Wheel With a Single Spoke Read online

almost invisible.

  Don’t forget how closely bound I am to you

  and don’t abandon me.

  My power to not be is so great

  my footprints give birth to a cone,

  to a mouth with white fangs, for sucking.

  And there they fall –

  the Seen, Heard, Disgusted, Touched,

  like into hunger, unending and deep

  into my stomach, nudged and tugged

  over to where

  the Infinite found its center.

  Eye Snow

  How it snows. It snows fish eyes,

  snake eyes, dog eyes.

  It snows so hard the walls become unnatural,

  masterless and blind.

  It snows. And the eyes burst, leaving behind

  glimpses of stones, sea scenes,

  instances of the world beyond itself,

  shrunk, fleeting.

  It snows. Round pupils, square, triangular,

  crooked, smooth,

  they freeze in colorless icicles,

  they hang from gutters, roofs . . .

  Eyes rolling in the sewers. Scooped with wooden shovels

  to clear the street.

  Eyes, ice balls. Eyes, snowmen.

  Eyes below the sled that passes solemn, jingling.

  Eyes dilate. Ever more, until they burst.

  Eyes with black pupils suddenly wide,

  large as the windows where the moon beats down,

  eyes wide as the wall. It snows. Eyes like towers. Eyes like winter.

  Angel Holding a Book

  An angel passed,

  seated on a black chair,

  passed through the air, quiet

  and proud.

  From my window, I watched

  how it passed as though walls were smoke.

  Receive one word from me, I called,

  you, O angel, from heaven impelled

  by a wind roused by the force

  of an even greater thought.

  But the angel kept silent,

  seated on a black chair, reading

  an ancient book with a glistening

  silver cover, and many pages.

  It passed through the new apartment block.

  It passed through the brass

  gas stations

  abstract, divine.

  Receive, O angel, I called

  the cup from which I drink this wine.

  This salt, receive from me, and bread . . .

  Night falls heavy against my ribs.

  But the angel kept silent, passing

  through the tile stove in my room.

  On a black chair it sat, reading

  a thick book with silver scales.

  When it was right in front of me, I called,

  O angel come from heaven,

  let me hang

  from your chair, from your arm.

  I just caught the leg

  of the chair and latched on to its flight.

  I flew with the angel

  through air and walls,

  dangling like a butterfly in flight,

  like the silk of a conquered flag!

  And I battered against roofs,

  through green and tangled branches,

  and I hit tall pillars

  and cables and corners and wires . . .

  I fought free and fell

  into the square at night, quiet.

  Oh, it flew away

  through air and walls

  holding a book, reading

  with unbridled passion.

  Oh, it went away and I

  only wanted to see it more, through the night.

  . . . But it slid further and further off

  from heaven impelled by a wind

  or perhaps by the force

  of an even greater thought.

  Transparent Wings

  I move and all things flap their wings;

  the stone wings of stones

  beat so slowly,

  I can pluck out bits of quartz

  like feathers of pain.

  It turns out that only the wings of stones interest me

  because they beat very slowly,

  because they beat inside themselves,

  which is at the same time inside time.

  Here are chambers, halls, colors,

  and throne rooms.

  The bird king has no wings.

  He does not fly, because one can fly

  and flap one’s wings only through him.

  Through the arteries of the bird king

  migrate cranes and flocks of wild ducks.

  A migration from elbow to shoulder.

  The tropical meridian

  is nothing but his eyebrow.

  But the Equator, ah, the Equator!

  Here, on rocks where everything is tough,

  where time can be touched,

  where the past seems not to exist,

  where the future cannot be imagined,

  is the throne room.

  Here is the bird king –

  blind, mute.

  He is deaf, he limps,

  he is unfed, undrunk,

  unled, unborn.

  He is unsane, unwise,

  unhappy,

  unnecessary, unborn.

  He is unreliable, uncouth,

  unhappy, undignified,

  unseen, unheard,

  untasted, untouched,

  unborn.

  He is unthinkable, unimaginable, undreamable, unasleep.

  He is unreckoned, unmuscled, unborn.

  Stones flap their wings the slowest.

  Stones hold inside them the bird king.

  Stones fly while still.

  Stones think of nothing but pyramids.

  The bird king is inside,

  inside the bird king

  are birds,

  inside the birds are viscera and gullets,

  in the craws of birds are seeds.

  Whoever would sow

  must first break stones.

  Stones move their wings the slowest

  many lives must be knotted

  together end to end

  to make one sense of sight.

  With sight like this, you can see time.

  Stones move their wings the slowest –

  inside them is the bird king.

  The bird king sits on an egg-shaped throne.

  It is the same earth on which we live.

  The bird king will hatch it.

  The Young

  They kiss, yes, they kiss, they kiss,

  the young, on a street, in a bistro, against a railing,

  they kiss each other constantly as if they

  were nothing but the endpoints

  of a kiss.

  They kiss, yes, they kiss in heavy traffic,

  in subway stations, in movie theaters,

  on city buses, they kiss desperately,

  violently, as if

  once the kiss ended, once the kiss was over, beyond the kiss

  there might be nothing but the exile of old age

  and death.

  They kiss, yes, they kiss, the young so slender

  and in love. So slender,

  they might not know there is bread in the world.

  So in love, they might not,

  might not know there is a world.

  They kiss, yes, they kiss as if

  they’re in the dark, the safest dark,

  as if no one could see them, as if

  the sun would rise again

  luminous

  only after kissing rips and bloodies their mouths

  and they can keep kissing only

  with their teeth.

  President Baudelaire

  Ill, I visited President Baudelaire,

  Saturn had passed through my constellation,

  and I was devastated to learn that absinthe was outlawed

  and that, generally speaking, no one makes it anymore,

  so
I lived in a zone of chlorine, where often

  slipping from the bridle of existence,

  in order to examine the spirits behind my brow-bone,

  I let my beautiful skull crack open.

  You are losing touch with your obsession, he told me,

  and I responded that I’d been connected for a while,

  and maintain relations with giants, like

  some Mercury who brings only bad news.

  The president smiled and laid his skeletal arm

  around my shoulder, reminding me of the fact

  that death itself is a form,

  and just as perishable as any other.

  He lamented, like me,

  the awful state of albatrosses

  and the thinning forests of symbols,

  the degradation of the word and blank verse.

  The president believed it did not become

  the living to experience sadness,

  and showed concern, at the same time,

  for my hasty unions with the cosmos.

  You’ll only end up in pieces, he said,

  so do your best to preserve

  the phantom of some spiritual state

  with a transcription into our good, old hendecasyllable.

  My face was pressed against a violet flower

  wilted by presidential sweat

  from the time he took a nap

  with his forehead in the plant.

  It rains too much, said the president,

  it makes the stones suffer

  and the legions of monsters we enlist

  to serve the syllables of our poetry.

  He also noted that the language of poetry

  was threatened by certain modishness,

  and he lamented, like me,

  the exaggerated interest accorded

  to poets’ physicalities.

  President Baudelaire rested the skeleton of his hand

  on my shoulder, and asked

  whether, come the next election, I would give thought

  to voting for him.

  I told him I would, and left

  him, connected, and I went back to

  that exhausted atmosphere of chlorine

  in which of late I’ve led my existence.

  LAUS PTOLEMAEI

  (Laus Ptolemaei, 1968)

  The Atmosphere

  I sit on a terrace of loss

  at night, under a moon that covers half

  the sky.

  If not for the sight of constellations

  the sky would be a shoulder blade

  in red.

  The line of the sea. A cannon firing

  at who knows what barbarian invasion.

  And my book yet unpublished,

  and my consolation of being the coauthor

  of the great Ptolemy.

  Rejoice, unquiet soul, in visits,

  in losing at games of chance.

  Console your parents, whose son

  has left for good a home that teems

  with monotonous ghosts and retrograde visions

  perpetuum mobile

  of bones from ever older men, growing younger

  under crosses of ruined stone.

  I review the celestial ships arriving, the boats

  that see us and shout: UK! UK!

  or Vef! Vef!

  It means nothing to us

  who think in thoughts

  and speak in words.

  In great halls, illumined by the full rising

  of the moon, hu!

  How disgusting it can be

  drawing, drawing

  ticket after ticket

  in the shinbone lottery.

  And the solitary cannon fires into the night,

  and a sweet, reddish light falls on my hands,

  and I let my hands be gnawed

  by starving dogs,

  each finger receiving a ring

  made of ashes,

  my pain tempered by a song.

  Steam flows into buildings

  through the gaps under heavy latches.

  The line of the sea is straight, monoliths

  sink into me, oranges

  I crush underfoot, I move forward

  against the current of time.

  Damp and a smell of citrus,

  if I yell loud enough, the heart-bone echoes.

  My book still is not printed

  but my consolation

  is to have the other author – Ptolemy,

  the most learned

  of the learned.

  Reading

  Ptolemy said to me:

  – Two are the ways being may be:

  the state of plentiful time at hand,

  that is, the state of contemplation,

  and the state of time’s shortage, that is

  the state of crisis.

  Then he fell quiet.

  I found some paper and wrote:

  – Contemplation, that is, static being,

  changes on its own, out of boredom;

  the crisis of time, that is,

  the weary state of being

  that keeps wearing its old clothes,

  its swaddling blanket.

  On Contemplative Beings, Things They Say, and Some Advice I Would Give Them

  Contemplative beings love reason.

  Reason moved the earth

  from the center of existence

  and made it turn

  around the sun.

  Reason proved it with numbers

  but not with the manifestations of numbers.

  Advice:

  contemplation and beings, as they are able,

  should find a reason to be,

  should mix, should abandon the static.

  Advice:

  those who made the earth

  the slave of the sun

  should justify themselves.

  Otherwise, it’s sad on earth.

  Beings outside of time

  left the earth in the center of the universe

  and that’s good,

  because it’s the truth.

  Beings short of time

  tried to measure with common sense

  even what cannot be seen.

  Advice:

  To doctors, physiologists, anatomists:

  first

  one should doubt

  the heart

  is the center of feeling

  and the mind

  the place of thought.

  I tell them:

  soon this will be proven,

  it will be proven

  that common sense was not wrong, that

  the heart

  is the center of feeling

  and the mind

  the place of thought . . .

  But it’s another kind of heart

  and a completely other kind of mind.

  A Few General Statements on Speed

  We differ from each other in speed.

  We share only our aloneness.

  The speed of existence of a stone

  is slower than the speed of existence

  of a horse.

  But the stone sees the sun and stars

  while the horse sees the fields and grass.

  I say:

  The pyramids marked the slowest speed,

  the longest gaze.

  A pharaoh’s mummy is a piece of stone.

  The fleshly pharaoh saw Egypt.

  The stone pharaoh sees the cosmos.

  To those made of flesh and bone

  I say:

  You only see what surrounds you.

  Ideas are a kind of stone,

  so contemplate.

  To those made of wood and other durable materials

  I say:

  Shatter!

  Rot!

  If you have seen the whole,

  fill yourselves with flesh

  so you may see the part.

  Bones are interior crutches,

  they hold up fl
esh and nerves

  but are better friends and closer to stones.

  I say:

  Flesh and bone,

  I say: common sense and shortage of time.

  On the Life of Ptolemy

  Ptolemy believed in the straight line.

  It exists.

  Count its points and, if you can,

  tell me the number.

  To doubt the straight line

  you first have to know how many points

  it has.

  I detest those who make an arc

  from a woman

  they do not know and have

  never seen.

  When Ptolemy was born,

  the earth was nothing in particular,

  when he died,

  the earth was as flat as your palm.

  When Ptolemy was born

  many had not been, yet.

  After he died,

  quite a few had not been, yet.

  On the Death of Ptolemy

  However often I think of the fact that

  Ptolemy died

  the same despair comes over me

  as though he died

  yesterday,

  today,

  or even now, at this moment,

  in front of my eyes.

  I cannot believe he died,

  his scent of a living man

  lingers in the air around me.

  His gestures still stir

  the air

  and I hear his voice upon my eardrums

  as though the truth had

  a human body;

  and his way of putting things

  in your face

  still makes me redden with embarrassment,

  with the guilt

  that I knowingly let

  the wonderful, unreal, unending earth

  become a sphere.

  Nothing will ever convince me he has died.

  Field

  I believe the earth is flat,

  flat and thick as a plank,

  pierced by tree roots, hanging

  into the void, skull and shank,

  that the sun doesn’t rise in the same place

  and it’s not always the same sun,

  but smaller or bigger,

  altogether different, at random.

  I believe that when it’s cloudy

  nothing rises, and I fear the end

  of that long line of suns

  sliding out of hell toward Eden.

  Then I send out homing birds

  who scan the water with their eyes,

  who tell me where to steer

  the fields, to find another sunrise.

  An Argument with Euclid

  Postulate

  One thing cannot occupy the same space

  at the same time as another.