and rage,
the pierced wall of
the modern town,
what now appalls the
world.
Just yesterday, before
the stone
fell, life, it was so
much simpler . . .
That will be the future’s myth.
Of course it will be a
lie.
Life was never
simpler.
Man against man, and
against woman, was the rule,
commanded by genes,
natural selection,
and our bizarre yet
entirely human mix
of the irrational and the
arrogant.
The world was, as
usual, at war
with its
silver-stained reflection in the glass.
Humankind was proving
a gorgeous catastrophe
for life
on a planet the size
of a pebble
slung from a
slingshot. We were the crown
virus enthroned in the
breath of the world.
And now, in a cruelly
fair reverse,
the crown virus has
laid siege
to human monumentality
and mortified its
pride. The skies
are clear of plane and
smog, the clouds
and birds alone
inhabit it,
the plains have only
farmers cross them,
the mountains do not
burn, the woods
are quiet with the
stuttering of squirrels,
the tangled skein of
interstates
is silent except for
insouciant semis
running drink and food
to the locked down.
The night is black as
ink
strewn with glittering
points
we had almost
forgotten.
The air, transparent
for miles
as glass, stands fresh
as morning.
Greenland freezes a
film of water
back into ice. The
corals
hold their limestone
like a breath
beneath a glassy sea.
The city is filled
with singing
and archipelagoes of
blossoming flowers.
Birds, knowing nothing
but the leaning sun’s
ecliptic
and the burnished
weathering of the wind,
migrate in their
clouds northward,
choiring.
The flowers proclaim
that beauty
will always triumph
everywhere.
“We must love one another or die,” said the poet.
Then changed his mind
to the obvious fact:
“We must love one
another and die.”
But this thought undermined
his poem.
And so he scrubbed the
line, almost
tossed away the poem.
How
we live makes the
change beyond
where we bow out of
the light;
our choices made, our
acts, our words –
these make our meaning
and our truth,
our good, our evil:
the stones dropped in
a pool,
ripples shivering
outward
in growing circles of
effect
into infinity,
the moment into
eternity,
beyond our little
lives more or less forever.
Must we die for the
world to live?
This is the question
with the forced reply.
If we say to that word
“no,”
we are not free from
what we know.
_____
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry
editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.
His new novel, Meditations on Love and
Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020. His third
collection of poetry, The Socialist’ Garden of Verses, is slated to
appear later this year.
What
is greatness – moral, intellectual, artistic? It has a musty, old-fashioned
sound, and is not exactly a fashionable idea just now, with our cultural
hysterias against “elitism” of any kind, or perhaps ever was in a democratic
culture with its sweet, egalitarian shibboleths. Nevertheless, the idea of
greatness, saintliness, genius – of a superiority one cannot ignore but only
acknowledge with humility and gratitude and admiration, even, in supreme cases,
awe – periodically returns, because, like “truth” or “goodness,” it is a value
that, however we may pretend we can do without it, at a certain point we discover
that we can’t without collapsing into moral incoherence: nihilism,
demoralization and despair.
In
my own experience, artistic greatness, in particular, is partly discernible by
the fact that the subject is more powerful, more beautiful, more astonishing or
impressive than I remember it: that painting, this poem, this dance company,
that book is more than I assimilated or knew; in some sense is permanently
beyond me. It reminds me of what is often meant by “transcendent experience” – “artistic
greatness” seems to mean a direct, sensuous experience of transcendence,
piercing through the fog of distracted daily living in concentrated brilliance
– and thus is an absolute value and not a category of relative merit.
I
was provoked to these thoughts partly by the arrival in Berkeley over a recent
weekend (and thanks to Cal Performances) of one of the country’s pre-eminent
dance companies, a company that has, in the past, shown itself capable of
reaching such heights with sometimes intimidating ease – the Joffrey Ballet,
based in Chicago and not nearly a regular enough a visitor to the Bay Area and
the finely tuned dance audiences we have here. And the company was indeed
better than I remembered.
The
Joffrey, originally under Robert Joffrey, then Gerald Arpino, and now Ashley
Wheater, has mastered a lithe and muscular style of dancing that was on full
display throughout a cast in which all of its member are presented as principals.
Stephanie
Martinez’s “Bliss!”, which followed, set to Dumbarton Oaks, a richer and
more complex piece of Stravinsky’s, was a good deal of a looser, less
self-conscious affair, spinning between beefcake machismo and winsome
femininity, with strong contributions, again, by Iwai and Kawazawa and by Jonathan
Dole, and with an almost hilarious riff on muscularity by a stunning Derrick
Agnoletti.
If
the performance had ended, or peaked, there, at the first intermission, I would
have had an interesting afternoon, with some moments to savor and much to have
enjoyed. But I wouldn’t have been prepared for what followed.
What
followed? “Beyond the Shore” followed. But wait: this is a work, choreographed
by Nicholas Blanc (long a staple at the San Francisco Ballet) and
co-commissioned by Cal Performances, and so having a special relationship with
the Bay Area. The dance is set to a thundering, highly theatrical score by
Mason Bates (perhaps best known here for his work, a few years back, with the
San Francisco Symphony), “The B-Sides,” originally commissioned by the
Symphony. Blanc describes his dance as about “exploration as a metaphor for
human nature,” which is certainly a good thought to hang on to as we are thrust
into a series of dance adventures, one for each section of the music, as
thrilling, compelling and complex as I hope to find in this or any other dance season,
climaxing in a profoundly astonishing and deeply moving pas de deux by Victoria Jaiani and Dylan
Guttierez that took me to places dance has not taken me in a very long time
indeed, in a section called “Gemini in the Solar Wind.” This was inspired by
(and for once, the word is just, for this was in the deepest sense an
inspiration) the famous 1960s Gemini spacewalk, recordings of the NASA
communications from the walk being cleverly, and oddly movingly, incorporated
into the music. The dance was a haunting and vivifying experience, demanding
much of the entire company, which met the challenge with limber and dramatic
success.
After
being vaulted into outer space by “Beyond the Shore,” we put on the razz and came
back to earth in the concluding, dance, “The Times Are Racing,” by Justin Peck,
a choreographer I have had mixed feelings about till now but this time was completely
won over. A sneaker dance if there ever was one, this work starts in a
throbbing mob cluster of bodies exploding into a swirling disco-thon to a jammy
score from Dan Deacon (moving from ironic, to joyous, to hopeful, to joyous, to
ironic, from his hit album America) with an array of young dancers who
seemed like they’d jettisoned ten years from the assertive maturity of the
Blanc, and dressed up, or down, in sports punk togs from Humberto Leon of
Opening Ceremony, splashed with defiance – “Fight,” “Rebel,” “Change,” “Obey,”
and of course “Defy” – and knocking them flat with a trip-hop stew of dance
styles I soon gave up counting. Starting at a race, it only got faster, wilder,
crazier, though whittled down at moments to knock-’em-out solos, especially
from Edson Barbosa, that knocked out the audience too, till, speeding by like
it would never stop, the dance spun out to succeeding heights of crazy, then
spun back in on itself, whooshing back into its cluster like a deblossoming
flower before collapsing in total exhaustion.
What
a dance. What a performance. What a company.
____
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry
editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.
His new novel, Meditations on Love and
Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020.
The
silence seemed delicious. No one would have thought
the
streets could be so still.
The
whiplash hum of the cables,
slapping
and whining in the slots
or
clashing, electrically, above the streets,
the
moaning and whimper of the busses,
the
gnarled complaints of cars,
the
arthritic squeal of a truck,
vanished,
like the crumpled quiet of barroom talk.
The
barroom talk, too, silenced,
with
the garrulous, loud Pandora,
the
restaurant ramage quietened
to a
held breath by the cashiers.
The
tap-tap of a single pedestrian.
The
whisper of the wind in your ear.
The
buzzing of a heavy bumble bee.
The
full-throated aria of a mockingbird,
blithely ignoring
sheltering in place,
singing
his heart out at the top of a tree.
Under
the silence, a trembling,
the
lifting of a finger
turning
in the wind,
like
a cock on a weather vane.
West.
South. East. North. East.
South.
East. South. West. North.
_____
Christopher
Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations
on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020. His
third collection of poetry, The Socialist’ Garden of Verses, is slated
to appear later this year.
Eunice
Odio (sculpture by Marisel Jiménez; image from Oregon Arts Watch)
AT JOURNEY’S END
The Fire’s Journey
Part IV: The Return
Eunice Odio
Translated by Keith Ekiss with Sonia P.
Ticas and Mauricio Espinosa
Tavern Books
A review by Christopher Bernard
“2ND
MAN
Where,
where is the house of your words?
ION
Behind your
heart.”
—The
Fire’s Journey, Part IV: The Return
Eunice Odio, considered
by many the greatest Costa Rican poet of the twentieth century, wrote what we
can now see is one of that century’s most remarkable poems – her complex,
elusive, deeply imagined epic of creation, The Fire’s Journey. It has
taken several generations for Anglophones to be introduced to this extraordinary
poem; with the publication of this translation of the epic’s concluding
section, we are finally able to get a sense of the full magnitude of Odio’s
accomplishment.
To briefly recap: the
first three parts of this epic depict, and in some ways enact, the creation of
the world from primordial chaos, and of both the poet narrating the epic
(introduced in part two) and of the world’s poet-creator, Ion, named after a
central character in Plato’s dialogue of the same name in which the philosopher
presents his understanding of poetry as a kind of inspired madness and the role
of the poet as a necromantic artificer and a tutor, wise in his madness and mad
in his wisdom, of the ways of the gods.
The third, hitherto
longest, section depicted the heroic making and remaking by Ion and his
faithful servant, Dedalus, with the help of a host of gods, of a great
cathedral, an edifice against the void that threatens creation at every instant
of its existence.
The fourth part depicts
the return of Ion and Dedalus and the other creator gods and goddesses (Om,
Tiara, Thauma, Efrit, Demon) to the city of humanity to celebrate the creation
of the world after a great victory has been achieved (it is not entirely clear
what this “victory” is of, or against what, though it may be the victory of
creation itself against chaos and nothingess). On their way to the city, they
meet a group of men carrying an angel who seems, somewhat ominously, to have
been killed by the masters of the city. In a Lazarus-like act, or an allusion
to Jesus, they resurrect him:
He is a crippled
angel, he is a man;
not a whole man,
but broken in pieces;
half a man that
rage spun cut by cut,
large in wounds
and small in hope . . .
Ion, returning to his
human form, hopes to be recognized by his mother, his uncle, and his brothers
(curiously, Ion’s father is never referred to directly, though an ultimate
being irregularly appearing, called “The Guardian,” may be him), but even his
family does not see him for what and who he is (the second brother speaks):
You’re
left, mother, with the son
who
disturbs you piece by piece;
you’re
left with your recovered son
in
whom you never rest
the
one you love in secret
without
joy and without pause;
in
whom you whirl, crying in pain.
In consequence, Ion, who,
as a creator of the universe, is also the creator of himself, must now reject his
family:
Mother, . . .
. . .
Stay in your place,
Stay there, living, besieged by the dead.
Stay there, kissing me from within.
A new word annihilates me,
another sets me free
another one is born in me, allowing a new birthing;
I am become birth-light once again.
I emerge.
. . .
I keep on until the end,
journeying in rapture.
But on their way to the
city, the creators make a harsh discovery: though those they meet are eagerly
awaiting the coming of the creators to celebrate them and all of creation, Ion
and Dedalus are not recognized; they are spurned, laughed at, denied. They then
discover the harshest reality of all. The city of men where they hoped to
celebrate, and justly be celebrated, has been conquered by an oligarchy of
demons: god of the dead Erebos, three-headed Cerberus, Syriac devil Beherit,
and Hybris, named not coincidentally for the Greek word for the overweening
arrogance that leads to catastrophe. Humanity has been corrupted, and the euphoria
of creation is poisoned by the reign of evil.
Ion and Dedalus are cast
out of the city. After their long labor creating the universe, they are stripped
of joy and pride, mocked, and left destitute in the wilderness:
DEDALUS
Lord,
you are sad. You have nothing left
nothing
but
your solitude.
. . .
ION
You, my populous solitude
my
soul’s pluranimous movement,
the
thirst that sustains me,
mother,
child, my brother pulse,
the
bread’s skeleton,
an
unbroken visitor
. . .
Guarding
keeping
watch
at
the gates of the earth.
“The return” of the title
means different things: Ion’s return to the city of men, his return to human
form from his time as spiritual creator, the return to “reality” from the
inspired insanity of the rhapsode, a return to darkness after the blazing light
of creation. It is also a kind of return
to the primordial questions of existence, to void and chaos confronting the
painful articulations of reality, to the adventure of being that is always
about to begin.
Thanks to Keith Ekiss and
his associates, Anglophone readers now have a chance to be enriched by this strange
and challenging poem, Blakean (as the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz
recognized) in its range and originality, a myth of origin of endlessly
ramifying depth, a spiritual and verbal journey rich with promises of discovery,
and a look into human and ahuman reality depicted in a masterpiece that
deserves a wide readership in any language. One can only wonder why it has
taken so long for us to learn about it. But surely it has been worth the wait,
since the result is this masterly translation.
____
Christopher Bernard is co-editor and poetry
editor of the webzine Caveat Lector.
His new novel, Meditations on Love and
Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020. His third
collection of poetry, The Socialist’ Garden of Verses, is slated to
appear later this year.
When
is a hotel like a circus? And when is a circus like a hotel?
Both
are dreamy places of encounter and chaos where strangers tangle in embrace and
flight and our fates are in our hands briefly before they journey on to other
lands, and everything is apparently controlled but anything can happen at any
time; where lovers meet and lovers part, fortunes are made and fortunes are
lost, but only Fortune rules; where the daring young man on the flying trapeze
is suddenly an ancient porter bowing for a tip, or the master of ceremonies
becomes a harassed maître d’, or a junior maid suddenly saves the show.
They
are little worlds both, where we can be whatever we pretend to be, put on
glamour and tinsel when we make our entrance to the grand lobby or the big tent,
and for a beguiling moment take on the substance of a dream.
In
Berkeley over a recent weekend, Montreal’s Cirque Éloize revealed just how much
poetry, humor, fantasy, imagination and grace can be mined from these parallels,
in Hotel, brought to the Bay Area by Cal Performances, and the company’s
15th original creation, premiered in 2018 to celebrate their 25th anniversary.
Cirque
Éloize has been called Cirque de Soleil’s (also headquartered in Montreal)
“slimmer, sexier sister,” which is not far off. But what Cirque Éloize is in
itself is what counts here: a compact, inventive, multi-talented troupe (they are
all, at one point or other, equally skilled acrobats and dancers, actors and impressionists,
contortionists and musicians) who can give the impression of a small army of véritables
artistes with a distinctly French Canadian aesthetic: alternately sadly tender,
old worldly nostalgic, sharply witty, bravely romantic, and robustly pratfally,
sometimes within the same few gestures.
I’ll
admit that, at the afternoon show I attended, there was a moment near the beginning
when I wasn’t sure if there was a bit of scene that wasn’t working out, or a
technical glitch, and a couple of minutes passed (an eternity on stage) when
the troupe seemed to flounder as bits of pumped-in music whispered and died
several times before sounding with complete security. But this was the sole hitch
in an otherwise tight performance.
The
setting was a hotel lobby with a peripatetic entrance door (moved about on
wheels and proving a prop of many uses) and a long bar cum counter at
the back under a diamond-shaped alcove and triangles of neon tracing bright
lines above the stage. The lobby morphed through a collection of glittering identities:
from a 1920s Grand Hotel, to a 1940s lounge for a Gilda-like torch singer, to a
disco-fever ballroom from the 70s, to an 80s Jane Fonda gymnasium, before
flipping back to its Art Deco roots, with, trooping through it, a cavalcade of
archetypes of the modern caravanserai: the swooning lovers, the attentive groom
and his glamorous bride, the hotel’s jack-of-all-trades handyman, the
mischievous maid, the shady, “chameleon” figure who lurks in all such places
where strangers mingle, a pair of twins who confuse everyone, and a maître d’
who imagines himself in control of things no matter how often fate instructs
him otherwise.
The
meat of the show was series of acts, by turns acrobatically controlled and comically
chaotic, building to a series of climaxes, each bettering the last, until the
audience was heated to a compound of clapping, whistling, hooting, stamping celebration.
Several
moments bear special mention: Cory Marsh’s work on the Cyr wheel (a large hoop,
like an over-sized hula hoop, worked from the inside; an act not strictly
original, but I haven’t seen it quite so imaginatively choreographed and
performed); Vanessa Aviles’ graceful work on “tissu tension,” long rope-like
scarves hung from the flies; Jérémy Vitupier’s death-defying (and
head-endangering) acrobatics and miming with a piece of luggage at least one person
in the audience won’t soon forget; Una Bennett’s wittily risqué work on aerial
rope, inspired (and well-timed) trumpet riffs, and a Metropolis-reminding
spinning of multiple hula hoops from neck down to shins, commanding a scene
where hula hoops reigned, indeed rained; and, helping bind the whole, sizzling
vocals by Éléonore Lagacé, especially near the rapturous conclusion, when she
commanded as much with guitar as with a voice that surprised the house with an unpredictable
(unless one remembers the old phrase: “chaotic, like a Spanish inn”), highly
theatrical, deep voiced, and deeply satisfying, swathe of flamenco vocals, sung
con mucho duende.
The
creative team was led by Cirque Éloize’s president and creative director
Jeannot Painchaud and director Emmanual Guillaume, and the atmospheric musical
accompaniment, both live and piped in, was composed, arranged, and compiled
(including a magical performance, by Antonin Wicky, of one of Chopin’s most
exquisite and moving nocturnes) by Éloi Painchaud.
____
Christopher
Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel, Meditations
on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café, appeared in January 2020.
Celebrity,
“cultural attention,” fame (“that last infirmity of noble mind,” as Milton said
in “Lycidas,” another elegy), is fickle, often very strange, sometimes
preposterous. Andy Warhol may have been an optimist: in the future everyone
will be famous for no more than fifteen seconds, with anyone famous for longer
than that in serious danger of being trolled by the envious until they wish
they had never been heard of.
Yet
there was, at one time, a point to fame: the holding in memory by a culture, a
nation, a people, of exemplary beings whose deeds inspired the rest of us to
strive to shape ourselves into something truer, nobler, finer—proofs of what a
person is capable of for good. We have examples enough of the contrary, their
“fame” one more proof of our eternal human folly.
The
noble spirits among us go almost unseen, unregarded; condescended to with a nod
here, an award there, but taken for granted for the sake of the mad men, the
mirrors of our weakness, who genuinely fascinate us. We are of course free
either way—but, born ignorant, needy and weak, and needing as we do to learn
everything from the darkness of our beginning, we require examples to teach us
which to choose: nobility, infamy, indifference, golden mediocrity? Or?
One
criticism of democracy has always been that it pretends the ordinary person,
the “common man,” capable of few or no superlative acts, nor claiming to be so,
is an ideal. And yet perhaps it is one, an ideal worthy of respect and value:
the basic decency of the ordinary person—once the adolescent manias have been
seared off via an acid bath in reality, leaving a rooted awareness of vulnerability,
our ultimate powerlessness—is surely closer to the reality of the human
condition than the brief exhilarations of conqueror, genius and saint.
The
exceptional person inspires us to demand more from ourselves, sometimes more
than is possible—they can be as cruel to those around them who are less able to
endure it, as toward themselves. The ordinary person reminds us that our limits
are as absolute as our promise; that the greatest of all human beings will be
never more than human: that all of us live in bodies that are born, are
vulnerable to vicissitudes we can neither prevent nor even know the existence
of till they strike us, and that perish as completely as if they had never
been.
Which
makes it all the more revelatory of our painfully contradictory position—as
vulnerable, mortal, and limited beings of flesh, blood and bone who at the same
time have the minds and spirits, the gifts of gods, demons and angels, and the
will, in our small way, to use them—when we see a direct expression of the
nobility of our spirits meeting the nothingness and cruelty of our bodies, and
the meeting does not end in stalemate, but in an eloquence that, while only a
partial victory, is nevertheless a sign of the holiness of existence, of life
and mind, of humanity and the world.
Such
a revelation I believe can be found in this book. For the poet Ivan Argüelles
has given us a book of great beauty and emotional power, heart rending and
moving, because we see enacted in it a human nobility in stark confrontation
with ultimate human weakness—in woe and wonder, bafflement, grief, and a
strange and grateful joy.
Early
in 2018, the poet and his wife lost their son Max. Max had suffered for almost
four decades from encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain contracted when he
was ten years old. He spent most of his life with his parents, moving from
crisis to crisis, in and out of hospitals, severely challenged in mind and body
if not in spirit. In recent years, the poet had also lost his brother and
identical twin, José Argüelles, about whom he has written eloquently. But this
new death, though long expected, clearly wounded at an even deeper level,
calling up an anguish not only over the loss of what was, from all accounts, a
loving and gentle soul, but over the mystery, the apparent cruelty and
senselessness of his son’s fate.
The
result has been an anguished outpouring of poetry, a despairingly eloquent
questioning of life, the universe and the emptiness suffusing it, of himself,
the world, and the void; of “the Unknown,” as he puts it—a hopeless yet
determined quest for an answer he knows, believes, suspects, and fears cannot
be found. The poems have been collected into this, his most focused and moving
book – “HOIL” was a word of unknown meaning that (according to the poet) Max
wrote on various drawings in his early childhood, and thus especially
appropriate for this book.
In
these poems Argüelles displays what anyone who knows his work would expect: a
seemingly limitless inventiveness of startling imagery, a gift for paradox
seducing assent, surrealist elisions of logic that seem as natural as
breathing, and a near perfect ear—coupled with a mastery of condensed statement
that demands, and rewards, close attention, to say nothing of a depth of personal
feeling and illumination, vulnerability, in some ways unique to his poems here.
There
are poems “spoken” by Max:
I
can’t tie my shoe strings
my
pulse is fluttering madly
black
spots devour my left eye
and
people randomly assembled
all
with someone else’s hands
what
are they doing and saying
where
is the illuminated globe
and
the scissors that cut the wind
—from SHORT CIRCUIT
And
poems spoken to him:
tell
me you’ve just gone
to
a temporary Elysium
where
flowers are made of paper
in
colors that last a day
a
place where they burn water
because
death does not exist
tell
me that on the other shore
your
hands are still making
shadows
that the blind can feel
—from MAGIC MAX
There
are poems about Max:
great
and splendid the mornings when
in
your magic chair you greeted the first light
.
. .
and
with joy bush herb grass tree leaf
beloved
of bug and bird alike you blessed
.
. .
and
when you reached your happy hand forth
to
greet and bless the homeless and hungry
who
in their morning passage came to you
a
benediction in their grateful smiles
—from SAINT MAX
And
about his child’s game of traveling through outer space, powered by a favorite
toy:
. . . I was a miconaut
in
my plastic toy sailing the galaxies
—from MAX: A SHORT AUTOBIOGRAPHY
There
are poems about the basic mystery of being:
all
the schools of thought
fit
into a blade of grass
the
heat and magma of the past
the
very turbulence of the cosmos
a
dew drop a petal in the wind
all
expressions of the seen and felt
are
nothing in the sweep of time
.
. .
. . . the rapacious gods
flash
their gaudy crowns
parading
magnificent see-through
bodies
like shadows of alabaster
they
too are nothing but absence
—from IN PERPETUITY
.
. . and the mystery of death:
where
does one go when the door shuts
are
there windows inside or a trap-hole
hidden
in the ceiling or secret words
to
transport the soul to its next destiny
.
. .
does
it feel like an ancient ruined temple
the
feel of moss the scent of damp grass
blind
statues representing the gods
of
futility and longing . . .
.
. .
is
it easier to sleep again to forget what
it
was that was being sought—a hand?
—from AVERNUS
There
are poems made up, partly or all, of questions with no answers:
how
many is number? who talks to the comb?
who
are the zero? what letter comes second?
who
counts the echoes? who sets light in the glass?
who
emerges in the cloud? who sleeps with the child?
who
wakes in the well? who pronounces the moon?
—from THE PURVEYOR OF SOUND
And
poems about the anguish of this death:
the
discarded comb
the
useless shaving brush
and
what the mirror no longer holds
distance
of immeasurable hours
nowhere
now in the spent landscape
of
discarded talismans
—from THE REMAINS
you
have become sleek a streaking flash
in
the night heavens which we scour looking
for
the brilliant dust of your swift passage
into
eternity a micronaut at last
—from MICRONAUT II
And
there are poems about the responsive questioning and questionable responses of
poetry:
when
they wrote that page
who
was at the window watching?
who
could restrain the hands of the wind?
it
came from a chasm of ink
illegible
words of a rotating night
errors
in punctuation and syntax
what
could be the one way forward
if
not opening the side door
and
going directly into the woods
—from FATE
Above
all, there is the embrace of mind, spirit and heart of a noble soul (when will
fame come?) speaking from the depths of sorrow and grace:
you
reached out for a handful of air
to
define your true being the essential inner you
great
internal blossoming of sand and rock
imprinted
with the hearsay of the archaic
enormous
unfolding waves of letters
missives
from secret gods hidden in liquid gold
what
their mouths were telling you in a language
of
fever and ancient fingerprints HOIL
which you wrote in your mysterious passage
to
the underworld riding the enigmatic thunder
—from CHILD-OF-MY-HEART
____
Christopher
Bernard is co-editor and poetry editor of the webzine Caveat Lector. His new novel Meditations
on Love and Catastrophe at The Liars’ Café will appear in 2020.
