Nike (Victory) Adjusting Her Sandal
Relief from the balustrade of the Temple of Athena Nike
Marble. 3 feet 6 inches high, c. 410-404 BCE
(Acropolis Museum, Athens)
Marble. 3 feet 6 inches high, c. 410-404 BCE
(Acropolis Museum, Athens)
Animula, vagula, blandula
Hello,
Little Thing, wandering and ineffable,
who
now lives pleasantly (vaguely?)
with
me as my “soul”--
once
you've gone off, thinning, wan,
to
that barren, X-ed out location,
we
won't be together
the
way we're used to being--
and
you won't be cracking
all
those jokes you used to,
either.
“O whither, whither
dost thou fly,
Where bend unseen thy
trackless course,
And in this strange
divorce,
Ah tell where I must
seek this compound I?
. . . .
Yet canst thou without
thought or feeling be?
O say what art thou,
when no more thou'rt thee?”
Italicized selection is from
Anna Laetitia Barbauld's translation of “Animula, vagula, blandula”
Authoritative words will range
beyond uncertainty, a
sublime defining sound.
Yet
I’ve made another zone, where the strange
orphics of the first
will get turned around.
I might have said it’s
hard to give up icons.
For
here's a further sonnet where the Femme-
thing pivots, costumed
as another paragon,
and
locks into a poem. Is this the thing I am?
But
really. Time for volta. Let it go.
Open being, tune
to that expansive
resonance in the universe
of
is-ness, its moody, gorgeous largeness.
Marvel
to walk here, on these paths of bliss
even through rocky
fields of sadness
with
female compost rotting inside unmarked sites of ruin.
=
Yet hers
another sonnet where the Femme-thing is given another please. I meant another
plea. A zone. Here her; hear her. Dressed and re-dressed, custom after costume;
is there any redress? You’d have to strip the poem, not the girl.
Yes, the
marvel, the orphic turn, transcendence. This is privilege. Who can avoid their
little bit of that? One must be true to what one knows. This doubleness. The
girl-children hanging from a tree, raped and murdered. Or raped, and then self-murdered. Where does
the resonant universe end and ethics begin? Shouldn’t they be co-terminus?
simultaneous?
Punctual
sites of ruin. Traces of the unmentionable sites of ruin. Ruins of the traces.
Further erosion. How can the unmarked trace of the ever-whispered evanescent
unremarked ever begin to be re-traced and tracked, un-murked and marked?
I
am Eurydice questioning what I am doing.
Something
bad had bitten me: I swelled up.
I
am angry again, reverting, inside the
pretensions
of poetry, its
endless
mode of mythic memory,
its
elegy.
The
Lily.
I
feel acute marginality.
Clueless.
Opposite
of
flowers. But still flowers!
Je
est un diner at Exit 59,
Open
24 Hours,
the
menu serving up
the
sweets, from centuries of Rose.
Or
its rancid opposite--diner coffee.
But
nothing will fit.
Why
am I questioning myself?
Why
again this?
Nobody
knows how to say me,
what
to call it,
not
even I.
Can
no one say a name, just one just name
for
this clot of blockage?
But
why do I insist
on
only “one name.”
Or
that someone else say it.
Or
that the names are me and my.
I
fail my plethora.
My
power lies
in
the generative dissolve
of
I's.
=
The sphinx was there
before Oedipus. She was the mystery to face.
Eurydic--what
is it? It's awkward change?
while
“orphic” is defined as long
lament,
loss, beauty, and the strange
desire
of trees, crept close to hear his song.
Eurydics?
empty presences? zero-hero-ness?
a
silent black intensity so strong
it
tempts his glance back. His loss
lies
in longing to see her, check her. He was wrong
but
right. Was she in fact following his path?
Is
she one thing, or pluralities of words,
some
uncontrolled cross-currents of morass.
“The
opposite of pain is pain, of ruth is ruth.
Her
song is secret. Her sound is dim, unheard....”
A
lie!
Such
poignancy denies the truth.
=
“Against the black”
“my
thoughts”
“fervor”
wide as woe and racing
as the world of need--cry out!
I am the language and
I am the shout.
note: cited words from
H.D.,”Eurydice”
Ah, it is
amazing, this desire for authenticity, for the life of life, insofar as lives
are sacred. And all are sacred.
Therefore all are called. To hear is to be ready to answer. To answer is to
build a shadow world: argument expands and thins, all so evocative, filled with
hypotheticals but ready for risk. Thus to call out is to risk the risk. And to
answer is to hope and to fear. All are scared, too; doesn’t sound as fine. Nor
does scarred.
Such a
practice, gaining and losing, rusting and disappointing says that no text, no
matter how important, is ever finished and complete, but rather continuously
generative, almost magical, even in its dramatic wounds. To write is an act of expansive unfixing; something rather demonic as
well as something painful has happened. Intimate. Desirous. One day. Now.
Frightened.
“The white
fire of unnumbered stars.” It's true. Each star a little pint of milk, as for
kids in school, giving you
some new sidelight, lining
up on the side of sidereal time.
The stars….
Are fixed. But the
planets present to our swimming ken just skim across the sky. One can see why
they were called the “wanderers.” I’m actually my own opposite. My stakes have blind spots, too. But look
up, Look! Venus and Jupiter hardly an
"inch" apart. Right now!
Could I follow both
their doubled wanderings?
“Three pinpoints of light” –did I have to choose among? I
was locked in my half-gone body, could not exit and transcend; I had to wait,
but why? Probably stupid doubt. The whole culture fell on my head. Oh, that! What did it cost to act? to travel
out? to investigate? I gathered myself up, I waited for finality, but also
failed to understand what love could accomplish with its precipitous yearning.
I had once been on course, awkwardly tracing the rocky path, inclined to waver
and become dizzied by this sudden exercise.
And besides, I was dead. Is this a metaphor, an image? who
is this I--as mechanism here a tiny ticking machine run down. “Death cannot be
lived,” he said, that man pulsing with knowledge of sexual urgency in
everything, his thrilling energy. But my death was. I lived once then. And then
I died again, but with a singing (intermittent? hollow? chipped?), a barely
hearable exhaled breath. A cool draft from a side vent: that was me. I lived but
also sepulchered a labyrinthine cave inside. It was beyond dark. Inside out was
how I turned. I was an avalanche. I killed myself. A finding: There are
grumbling under-numbered myths that hardly do get told. Or even made. Or hardly
thought. But they hiss in the seams between porous sediments. Sentiments. And
when I think them, if I do, reception staggers through darker broken shards
from the erosion loosening the zones. The same, as though light. Like him I go
as both, but all reversed. Verso verse. All reversed, but also turning,
revolving.
=
Volta
cannot happen only once. Like a bolt o’ volta. It is a way of patterning the ways
of going. And now we have “proem,” we have “continuous volta,” we have sonnet
as son-net, sondage, and we have the
mind of the so-called author in a continuous limp inadequacy, painful to see,
provoked to write (give it up! or get on with it!), backing off, sulking in
remembered ooze of former wounds, and nursing “ill-formed offspring of my
feeble brain.” So belated. So impolitic. So filled with notions.
And
something else--a “place no longer to be found, / Yet the lost fragments shall
remain/ To fertilize some other ground.” But is it true we cannot find it now?
Or remake fragments as to what we need? Why insist that they are “lost”?
Citation from Anne
Bradstreet.
Couldn’t
there be a constellation
called “Blue
Rider”? Turning in the sky
right next
to “Moth”? alternative creation
of our
zodiac, figured deep inside my eye.
Rising and
swinging, woven out of waste,
pendulum-ed
sidereal motion, human dust
names the
animals, tells the fables, pastes
up shards
from cosmic piles of cosmic rust
with
metaphor. Like a diagram of stars on cardboard
with little
lines between to make pictures of things
like ours,
not the stars’ things,
as
if stars could sort
out “Moth”
or “Horse” or any "thing" at all,
by what
wings they have, or feather,
or by what
human primer clumps them all together.
=
Mine as good as any. Mine as seen. The
stars are implacable. They
are not our toys or things, however
much we want them ours.
Our human dust is really theirs.
The planets pass through conjunctions,
wander apart, doll coins
unspendable.
the miniature
realm being gigantic--
a stylistic problem how to tell this
fact. So big
that no one can see it. We’ve made them
metaphors for us.
And for unicorns idealized in their
tenderness and trust.
But the sight of 20,000 light year
stars actually exploding
outside
the state, outside the home, outside our solar rounds,
outside anything
but their own acts in the universe--
what
is the biography of this implacable instrument
filled
with minerals, chemicals and chance?
Looked at from there, I am nothing.
But
I am already nothing--why do I need this nothing underlined?
Because
here, in the sight of movements we can see, were created
stories of these stars,
chasing
and fighting, abducting and killing and romancing.
An
endless repeat of who I am--! is what is said. Do I believe?
Am I obliged?
Are
only these tales true?
There is some space—from whence did it
emerge?
how does rogue insight get to be
deployed?
The oddity is I still feel space
unscathed inside
and comfort in its generative void.
“No coward soul is mine.”
note: cited words from Emily
Bronte
The
in-between is evocative in theory, fraught in practice.
Any
discussion is riddled with the unsaid.
I
want to confess something, but I’m not sure what.
Is
it scraps of the past in which I lived so dazed and vulnerable
that
thinking of any event or what befell is like being blinded
by
oncoming cars appearing over hills and suddenly fast curves?
A
narrow road, at night. That's it? The past recedes still further.
How
could it not? Me so in the dark, my
memory
is
no advantage. But worse still when it gets erased.
Sealed
time. Unopenable. The perfect evocation
of
the crypt. A cavity in which “conceal”
itself is what
it
won't release. The verbs are covered with mucus. Is this
the
original, or the second trauma? If I’d
said, joking,
something
about an aesthetic crisis,
if
I’d said this without meaning it, just playing
the
way one does, who would be surprised
to
find out I’m inside it, that it’s true.
Not
you. You’re not surprised. But me--I am.
=
This work without
value in the 1920s
got
indifferent reviews
degenerate
in the 30s
forgotten
in the 40s
naïve in the 50s
an awkward bumbling in
the 60s
purchased with excuses
and cover stories
in 1970, either from
prescience or pity,
but then hidden in
storage by the Museum
as a shame, as a false
move, as a waste of funds.
One of those
curatorial errors
to be deplored.
And finally, a
triumph—a triumph of the depiction of war, of men, of women,
of life in our time, a
work that seems to know everything we needed to know,
yes,
a triumph of insight
and understanding,
brilliant about its
time, an original masterstroke
and thus by 2000 or so,
we know it is a triumph, a triumph
because we finally
know what we should know.
Should have known, And
what it showed us.
Now we really
understand it!
Am I right?
Three findings
First
finding, random. At least two figures
taken
as distinct, implying different, even alternative
choices.
Both golden. Both darkling. Met together. In certain lights.
Second
finding. We are “socked in.”
Stick
with the feeling, bottomed out.
Can’t
see where we are, that fog so thick
in
a timeframe and a built substance.
Like
being buried alive.
Again,
once the initial surprise
has
been assimilated, shock remains generative.
Third
finding. Or provisional conclusion:
Thus
distance is vital: never feeling
quite
at home. Epistolarity
often
normalizes it (home? distance?), so the question
becomes
who are you writing to, as if there were a “who”
or
“what” (“dear tree, O tree”; “dear you” “dear O------“).
No
one. The thing itself. The it. Uncoupled
from
sex, love, knowledge of the past,
imagery,
factoid,
although
all these saturate, as well;
still,
uncoupled from everything except
the
necessary and undefinable void.
In
feeling.
It
was an open/omen operation--
an
epistolary exchange between shapeliness
and
shapelessness, happening again and again,
rain
blowing across the sightlines
with
drops so thick and large they catch light’s
refractions.
Curves. Several distortions
use
the same palette, but different tonalities.
The
compulsion is not timelessness but time.
=
To enter the space of
being, it is a constant struggle, lifting the whole with a small lever, pitting
one force against another, like pushing an imaginary rock off the mouth of an
imaginary cave.
Which of these
flames is “the stranger”?
You
are.
There were
smokescreens and guff,
disinformation
from the myth—who was
the singer
after all, what was
the name
of
the figure who got lost…
and
was there a ghost?
Where was it hiding?
You threw it
higher yet, the highest ever
that
pink Spaulding ball
and
moved under the underhanded throw
and
watched it hover at the parabolic top
Up there,
hanging, suspended as such—
How
is this possible?
The
thing looms whose
evanescent
solidity
and
everlastingness
is
haunting.
You.
Dissolved for a second
in
the blind spot from the sun.
But Calling.
You were always calling.
—Rachel Blau DuPlessis
*These nine separate poem-works
are from my fifty-five poem manuscript Eurydics. Based loosely on Sonnets
to Orpheus, these began as somewhat unstable sonnets (with Rilke on my
mind). Many works include further commentary often in prose, and citations of
lines and bits collaged from the historically existing female-gendered poets
now present in the Norton Anthology, as part of that chunk o’canon. The
book’s premise is, we have a cultural sense of what “orphic” is, but do we have
a clue what “eurydic” could possibly be? The book Eurydics was written
between 2013 and 2017 as part of a set of books that I called “interstitial” or
in-between. In fact, this book might even be called perverse: Persona
poems? mythic allusions? sonnets?
