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  and secondly, in German.

  My first schoolday, September 1941, a cool day. Time did not pass, but was conducted to the brain. I was taught. The Nazi salute, the flute. How firmly entrenched, the ancient theories. Already using paper, pen and ink. Yes, I said, I’m here.

  I was six or seven dwarfs, the snow was white, the prince at war. Hitler on the radio, followed by Léhar. Senses impinged on. Blackouts, sirens, mattress on the floor, furtive visitor or ghost.

  And mother furious. Sirens. Hiss. The cat. My sister cried unseen. Her friend. Afraid to look. What did I know of labor (forced) or pregnant? The deep interiors of the body? I had learned to ride a bike.

  The black cat. The white snow, the blue flower. A menace of a different color. Uniform movement with unsurpassed speed. Not fastidious. Not necessary for substance to be filled in deep inside.

  Mother, I cried, extremely. And wolf. Exceeding the snow I was at home in, wool pulled over my eyes. O wolf. The boy who did not cry it also died. Twilight overtures.

  Face fair. Black hair. Hands parsimoniously on knees. A Polish girl. In Germany? In the war? Moving along swiftly in the air between us, a continuous image. Enough of black cat panic, bells (hells, shells), of sirens, hiss of bombs.

  *

  A long life of learning the preceding chapter. That my soul in blue jeans, my mother in childbirth, my rabble of hopes in German, East of expectation, West of still waiting. In bed with an antidote.

  Eating of the tree. Leaves falling before the fall. Through a hole in

  memory. The fruit puckers new problems, but doesn’t quench. The

  orchard long abandoned.

  The Mind

  said my father. A door open, a gray carpet, a flat dampness. A cat. A field. The means of power and coercion without which no civilization. How to possess oneself. He thought he had explained. What does “I’m frightened” mean?

  A black cat. A field. All the colors of memory, however crumbled. Power, discourse, and legs. Spread in a dance too normal to stop. At pains. Not naturally fond of work.

  The sun still there, the moon already in the pines. All hands in the field. Women and prisoners. War internalized as everything. A father is a father, but the super-ego is monosyllabic. The nature of touch under wraps and, like the world, folded. Can it appear in another connection?

  If you tell me you’re in love I understand a different order of window. Nothing avails against passion’s ungainly, but luminous. Trapped in a sleepwalk. The cat both by the woodpile and in the past.

  Grammar aligned according to race. Too bitterly other and taught to respect. Surplus of privation. Polish. Yiddish. Prisoners in the field. Of wheat. The cat with its sleek black pelt. Tactile parts of body. In what context? In the field, harvesting.

  Let us therefore use a little nubile and strong. Bewildered, carnivore. And that from childhood. Mother in a pose of annihilation. Sexual autonomy. Does it occur? Cf. Philosophical Investigations. To the ends of the earth.

  A simple cat by an ordinary woodpile. The body with pain and difficulty. With wallpaper of chrysanthemums. And birds of paradise. With narrow windows and stiff-backed chairs. The mind, said my father. My father in the field. Of “honor.”

  Spasm out of a deep-shocked realm. One could also say: I simply say it. The mind, said my father. Opaque eyes. As if sick of seeing. As if decay were mining him under the skin. Reproachful, dissatisfied. Of course we find no answer.

  Or only smoke. Who lit the fire?

  Delta Waves

  war came out of the radio before I had time. To scratch on a slate. Pictograms, phonograms, determinatives. The river’s edge of marsh turned solid, the year, in on itself.

  Cold oozed up through the soles. Shoes always too small, bending my toes. With so many absent, how to understand human nature. Delta waves: Disease, degeneration, death, defense.

  Rhythm of sleep, of the first year of life. Brackish water thickened with soot and gum arabic. My legs itched in their woolen socks. Once again following an infantile prototype.

  Obedience as a time of life. Not to lose essential speed in abstraction. In the long run, an animal god does not suffice. Removed from her setting, mother paced back and forth.

  I too, for no reason, walked faster and faster. Everything was exactly as it seemed. Regions compressed by growth or distorted by injury. I was “thing” because “Rosmarie” required too much lipwork from a farmer’s wife.

  Wiping my feet became difficult. Speaking, even in cursive script, impossible. Swallowed up by deep woods. All falling still, all lapse.

  I sat on one chair and then another. As if my thought processes had no practical motives. As if I were not wishing to be part of the family next door. What happens when the shoe is on another foot?

  I thought lightning and thunder meant two clouds colliding. War, a surface to live on. A relationship fixed and never failing like cause and effect. Writing begins at the edge and rolls straight toward God (red ink).

  Each slap revealed a face I had not suspected. The calendar changed from moon to sun. The frequency of rhythm more important than its amplitude. Or the squeak of my shoes as I walked to the blackboard.

  On the other side of sleep the scarab came into existence. Hieroglyphs beautiful enough to be the writing of gods. With birds’ heads pointing the direction to read them. A net of branches denser than the woods.

  Sentences enclosing and opening out. Perspective changing endlessly around the interloper. In a fragmentary passage, I held a pigeon in my hand till the trembling stopped, but not the faint, rapid heartbeat. After such intimacy, how personify the holy ghost?

  Snow

  for Françoise de Laroque

  sometimes melts while the seven prismatic colors in succession produce the sensation of white.

  Father told stories of poisoned apples, while mother’s shadow fell ever so lightly. Then the Phoenician sailors traded the alphabet for solitaire, and brain rhythms grouped in broad frequency bands.

  The dark edge of the woods receded into compulsion and custom. Still, muscles resist the encouragement of descent. No shelter from a brainstorm.

  But a seeming mishap may avert nakedness. Natural space lost to mirrors on the wall. Depends as much on the play of light and shadow as on the marks of graver and chisel. Mother sat elsewhere in the body.

  The chemistry of the brain must be continuously adjusted to flower prints from the calendar. Not like a ship in a bottle, but awkward trompe-l’oeil. With seven dwarfs or lean years. Their violation can be made good through washing with water. Or oiling the shotgun.

  Words to be revered whether or not they can be understood. A compulsion as enigmatic as layers and layers of petticoats. First remote foreshadow of a brainstorm as well as pubescent white lace apprehension. The impulse not abolished by portraits of ancestors. Or sleeping between impossible and unacceptable. The smoke is sometimes screened.

  The language of the Etruscans has taken on the density of earth. Unsurveyed by geometers. Wherever two or three nerve cells are gathered together. Convulsive seizure of the day while lack of vowels drains out deep color. One after the other, mother refined the seven deadly sins. Wait until nothing is happening. Till the snow will not follow us south.

  “Shi,” or The Invention of Writing

  for Per Aage Brandt

  mother wore her shiny red boots with impatience. The power of common sense disappeared through the black hole in the middle of the eye. Too many birds. The Emperor Huang-Che studied heavenly bodies. Eyes blue from watching the sky. Without compass, the tribes divided into totems and taboos.


  I will now proceed with my explanation of how the margin is stripped to the last nakedness. How electrodes mean no more than the derivation of the word. How the Emperor Huang-Che studied bird and animal footprints. Members of the same totem are not allowed to enter into grammatical relations. At an angle into the blue depth of the eye. Mother thrust her chin forward so that the new violence would articulate space.

  Forays in the blood where no oath could penetrate. The Emperor Huang-Che sadly waited for the tide to wash away his footsteps. The beauty of trees is useless, their representation tied to relations of production and power. If you count carefully, a comma. In the case of the mother-in-law, the rules of avoidance dangle modifiers. The Emperor Huang-Che discovered, after much study, that combining the characters for mouth and bird signifies sing; mouth and child, scream.

  Grids of signs lock the planet. The Emperor Huang-Che wept through the night and, the story says, with much cause. The effect not so much related to sex as to pleasure. Not violent revolution, but native speakers. In a happy speculative mood, mother weighed mess against age, in against tension. The muscles in her neck stood out.

  The scroll shows the Emperor Huang-Che wrestling with a block of ink. Because the Chinese characters have remained unchanged they have amassed a large number of meanings. Shi: power, world, oath, to leave, put, love, see, watch over, count on, walk, try, explain, know, be.

  The Smoke Is Sometimes Large and Colored

  for Poul Borum

  it is a northern country. To which we apply close mathemati­cal precipitation. Thought being a kind of locomotion, the subject is asked to describe exact change. A bed, a stool, a heavy-lidded from the night. Symbolic blood count propels a different satisfaction. But libido smokes outside while we talk. The work of writing. Not to embroider but out of the blue. With delight, the Abbé Jaugeon locked letters in a grid.

  Harsh, brief, poor. One word before other spatial ideas. Or the eye chart for boldness and freedom. Pushed sideways in time, desire quickens, even when directed toward a cut above. Yesterday was to the left. No wonder father’s puny tobacco plants never got off the ground. Manuals by hand though an iron bed and copper plate would print large sheets.

  Snow cargo. Intensive or. The process of scanning relaxes when the knife is found. Spinning and dizzy. After a trudge through our own vast emptiness. Every individual shows a mixture of biological sex with cycles per second. A union of activity and under water. Day follows day with the certainty initiated by the rotary press.

  Rises from a complication of visual and tactile. To the attic. Used for drying the puny tobacco leaves on a string. The characteristic impression of interrupted. For example a knifepoint. If you wish to understand you must follow the compact of clitoral excitation. Between elements of repressive, a staircase. How to write slowly like a man sowing a field. With mistakes. Absentminded in alphabetical order.

  What happens in the brain after experience has done its utmost? Chair pulled to square eight of thought and personality? Even if we know about hope we must be present at birth. And puberty. Sit next to a new antenna for what never comes to be spoken. Later, tightly furled umbrellas. The hand for size and proportion. And an emphasis on speed love needs to come in writing.

  Composing Stick

  for Gale Nelson

  the way of experience proper is the front door. Through the back, I carry my mother’s body down into sleep. My mother lode. Ingrained vocabulary. I dreamed I was human, but not sure it was possible. I refer to the factor of actuality. There being ambivalence. Charlemagne signed with a cross, which he inserted into the loops of the signature prepared by one of his scribes.

  Any form of thought a spasm of pleasure if we could get at it. Mother cleared my throat. My mother tongue. Where do you put your hands when constructing a hypothesis? Or inner stairwell? The brain must be able to communicate every item of information received in one part to all its other paroxysms. Sleep at a distance. Or following a fish. A sense of unease may afflict the traveler, but the scribe must retain a steady hand.

  The tide of dreams washes up in the sink. Too many chairs, even at midday. Mother succumbed to the antique love seat. My mother of vine­gar. And potatoes. If there is physical interference between these and the so-called silent areas, things are seen but not recognized. The tarot showed La Papesse, La Mort, La Tour Abolie. We may say that compulsion is beveled blindness. Initially, printing seemed more an extension of handwriting than characters moving toward a plot.

  Often our discoveries come as lucky apples. Mother in a different constellation of confidential. My mother of pearl. On moonless nights surrounded by sobs. The mechanism for opening the eyes more finely tuned. Attention prowls among privacies. Furniture, pen, ink. A flicker of worry, dilapidated in its implications.

  The exaggerated application of the principle of mere neighborhood. But many people can think better with eyes closed. The back of habit. Motherproof? House of cards. The projection of unconscious hostility greatly speeded up by the introduction of paper. After a pause, I practiced idleness. Down endless corridors, up winding staircases, the slow and laborious process of writing.

  The elements of consciousness such as the glass reflects. Curtains, their capacity for surface. Feeling as big as the room, a child will dress up in her mother’s clothes. My mother hood. Surely there are photographs to put in its place? An eyelid in the mind? When Gutenberg could not repay his debt, the banker Johann Fust confiscated all his material and hired it back to him. The hostility is cried down by an increase of tenderness, smoke blown into the room, or too sick for arrest.

  blindsight

  from Hölderlin Hybrids

  I. In a Doorway

  for Lisa Jarnot

  1

  The world was galaxies imagined flesh. Mortal. What to think now? Think simple. Matter? A lump of wax? An afterglow? Or does everything happen of its own accord? Perfect and full-bodied. No more. Observable. No longer. In your eyes or line of sight. Down all three dimensions of time. Or lock up the house. Or prophets.

  *

  Here I work toward. A kind of elegy. Here a strange ceiling. “Earth fills his mouth.” I would look at you. And write you. A spell but slack at the edge. And in the door where I stand your voice goes. Hollow.

  *

  If what happened. (Happened?) Hand. Between palms. Grief. Death. Coffee with cream. Coffee. Arms, knees and free will. And shiny. Rainbows.

  *

  The words have detached. And spread throughout my body. Such reckless growth. Windbag! Want to see come full circle the wheel? To comment. My own commentary till I till. My own great-granddaughter’s body?

  *

  Absence. But it cuts. Repeat. Furiously Yes then No. Even a fictional character catches a chill. Makes the heart. And cold penetrates. We do not fall off the surface. But you, planet earth. Grow. Even as we read. Fonder of the dark.

  2

  Electric bulb. How the words are. Suspended around you. And. Bones in the body.

  *

  In packets comes the voice. Often have I emptiness, it says. Emptiness is enough and as good as within. If your own strength carries your bones let emptiness. Lift them up to the sky. Often have I attempted the sky but it hears me not. The way corollaries are and the air. Transparent. Or not. Head wrapped in fog. But always always the earliest memory. Comes. Not as light but sluggishly. More visible must. More like a weather vane must memory. Then it revolves in feeling. In pubic hair. As if taking place.

  *

  Grass grows. But stalagmites too rise from below. Else out of order the w
orld. And the more blurred, the more lost in thought. That water rises as the pipes burst we understand. Which is why the need and power to see an oak and think “oak.” Is given us. And transparent flesh. And the eye, most dangerous of lenses, is given. So that we should see and imagine and think and be out of the question. So that we might weigh our answers with scales. From our eyes fallen.

  *

  Nowhere among the living. He remains. No razor gathers.

  *

  Strange things happen and unexpected. Not that I to you. Want to expose myself. And flesh touching flesh cannot explain. Innumerable cells. Spreading inward.

  3

  Something else it is. To leave your house and cross the Atlantic, Mediterranean, Aegean, Pacific. So many were killed. And to stand each. In a doorway. And say I don’t live here.

  *

  In the dark leaf nerve fibers spread out and from the brain. Scatter and like flames. From the spinal cord. Stinging. And stimuli from every. By ravenous hunger overcome. Transmitting backward and forward. “Nerves” more than seven. Dwarfs hi ho off to work. And farewell to the personal. Pronoun.

  *

  So Mohammed. Rinaldo. Barbarossa. As divided into fragments. The emperor Heinrich. I am however mixing up the centuries. But gloom there is. In every needle, thread and cloth. Crossed the Alps and with his own voice sighed “some things . . .” And his son Konrad of poison died. Hark ye the horn of the watchman at night. And hair. Away from the body grows.

  *

  Tendons. Muscles. Sweat. Interrupt their conversation. A man. A man by the sea. A woman. The earth and its inhabitants. Antigone. Antibody. Anathema. Discrimination, fine. What is a body? Moves. Passes water. Again and again.

  *