Norman Fischer, excerpts from On a Train at Night

Ho|ma|ge to the Infernal City, image by Daniel Y. Harris 

excerpts from On a Train at Night

How nothing in particular sways in the wind when tendrils whip

In each which way

As if inclement weather daunts them serially to a halting stalling just as the beam

Of my wanting more blunts me along on its blathering furor —

         Gotta swim against the grain in this creepy world

I cradle in my weary arms

With its lush water

Distracting meals

And bracing sorrows of the day

Herewith a grasping for syllables or any air at all which would be most terrible

According to the connections she made because she could -- she did -- minus the emoticons --

And wind again destructive --

Manzanita puffs fold alongside hills

Downtown residue of foamseeking -- shared the almond shape of long carrots in mud--

Placed side by side in virtue of materiality making meaning in their musical placement calming the scene

for the moment

~

Household word

Catching a mouse from under the credenza she wanders desert shores following clouds of debris

Further on into crouched disturbances — these dates not on any calendar — time blown as leaves                      at season's end

At the time of a single death

She follows light

She follows water

She follows wind

She follows earth

Marked by solemn words sung like cymbals— the poet refuses to name — refuses to sing hero              battles — paints blood on walls instead — which passes for advance in tattered times —

Herewith a housefly rubs its ears against the panes — nothing to write about

Really nothing 

To speak of

Details swallowed in world

~

Hole in  original world — disturbed — stutters — flashing in and out of being —

Smoke wafts up from fires below

Wordstones hurled from cliffs above

Split into pieces

Earth teeters

Bulked clouds with fuzzy fingers

Shooting out

Gray smudges of arrested rain

Sky spread jagged and wide

Like puzzle pieces on a table

Something about to occur in strain for its arousal

       Doesn’t

This never-occurring anything

Hollow potential

Halt between in and out up and down forward and back dark and light arousal and defeat

Music — categories shattered --

~

It wants plethoras of peace and silence

Sometimes to learn so as to forget  —

Nearly dimmer then later stupor sets in

Whenever I strike this sonorous bell

That lingers and is limber touching the runners as they course by

Carrying the bulges

Too hot for their frequencies

But you can’t not wonder for you need the food

How they make their rounds on their lilting perfect numbers

Is abstract on their hearths

That cannot concur in their cash only reconcile their books and plunder

Call out on high for help

~

In these eyes words spill over

Before thought there’s water

Unstable surging that eats at the edges

Quiet out beyond the breakers

In the definite crescent and in the craters

A casting up of weight in the swell

So that looking into them there is no contact

Outside the sheer warmth that this is there

Present in a larger vicinity

The collision is immanent

A force pressing down unannounced

Of memory back to a beginning before remembering

Which is carried along with effortless floating

That your hand touches

Brushing only the sounds of words like tinkling glass on beaches

No escape

~

In the haze

Before a yellow moon

Hung over tapestried water

Talking and tapped

By muttering birds

That engender small details

Of earthly life rhyming above me

The mind’s broken beauty mends

All that deigns to wonder or sing

The table the cup the spoon so generous

The book the bell the sandal the screen

Overflowing eyes their struggle to see

The sorrow of annunciation

~

I wandered in and was immediately given a name and a score

Now -- how to distance myself from the crowd--

Was it diet or hygiene? Wardrobe coiffure interior design?

That night I slipped away to watch baseball under the stars

The ball the cloud the arching glove

Or was that scars and love, abrasive unfolding of time against my skin

Without thinking propelled by the unseen adhesion

Justice

A penchant for improvement or perfection

The image of an alternative world -- imagination's horrid ideal --

Proved to be already exposed and over-determined

I had to learn a new language just to recover my socks

Which I left outdoors on the balcony railing of the last hotel

In the final city of the farewell tour

Many times I have wondered what was really in that trunk I’d kept ready all those years

Plundered mementoes I planned to take back with me on my eventual return

When the past as I had imagined it would finally be available in reds and blues

The mauve poems I purchasing in the middle of this dream of my flamboyant farewell tour

That occurred as I woke in another less rudimentary world

And the words will make it believable and true in their military arrangements

Stitched together with dental floss because that was all we had

Without any idea of who or why or where we really were

Or any actual idea at all

~

I don’t know nor can see

Buttered up and offended

Disappointments marry me to my decreases

Setbacks set me scurrying

When against my whacky eye is bent

Any tattered stickum screed

Disastrously attacked and attached to me by murky bended invisible threads

Seen through

~

In the pleading

Another voice speaks your obscure name

That floats on the swimming sea bobbing like cork or corpse

They yell or call their fever

They raise their arms pure sapphire 

In sky with its endless terraces

Or clouds as pieced together witnesses

Of your tingling nerve endings that paint them

Recreating suns inside your brain

Charisma is chemistry

Being whitehot for the world to pull its handle

And whole cities spring up plazas boulevards statues fountains

Beetle people scatter

Because a person can’t be flesh

A terror freezes fluid bone solid

And a curtain falls before the eyes

Shoots out rays of red dejection until little lights flicker on 

One by one along the delirious roadways

And an insulated wind blows through the pocked canyons

Mowing him back down under the mock everyday sky

Until it’s time to say their names  -- Count and recombine their letters --

~

Just that much urge toward filching — take what isn't yours as if it were  —

Take any sense that truth is spoken here — lethargical liturgical truth --

And the indignant ones mesmerized by shouting spill over freeways unfurl their banners

Down from overpasses

Being alive's an exaggeration, protest against contingency

An allergy or flea bite

Bacteria extol— DNA an arrangement of letters spiral death dance --

But a stone's set in its ways

You can't draw blood from it to test its mettle

Glowing in its aura — the moon I mean — above --

Shocked by its own light and shrouded in someone else's cloud

~

Juvenile bombast and highjinks

Stark summation beside hay ricks when she was young and sex was the primary metaphor for self --

-- Hold that thought --

Journeying forth into moist lattice network tugs at spires or spices languor called                                               Freedom determines political confusion

This false premise

Herein the splash that cleanses people once for all —

Sins wash out anyway in a redemptive present

In which past is contained

So forgiveness is impossible

And inevitable

Let it alone

             Again

Inasmuch as this proper language holds up in court

To drown out the other uproar

Of pictured world in crisis

~

Just lie down in a boat and sleep

It's artificial but in our language what isn't?

Peculiar magic of our idiom. Could be the first time that happened.

Any variety

Of the many varieties

Of endings

That produce beginnings

When after nothing something again appears

Curling shot and extruded desire amounting to no more than …..

Thinking through, repeating  — a new world to start with —

Down deep in cavern who could think her way into this newness

No way but going on being so long as there's voice to holler

Murmur I mean

Solitude necessary for any recognized unacknowledging shape — I slake my loneliness in it —

Which is never preservative.

                                                                        .P.   is   .J.

Or so they say at this late hour when we are about to anoint a new king

Same as the old one

~

Jeered and mooed and read the oracles

Fuzzy clouds over sea must mean something like tortoise shells entrails tea leaves

All pattern decodes significance which is —  what, after all  — anything?

The implications --

Preternatural twilight once we were happy — whose concept is that? Cows

            they say are happy so people can't be

Bees and beers and brisket — gristle — these lines indicate that—

How chew on words of the gone ones of course I do

Everything said in exactly these residue letters

Shells and seaweed jumbled by the shore

Invisible at night

Walking back and forth in this distracted manner — the melody sways back and forth —

Pock pock pock pock behind it

~

—Norman Fischer