Coarctate: Antigone`s Return and Selected Poems

Coarctate: Antigone’s Return
and Selected Poems
Other books from EyeCorner Press
http://eyecornerpress.com/
PULVERIZING PORTRAITS
by CAMELIA ELIAS
(poetry criticism, January 2010)
JAGGED TIMELINE
by ROBERT GIBBONS
(poetry, bilingual ed. with an intro by B. Sørensen, December 2009)
BETWEEN GAZES:
FEMINIST, QUEER, AND ‘OTHER’ FILMS
by CAMELIA ELIAS
(criticism, March 2009)
PASSION SPENT:
LOVE, IDENTITY, AND REASON IN E.A. POE
by BENT SØRENSEN
(criticism, July 2008)
FEDERMAN FRENZY
by CAMELIA ELIAS, ed.
(criticism, October 2008)
FIVE FACES OF DERRIDA
by BENT SØRENSEN, ed.
(criticism, July 2008)
ÅRSTIDER I SKEPTIKERENS HIMMEL
by VALERIU BUTULESCU
(aforismer; udvalgt og oversat af C.Elias & B. Sørensen, July 2008)
EIGHT SENSES PLUS TWO
by CAMELIA ELIAS
(poetry, July 2008)
UNTITLED
by CAMELIA ELIAS, ed.
(criticism, July 2008)
COARCTATE:
ANTIGONE’S RETURN
AND
SELECTED POEMS
MARK DANIEL COHEN
INTRODUCTION BY
CAMELIA ELIAS
EYECORNER PRESS
© MARK DANIEL COHEN | 2010
Coarctate: Antigone’s Return and Selected Poems
Introduction © Camelia Elias | 2010
Published by EYECORNER PRESS, August 2010
ISBN: 978-87-92633-00-2
© The author and EyeCorner Press 2010
Cover design and layout: Mark Daniel Cohen
The text has been typeset in Bembo
Printed in the US and UK
CONTENTS
A Touch of Tongues
Introduction by Camelia Elias
7
Coarctate: Antigone’s Return
A drama in one act
33
The Hollow at the Core
82
The Last
83
Tremor
84
The Eyes Lear Never Lost
90
Conjunction of the Senses
100
To Tender
104
La Pièga: A Gio’ Pomodoro
106
The Planetary Flaw
110
The Radical of Mars
111
White Tactics of the Stone
112
Museo Missionario
113
Twice
116
Ravel
118
Terza Rima
120
Idyll of Spring
122
A Touch of Tongues
Mark Daniel Cohen’s
Coarctate: Antigone’s Return
and Selected Poems
by Camelia Elias
Introduction
8
I
n this new volume that gathers together a new play in one act,
“Coarctate: Antigone’s Return,” and a series of poems written
over the span of several years, Mark Daniel Cohen presents us with
what can be termed configurations of geometrical perceptions of
experience in words, acts, and restraints. The meaning of the word
coarctate indicates as well a more clinical and stark usage of senses
that are made not only to embody restricted forms but also to
form chain reactions within these restricted forms. To coarctate
means to constrain to an oval form, or to disseminate in a welldefined, yet constricted form. The term can also describe the state
of some insects’ last larval skin in a pupae. In chemistry coarctate
covers a topology of the redistribution of electrons where what is
constraint also undergoes metamorphosis, or finds itself in a
transition state. A state of nothingness of hollowness. In physics, the
idea of a hollow sphere is bound with the law of symmetry
regarding mass distribution. As a general rule, a hollow sphere does
not produce any net gravity inside. While the hollow core exists, it
acts as if it didn’t, at least as far as the gravitational field is
concerned. This field remains the same irrespective of having a
9
hollow core, and thus irrespective of the co-existence of
nothingness located at the centre.
In Mark Daniel Cohen’s writing we find a profound concern with
how words can follow both a constricted form while at the same
time also following a form that can be said to non-exist. Words
have gravity, to be sure, but this gravity is more of the kind that
one finds in Gaussian physics and mathematical analysis. Gauss’s
law is an application of the conservation law, which states that you
never lose flux. In math flux equals divergence multiplied by its
mass. Without getting too technical, one can use this analogy
between the way in which nature seems to work, tending towards
maintaining the property of flux conservation, and how art works,
tending towards breaking conservatism. One way in which the
latter can be achieved is by forcing gravity astray, as it were, or by
condensing dimensions. In mathematical analysis what is
interesting are not the questions pertaining to how dimensions
work, and how many they are, but how a continuous line works in
relation to its intersecting points. When a work of literature is akin
to the way in which a line can be said to mirror the point, then,
what we are dealing with can be said to be a case of creating
gravity in vacuum. Structurally, words gravitate towards limit
points, they converge, yet thematically, they can be said to diverge.
In Cohen’s work, the characters in the play and speakers in the
poems move towards converging to limit, while exploiting the way
in which the elements of what is enunciated are structurally at
odds with the underlying thematic action. They communicate an
expressionless affect, yet this affect is one of unending passion and
one which consolidates the idea that what ought to be appreciated
in any poetic language is what resists full comprehension.
10
Everything Speaks
Creon: All my prayers are that: The prayer of my desires.
Antigone: For this I feel no twinges of regret. And if you
judge me fool, perhaps it is because a fool is judge.
— SOPHOCLES, Antigone
Although written independently of each other, the play
“Coarctate,” with its continuous one-act, is well complemented by
Cohen’s supreme command of the iambic pentameter in the
poems. In both sets of texts the sound flows beautifully through
alliteration and assonance. Feelings as passionate as in the ancient
Greek drama are conveyed through an intelligence constricted to
form, yet while the feelings are recognizable as most vulnerable
and thus marked by a certain sense of finitude, they also rest on
the movement of ideas towards infinite potential.
In the minimal stage directions for “Coarctate,” Cohen instructs
that “the actors are not to invest,” as their roles are written as
masks, not portrayals. This is quite significant, as the words placed
in the actors’ mouths are thus constrained to conveying a
manipulation of facial forms and gestures as far as the veil, or the
mask, can allow for. What is behind is precisely the potential to
reveal more than what is understood by seeing ‘feeling’ in action.
As with the ancient Greeks, for whom feelings were always the
subject of whimsical agency, thus rendering absurd the whole of
humanity, so does one find in Cohen’s take on art a similar
approach, although here, what one senses above all is not the idea
that some are more fated than others, but that especially the fated
11
ones wish themselves to be free in that pure form that can only be
attained on an abstract level. As the subtitle to the play suggests,
“Antigone’s Return,” there is more in the flight towards abstract
freedom than meets the eye. The doomed one returns to be freed
from having to act due to a heightened sense of morality.
Sophocles’s Antigone has to pay with her life for crossing Creon’s
injunction to not have Polyneices, her dead brother, be properly
buried. As she insists on having the ritual, she constrains herself to
a moral duty, thus relinquishing her own right to live. Creon gives
in to his weakness, which is the fear of losing face if he were to
change his mind and not have Antigone be buried alive for her
‘crime.’
In Cohen’s play, Antigone’s feelings are what they are, but her
intelligence, surpassing the codes of morality, has more potential. It
is this potential that Cohen exploits, suggesting a reversal of the
cliché which dictates that what cannot be measured is feelings
while intelligence can be assessed with more accuracy insofar as
we have context to rely on. The play, in this sense, can be said to
operate with how the measurable is pitted not against the
unmeasurable, but against calculated, yet infinite thought. In
Cohen’s play the two protagonists are good at counting, though it
is shown that Antigone’s arithmetics, as it were, are better than
Creon’s. Also in the stage directions we find the indication that all
movement should emulate the certainty of a well-wrought and
well-choreographed ballet. If the body is to break down, then it
has to do so by suggesting simultaneously that the snapping of the
mind follows the pattern devised by the choreographer for the
body to follow. In other words, one is allowed to mentally break
down, but only to the extent that the break itself can indicate a
12
coarctate transition state from calculated passion to cold fire: one’s
own and the other’s. Cohen’s Antigone has a condensed mind and
a coarcted body. Her first lines indicate as much, and one senses
what is at stake in her discourse by wondering what all her words
mean.
Dueness is raw.
Amber seething chafes in supple fluxions,
Implicating teeming.
Darkness lamprey, inch and pull my chamber,
Braid my gardens, curling steep and numberless,
Amethyst and numbness, stitch syncopic volumes
Airless, breathed dimensional.
Linger savors, emerald-dense, and flocking.
Reverie cauldrons, steams to a raveling,
Silks flue, sills fluting, rapt in immuration,
Quails density of stunting tones
And strains to mist in sculpturing ascent.
Stone stars catch the quaver, eye the new night spume;
I, sudden to the night rise, shudder,
Lift to looming gestures, statuary of my various resolves,
Compressed to purposes, coarcted, crushed
To concentrated senses, fume.
Compacted figures, fire, as if diamond mind the dying mire.
Coagulate to underset amends my long transition.
The calcic ground streams under broken, unsought mounds.
Proclivity’s cocked to a nod.
New passions urge the soil.
13
It is clear from the outset that even if one does not get the words,
one gets the form. Antigone here is not merely a woman who
weeps for her fate and does what is right for her brother. She is a
sculptor who understands carving and its aesthetic implications.
She is a jeweler who understands cuts. And a mathematician who
understands infinity. Antigone knows she is beautiful in her mind
because she is not afraid of following a line of potential thought.
Antigone is not much for dimensions. All she wants is movement
forward and unfolding unto vast spaces. The more male-resonating
words, and which we find in the passive — “proclivity’s cocked to
a nod” — are here set in contrast to Antigone’s wide spaces. If
Antigone digs, she digs not below herself but ahead of herself.
Enters Creon: ‘let’s have some depth here,’ his language suggests,
thus also corroborating the idea that, just as in the Greek drama,
Cohen’s Creon understands nothing, or very little, to begin with.
“You shall have his grave,” he says, in reference to Antigone’s
presence to meet her fate. Creon digs depth, yet not in a language
that is his own. He steals the words of others. His sole authentic
agency consists of commanding silence. He orders silence from
Antigone, and one gets the sense that he can never rise to the task
of seeing through his own acts because he is too enwrapped in his
own dictations. But what does he dictate? When Antigone asks
him:
Is this impressed immensity of silence settled
Thick enough to lodge my surging doom?
Is it damp enough to waive a destiny?
His eyes were wet enough to weep eternity.
14
Creon answers: “Yours is the last.” Ever the man of action, Creon
thinks that he is even above formalism, yet his way of keeping it
simple, while being devoid of empathy, is not devoid of a love/hate
ambivalence. Although Antigone entices him to take a different
course of thinking and action by offering herself as an example of
what could be more interesting to be done to her rather than
merely having her die — “meteorize my ghostly capabilities,” she
says — and although Creon can also speak a meta-language, by
constantly referring to the previous play in which they were also
playing tragic actors, namely in Sophocles’s original play, he cannot
match her discourse. Creon would like to “meteorize” something,
but he does not know how, and Antigone is the last one he would
go to for advice. Here, it is Cohen’s merit to instill in his spectators
a moment of familiarity with these characters, even as he is
defamiliarizing the Greek myth, as we all feel like asking ourselves:
who exactly do these two remind us of, for we know them well
among the ones we have encountered. The language of thinking
and the language of action thus meet the language of domesticity.
In this language, things are very simple indeed. When Creon says:
you must die, and this whole thing must die with you, Antigone is
more skeptical and merely asks: really? Antigone’s fate can be
decided and dictated, but whatever the shape the dictation takes,
she always returns. This is the nature of form, to continue what is
meant to continue. In principle, we can all understand such an
exchange between couples, even when they are not together in
any intimate form. And one can sense the tenderness in Creon’s
gaze upon Antigone, but it is of little help when he is intent on
doing what he thinks he has got to do. He is thus cruel in spite of
knowing better. As Antigone is a perceptive woman, she knows
15
already what prompts Creon’s acts, and consequently forces herself
to remain implacable.
On a more sophisticated level, yet delivered in an equally
straightforward manner, what we encounter here is also the very
mechanism of ambiguity. For although both of these characters
embody their roles reluctantly, they remain inflexible and faithful
in their devotion to their acts. This renders them ambiguous
characters where the juncture of feeling with form occurs. In
other words, they both do what they think they’ve got to do, but it
is clear that they would prefer not to. Passion rules, but it goes the
wrong way, the principled way. It is also therefore that Antigone is
buried alive, and Creon lives to regret it. In Cohen’s play, there is a
bending of passion towards potential, and life thus continues to
pulsate in the very ‘I prefer not to.’ In Cohen’s play, they both say, ‘I
prefer not to see you or read you as you offer yourself to me either
as an image or as a text.’ The move is thus for what transcends the
gravity of words and towards desires that can actualize beyond
articulation or principle.
This reminds us of another tragic character, namely Melville’s
Bartleby the Scrivener, who ends up dying from inanition in a
similar way to Sophocles’s Antigone. He ends up passionately
eating his own words, as it were, but they do not serve him as
proper nutrition. In Cohen’s play, one senses a desire on the
writer’s part to investigate what makes food for thought, and when
thought is articulated, what happens if it is taken back, or eaten, by
the one who articulates it. Quite literally, we often say about verbal
situations that we can take them back, that we can take our words
back, or that we can bury them within ourselves, or that we can
16
eat them as a way of punishing ourselves for having uttered them.
Here we have phrases that pass from mouth to mouth in a
movement that creates a reaction which repeats itself and within
which thought itself speculates on nothing.Yet, while Creon
thinks that he is entitled to ask Antigone to follow his advice:
“Speculate on nothing / More than strength” he says, it is also
clear that Antigone’s reply to him, by using the exact same phrase,
rings another bell for both ideas, nothingness and speculation, than
what Creon intends for her to understand. Firstly, in the original
play, Antigone has a legal claim to the throne, now usurped by
Creon, and secondly, she seems to know Creon in a different way
from the way in which he knows her. This subtle knowledge is
what transpires in Cohen’s play, as it remarkably captures the
geometry of the thought at work, which is hollow at the core
precisely at the moment when it is stretched in opposite directions
by the ones who use the exact same form of expression to
manifest contradictory laws of attraction. Creon is not an idiot, to
be sure, but he insists on his principles as the person and the king
that he is at the expense of the potential of thinking mutability in
the face of the immutable law. In Cohen’s play it is clear that
Creon’s actions are a way of relegating his own ambivalence and
inflexible ways to what he claims is Antigone’s “essentially obtuse,
and poor philosophy of action.” Only, Antigone doesn’t have a
philosophy. To her it’s all about watching and waiting for things to
happen. Learning, for her, comes from paying attention. If she
doesn’t act, it’s because she is waiting for Creon to act beyond
‘ultimate’ principles. Therefore she says: “to do nothing is
superfluous... at this time.” Also around this point, Cohen’s
protagonists take a Beckettian turn: before their fates fulfill, they
realize that they are nothing. They are not even born, as it were.
17
Hence they realize that nothing can be done for them. And yet. As
a latter day Beckettian Tristan and Isolde, they play an unending
game of chess in which they both have a winning strategy. It is the
strangeness in this paradox and in this ‘nothing can be done’ that
keeps them going, as it wraps around both their passionate
thinking of each other and their rational guesses about who will
speak and who will make the next move. In the meantime, Creon
can keep mocking and Antigone can keep knowing better.
The continuous form of the dialogue between them is punctured
by points at which an implied author’s voice warns about the
dangers of analyzing things to death. Saying too much. The
spectator is thus invited to watch, much in the same manner that
Antigone does even as she talks, rather than make up his or her
mind about what is going on. For what is going on is also a
process in which form itself is in transition. There is the form of
the dialogue, following the traditional adjacent positions — she
said, he said — but then there is also the form that tends towards
geometrical symmetry that takes place within the content of the
play. As Antigone remarks, making meta-references to earlier
versions of the Sophoclean plot, “as it was a story, something else
was meant,” she establishes precedents that she wishes to match
across history. That something else is always meant becomes almost
a mantra that Cohen wants us to be reminded of, insofar as
mis-communication is as old as myth-making. Even when things
change, something else is always meant, and yet it is precisely
herein that the biggest potential lies, including the potential to
actually have some things unchanged in the face of nothingness or
flux itself. “There are emblems of danger in these difficult
remains,” we hear the implied author’s voice saying, thus passing
18
judgement on the nothing that is and which flows constantly
along the gravity of things placed at the core or in the margins.
In Creon’s relation to Antigone there is a constant tension of
balance, which keeps ambivalence itself in a state of coarctate
transition. He both wants her to die, and yet he wants her not to.
He both fears her, and yet he doesn’t. He both wants her for
himself, and yet he doesn’t. Antigone meets him in all his polarity,
but her swerving between poles is not gravitational but one of
lightness of being. Cohen’s Creon wants Antigone to speak to him
in a simple language that he can understand, but she retorts back
that she would rather be broken into darkness. She knows, of
course, that while Creon insists on speaking in a language that is
below hers, anticipating her descent into the nether regions, she
also knows that he understands much more than he lets see.
Antigone’s knowledge infuriates Creon, because it renders him
impotent and frustrated. As he refuses to speak her language, he is
forced to lie to her. The crux of the play is in its suggestion that
Creon’s core is not hollow. And yet, however much Antigone
insists on banging on it, the sound that comes out of it is one of
emptiness, as she is presumed not free. She cares for her brother
above the law that the potential lover has promulgated and which
holds her in a bind. In the face of Antigone’s situation, having to
submit to Creon’s law, which he insists on upholding, Creon not
only knows what he knows — that there is always a law above
one’s own, thus agreeing with Antigone’s point — and therefore
knows better — that as soon as there is a law, there is also
transgression — but he prefers not to know. Creon’s evading the
knowledge that Antigone’s logic instills in him makes him abusive.
He thus strikes her both verbally and physically, desiring her silent.
19
But Antigone’s silence takes new forms all the time, as she speaks
the language of transfinite numbers. She counts ad infinitum: “the
silence of the mob is its one lie. / The silence of the soul’s its only
truth.” When they meet in arithmetics, however, as Creon also
states: “I fall beneath the law of natural sequence,” then, they are
fine. The question is thus one of numbers: the natural numbers
versus the real ones. In mathematics, the first set is encompassed by
the latter. And whereas the natural numbers are countably infinite,
the real numbers are uncountably infinite. Because of this
entanglement, and in spite of Creon’s victimization of Antigone,
his discourse continues the ritual of embedding non-transient
beauty that we find in numbers. Thus he says:
We are gripped close in this.
There is a general scheme. A universal calculation,
Which I cannot explain to you.
We two are wheeled on one fate, bolted to a single rim.
We two are carted here together.
We share a tense breaking inevitability.
Together, we submit, the eternal thought.
Before the play’s denouement, Cohen’s structure reveals a few
thematic paradoxes as well. Two, to be more precise, which in the
end resolve in an act of pleading for mercy. The first regards the
question of worship. The more the plot advances, the more it is
clear that Creon worships Antigone, but as he does not want to
admit it, it has consequences for the way his ambivalent feelings
towards her unfold. Now he loves her, now he doesn’t, and yet,
even when he doesn’t love her, he still loves her. On a more
general level, the point is that when people worship other people,
20
their actions run counter to their beliefs. Which is also the reason
why the worshiped subject can quickly turn into an abject. If
women escape sacrificing, then they become the sacrificers,
engaging in the sacrificial ceremony as a matter of rite rather than
right. They detach themselves from their subjectivity, and hence
relinquish all claims to getting vindicated. Consequently, the more
detached, the more hated rather than revered they end up being.
The second paradox regards the law, or the immutable divine. Also
here as a general rule, when people worship gods, their beliefs run
counter to their actions. Which is the reason why the gods can
quickly provide platforms for forgiveness. We can commit any
crime in God’s name, because it is precisely God’s name that
justifies the act. So we attach ourselves to the name. Consequently,
God always ends up being more revered rather than hated. In
Sophocles’s Antigone, Zeus’s law is constantly invoked by Antigone
as being more primary and more original than Creon’s law. She
thus justifies her act of disobedience by making recourse to higher
orders. Now, the ambiguity that arises from texts that operate by
exploiting the difference between gods and mortals indicates how
high the poetic level is. In real life, how many can claim to
perform ambiguity on purpose with a view to creating poetry of
the highest mark? As the early Greeks showed, ambiguity in life is
merely the sign of ambivalence, and demonstrates, if anything, how
frail rather than how tragic our experiences are. We like to think
that we can dramatize, and live grand lives, but, alas, what we do,
for the most part, is create little narratives, which also, for the most
part, are more insignificant than significant.
21
Cohen’s play demonstrates that the recognition of one’s frailty
rather than one’s tragedy is stronger in its impact on the way in
which we are able to relate to his characters, for it is not difficult
to understand Creon’s agony, as he cries to Antigone not to go,
and not to let go of him. The only invocation that he can utter
and which can counter the law of action is thus a personal one
that involves the enunciation of his position. In spite of what he
says, or how he acts, Creon is against fallacies of discontinuity,
precisely because he recognizes in Antigone a matching potential
for a continuous relation. Moreover, he has her word for it as well:
she will not let go of him, because she said that she wouldn’t. They
are thus both ‘anti-gone,’ as it were. And it is also for this reason
that the idea of return is central to the play, even as it is only subtly
hinted at. Thus says Creon in a broken voice, followed by Antigone
on his wavelength:
Drench me, dear Antigone, rinse me in your sorrow,
Sight me once again with your streaming vision,
Clear me in your dripping seas.
In your revolt you lifted an authority,
Grant me now your mystery in mercy.
Acquit me and absolve me.
And Antigone answers in symmetry:
Behind the surface sheen I sensed a depth...
And a tender pull, a forward secluded and melting...
I looked to search that soft infinity
But, with every movement, my vision blocked my vista.
22
Cohen’s play is thus a lament on the kind of love that exceeds the
ordinary. We recognize ourselves in the characters, and yet, their
mysterious vulnerability remains bound to the ineffable. As Creon
grows more and more confident in his language, however, he
reduces his acts, not to condemning Antigone to stillness, but to a
standstill of love. “Forgive me, my Antigone,” he says, submitting to
her, and insisting on being present for her, and over her. “Know
that I’m here,” he seems to say as he urges her to match his
discursively continuous line. In Cohen’s play, the line: “Antigone,
continue it,” is thus the most significant.Yet, as Antigone remarks a
few lines later, “The plot is at halt,” she thus suggests the results of
her coarctate transitions in the void: her victory, but also his as
well. Cohen marks this moment in parenthesis saying: “(Silence.
Antigone smiles. She has won)” and then letting Antigone speak in
the language of the implied author, thus entangling Creon’s lower
orders once more with the language that is now made theirs:
“fresh tongued and forming timelessly before the infinite, /
Framing ancient passions.”
Along these lines, it makes sense to hear Antigone elaborate on
how, after eluding Creon’s cruelty — “I have avoided your
succession, eluded your eternity. / And I have spun another, in
absentia” — she has managed to create something out of nothing,
an eternity that has an even higher cardinality than Creon’s. At this
point in the play, the dialogue is transformed into a prose poem,
and Antigone begins to tell a story. The lines are longer, the story
has plot, characters, setting, character relations, symbolism, rhetoric,
and all the other elements one finds in narrative. As the play is
brought to an end via an almost fairytale detour — boy meets girl,
girl meets boy, and they want each other — yet with Creon
23
exiting the scene through the exact same point he appeared and
Antigone sinking into darkness in the exact same way she has
done before, the moral seems to be one of universal indictments
passed on all lovers: nothing can be done. Let them be, they are
merely in love. The test of timeless and unending love is still time,
and still a passing, of time and passion “where knowledge brings
with it a grace,” as Cohen aptly puts it. In this sense, passion can be
either witnessed or experienced, never compressed, never eluded,
never coarcted.
In this sense, one can contend that what Cohen has achieved here
is simply to have written a classic. The text speaks to us all. It
speaks everything, and lets everything itself speak.
Everything ‘Tells’
Why a sad tale Mamillius?
Rather a tale of trust.
— SACHA RABINOVITCH, A Winter’s Tale
The dramatic mode in “Coarctate: Antigone’s Return” is followed
in this volume by logical lyrics. The poems form a similar
incantatory tone as in the play, yet the attention to language is here
even more high-strung. The letters perform words, and the words
perform themes and variations on what we find beyond
signification, beyond symbolic language, beyond geometry, and
even beyond nothingness. Here, one gets the sense that while
thoughts open themselves onto vast potentials, the music of the
words that accompanies them creates a constant feeling of
something being sculpted. And one likes what one sees. The
tension is between stable emotion and volatile ideas, rather than
24
the other way around. Phrases that suggest a reversal of the belief
in the stability of ideas, or an idee fixe, and the ephemerality of
feelings abound, and the epigraph from Martin Gardner to the first
poem, “The Hollow at the Core,” almost says it all: “There is still a
difference between something and nothing, but it is purely
geometrical and there is nothing behind the geometry.” Insofar as
this poem almost performatively seems to strike a hollow core in
the reader’s experience of the transition from the play to the
poems, it can be said to not only resonate with some of the
themes in the play, but also anticipate a continuation of these
themes into the rest of the poems. Thus, although this set of texts
was written before the play, it almost seems to be encompassed by
the thoughts formulated there. At least where the woman is
concerned. There is only one woman who is worth the while, and
she is also the last to last. Another Antigone passes, but not from
the speaker’s mind. Several poems are thus dedicated to a deadand-yet-undying-in-form beauty, as her figure emerges
geometrically as non-transient. Although there is no body here,
one senses how the tongue touches almost the visual metaphors,
which are being offset by the music that alliteration and assonance
make. The speaker in these poems sculpts with light on the ruins
of love’s noises. We read such lines in the making in the poem
“The Last”:
The soil has sieved her, drawn her, steeped her, downed
And flocked her to the bedding of its ought;
A granulate, soft sift to silent drifts,
Lit lightning wince of every saber thought.
The seep unsoled her, souled her, sold her sleep,
A gravitate of galaxies of she,
25
The purchase of the ground, her weep to black,
And percolate into infinity.
The settle fractions strew to grid a term:
The snow of her in melting, sinking rime;
And darkness curls in darkness coils about
The velvet bones beneath the skin of time.
A roll suspension rounding on a dearth;
The particles geometry the last
And trace a correlate continuance:
But every torment figured in its cast.
Mark Daniel Cohen continues in these poems not only a solid
Shakespearean tradition as we find it particularly in the sonnets,
but also lets romanticism transpire through what the language
poets practice, such as the denaturalization of the speaker’s
presence behind the text, and disjunctive methodical approaches to
writing. Just as in the plastic arts, where beginnings and endings
are crucial, where to begin and when to stop is also crucial in
these texts, yet such formal concerns are not expressed at the
expense of what happens in the middle, especially when this
middle is something that not only eludes the writer, but also the
clearly demarcated beginnings and endings. The law of the
excluded middle, the law of non-contradiction, is balanced against
the law of imaginary logic. The worlds of different experiences
and perceptions identified in the poems through an acute sensing
of pain do not run parallel and nor do they map directly to any
non-dimensional space. Feelings are not linear, but rather
hyperbolic and elliptic. As in geometry, where lines can expand or
compress, rise or fall, the words in the poems, with their strict
26
con-strictures, are like calculated falling cadences. The images of
falling suggest that one doesn’t just follow only gravity, but also
direction. Sometimes one falls right in the middle of things that
are not settled yet, things that swerve in the air. While the ground
may be anticipated — I’m falling down there somewhere — it is
not being grounded that does it for experience, but being sensual.
Senses follow a principle of multiplicity and the array of figures
referred to, from literature and the arts, all adopt a both/and
position. The point is that while we may inherit some clarity of
articulation from following others and their traditions, senses and
emotions are often impenetrable.
In the poem “The Conjunction of the Senses” Cohen, again,
makes recourse to what can only be contained in parenthesis. Thus
he says in parenthesis: “(In all I feel, I feel, I feel myself)” leaving
the very form of feeling suspended in a supplement. Here, it can
be said that Cohen articulates what Walter Benjamin calls das
Ausdruckslose, the expressionless. Benjamin was preoccupied with
why what he thought to be the obvious object of study in
literature and the arts, namely the incomprehensible, always seems
to come second to what other critics identify as the means of what
language communicates, namely a clear and unambiguous mode of
telling. Opposing the view that language is there to always and
only follow facts, address people, and communicate in a
straightforward fashion through clear and unambiguous words, he
puts it:
For what does a literary work “say”? What does it
communicate? It “tells” very little to those who understand
it. Its essential quality is not communication or the imparting
27
of information [...] Do we not generally regard that which
lies beyond communication in a literary work [...] as the
unfathomable, the mysterious, the “poetic”? (Benjamin,
2002: 253)
We find examples of the way in which senses are put to work
beyond expression as we know it in poems such as “The Hollow
at the Core,” where encounters in geometrics are announced as a
means of being “face to face to fan in symmetries.” The first three
lines disclose both a new disturbance and a new arbitrariness in
the perception of who stands face to face with whom and why,
and we get lost in the sound of “us”:
As os arcs arctic argencies spine light.
A throw’s a mere extrapolated here,
A man’s a mere ascription, nominon.
The likeness of man to no-man, and arctic air with argent
extrapolations urge us on to considering the idea that condensed
thinking is cold thinking. Cohen permutes arbitrary connections,
but he always establishes a symmetrical relation between them.
One can follow the trajectory of the “spine light” through some of
the other poems, as rocks, stones, and diamonds acquire a specific
value. L’argent is both a currency and a crown jewel in the arctic
kingdom where “the world is waiting for a master that will not
come.” What comes in the meanwhile are different likenesses to
the one master, and we go from encountering King Lear to
saluting the return of Antigone who comes back with an
“impulsed” mind. It is suggested that these characters’ thoughts are
as galactic as the planets Mars and Venus, but although grand in
their schemes, they are also flawed. In Cohen’s poems, if
28
everything ‘tells,’ it is by way of stoning. Stones are cast, meteorites
fall, and diamonds polish the man. As he puts it, stones have tactics,
thus allowing us to see them resisting the artist’s touch. What the
artist can do is put his ear to the ground or the spiral in geometry
and listen. The poem “The Eyes Lear Never Lost” discloses how
language, with its verbal articulation, can also move from the ear to
the eye. This trajectory of following other senses is significant as it
is not drawn at the expense of vocabulary. The words thus
complement the initial syntactical patterns suggested in the first
poem and end up re-creating the hollowness at the gravitational
core of the flux density that a line of that poem suggests: “And
whispered fields repleat in non on non.” Thus enters Lear,
symmetrically bound:
The philosophic gouge, the lesion doubt,
The shiver thought, the eyes Lear never lost.
The aspect of interiority
Condensates to the tears upon, the glance,
Glare mordant burnish of the circum-stance.
The made of matter are the tears of time.
What’s phasing matters, what are phasing matters,
Woof and filler aromatics, steams,
Wolframiums and texts; and death is death,
What’s dun is done, as figures factor out,
As dreamer figures on; what’s time is thyme.
And gone is gone, a door gone is adore.
There are characters who enter through doors as if through air,
while themselves never opening any doors to anyone. As air creates
forms, the forms themselves get shaped by something other than
pure void. Formal alterity is thus bypassed, and it is no wonder
29
that we have juxtapositions of cold air and hard rocks as settings
for the characters whose integrities are like the integers. Cohen’s
poems are thus both mineral and numeral. They have solid
elements in them, yet they all create beautiful chain reactions in
the expressionless, or the uncountable. Structurally, however, while
the poems may seemingly express, or rather manifest, a solitary
voice, thematically, they engage the reader in a relational aspect of
interacting with the solitary and the coming of others. As
kingdoms come, seasons come.
As the last poem suggests, after winter, spring always comes. And as
in spring, not only lovers go hand in hand, but also their ghosts.
And yet, “Idyll of Spring” is courageous enough to forward the
idea that although the woman is “it” and always there as she walks
along with a strong Apollo, a time comes when she leaves it to
him to grow up on his own. A burden, however, as light as the
lightness of being itself.
With carelessness she kneels to kiss the waters.
Her gesturings are, in this gentle gloom,
Grandiloquence of indolence that must,
Despite the ardency that you assume,
Withdraw to leave you writhing in the dust.
Here one can begin to ask the question: ‘what’s in a name?’ as the
temptation is to read Cohen’s own name into this volume, and
then say, by way of concluding, that the kohen is not a kohen for
nothing. He is the guardian of the arts, writing the kind of poetry
that dominates and subjugates the sacrificial spot. What the reader
wants to do in exchange for being allowed to watch and learn is
put himself to the test as a witness who witnesses the ritual of
30
‘ashes to ashes,’ because ashes bear the traces of torn books, and
burnt books, and burnt looks. Then he must turn to listening to
the subtle thunder that echoes the cardinals: burn the book, and
the numbers, if you can. And we’ll see what happens. An
intelligent life accommodates change, and pain is always true.
Cohen here coarctates on behalf of all the lovers who want to
keep gazing into the spark of the eternal and ineffable fire.
Holding their tongues. Forever. And yet.
References
Benjamin, Walter (2002) Selected Writings.Volume 1: 1913-1926.
Eds. Marcus Paul Bullock, Michael William Jennings. Harvard
College.
Sophocles, The Complete Plays. (2001) Trans. Paul Roche. New
York: Signet Classics.
Coarctate:
Antigone’s Return
A drama in one act
34
Each time that a poet looks into himself, as did Narcissus bending
down over the still water of the fountain, he sees something which
no one else can. He sees first a reflected self and then a second self
(Nous fûmes deux, je le maintiens) between whom the drama of selfknowledge is going to be engaged.
— Wallace Fowlie, Mallarmé
35
Characters
Antigone
A young woman, barely past her girlhood, dark hair, large, dark,
sad eyes, lissome and wearing a garnet satin robe.
Creon
A tall man, distinguished, dignified, strong and still vigorous
though in the last phase of middle age, soon to embark on ancient.
Shocks of grey streak his beard and hair. Wearing a black, loosefitting robe of sumptuous fabric, he is a figure regally enriched.
Notes for Production
o props or scenery are to be used. The embers and the mirror
N
must be mimed by Antigone.
oth actors, but particularly she playing Antigone, should give
B
their movements a ballet-like smoothness and sureness.
he actors are not to invest. The two roles are written as masks,
T
not portrayals. The actors are not to provide their characters
superfluous personality, but to grant them the gracefulness of
thought transpiring as gesture.
36
Coarctate: Antigone’s Return
(A light comes up slowly, first to illuminate smoke rising and
dispersing high above the stage, then to form a circle of light
which pools the playing area downstage center. The rest of the
stage is in darkness; it must be evident there is much more space
than is being lit and employed.
The light discovers Antigone curled on the floor in the center of
the playing area. When the light is up fully and the smoke has
dissolved, she unfolds, raises herself to a crouching posture, and
begins to speak.)
37
ANTIGONE
Dueness is raw.
Amber seething chafes in supple fluxions,
Implicating teeming.
Darknesses lamprey, inch and pull my chamber,
Braid my gardens, curling steep and numberless,
Amethyst and numbness, stitch syncopic volumes
Airless, breathed dimensional.
Linger savors, emerald-dense, and flocking.
Reverie cauldrons, steams to a raveling,
Silks flue, sills fluting, rapt in immuration.
Quails density of stunted tones
And strains to mist in sculpturing ascent.
Stone stars catch the quaver, eye the new night spume;
I, sudden to the night rise, shudder,
Lift to looming gestures, statuary of my various resolves,
Compressed to purposes, coarcted, crushed
To concentrated senses, fume.
Compacted figures fire, as if diamond mind the dying mire.
Coagulate to underset amends my long transition.
The calcic ground streams under broken, unsought mounds.
Proclivity’s cocked to a nod.
New passions urge the soil.
There are emblems of danger in these difficult remains,
Embers clenching hushed and remembering glow.
You can whisper them to vigor,
Musing to foment, flame spoor the air skein;
38
The nudge of a breath.
These gleam plots lace a logic that reviews.
It tendrils from the onslaught, thunder spate
To track and tramp of blunting consecution,
Sole’s decay, and ceaselessly descent.
The trammeling of dynasties of weight
And stricture tomb the time slung soul in dust.
The syntax eons toll. This no’s the stall.
That vented underwrites articulate,
However, intimate from overwrought,
A pause rear, strangely resonating,
This time right, pitch to constellate,
And fraught of the torrent abound with a vertical thought,
Spray to the sky chain’s meandering spill,
And clip an accent that he cannot tongue,
That heel that tread my schooling.
(With “he,” Creon, thereby invoked, steps into the light, behind
Antigone. She does not notice him and continues as he stands
above her, motionless.)
ANTIGONE
A swooning drag of space is dredged by glances,
Delved by every look, set beckoning,
And plunges into endless distances.
39
There is a hover in assent. I crest a shimmer,
Mirror a configuration
Hung before me like subtle leaves.
Where a brimming fragrances which haunt, encloud
In feinting colors, portrait vacancies,
Stressed in pastel iridescence from the veiling haze,
Galaxies of crocuses, narcissi seeping luxury
Skirt the colonnades, secerning blends
To bleed out margins, whelm immerging, weft
Infolding, glimmer isochronal undulations:
The depths play pattern in my shadow,
Firm between the breezes, phrased in silence.
As lashes light to tissue, nails to my own face,
My fingertip speculations drift toward a brushing stillness,
Purling through the welling passageway,
Synchronize their sigh to new alignments.
(During her last words, Creon reaches forward and thrusts his
hand through the mirror Antigone has mimed, dissolving the
illusion. She turns and they stare at each other, frozen several beats.
She turns back, hunching over her embers, and attempts to
resume, as if to chant him away. His interruptions hammerblow,
battering off the ending of each of her lines. She refuses to face
him.)
ANTIGONE
Light packed the bone gape to blaze cataracting
40
The tremble of . . .
CREON
He punctured his eyes with a brooch. He bled to his feet.
ANTIGONE
Peripatetically, steadied, the motion, winking
The astral scheme back from . . .
CREON
You straggled directionless, filing for haven.
From scepter to scepter, you were dispelled,
You and your relatives.
ANTIGONE
Bound by beating echoes, foaming slaver, bruted
Nearly vaporing, and spirited, off, by . . .
CREON
The sinews of the state requested your royal presence,
41
Blood ties your return.
ANTIGONE
Stillness sheering arches solemn caverns
And secreting absences . . .
CREON
A corpse lying in the dust.
ANTIGONE
A waif a ground of exileship of condemnation lay in state . . .
CREON
He shall have no grave;
No one shall have his grave;
You shall have his grave.
ANTIGONE
Done undone redounding, maelstrom scriber,
Columnar charybdic . . .
42
CREON
Dirt you poured twice on nothing, spun
In an empty whirlwind. But what you braved
Was far more than a storm.
ANTIGONE
The sealing of the sinuates . . .
The damming unto distillate . . .
The canting from the caviling . . .
CREON
The execution of your sentence.
(A pause Antigone relents, depleted and limp.)
CREON
Why didn’t you stay?
43
ANTIGONE
He was dead.
CREON
You left him for death. Recite the contradiction.
ANTIGONE
Death by its crime resolved him to rock.
Death by its gesture distilled him to essence.
CREON
(cruelly)
You take your lessons well. And we begin again.
ANTIGONE
Devoid to our jointed discursion.
44
CREON
(gently)
Silence.
(Antigone tentatively reaches forward to mime.)
CREON
A niece.
(grabs her savagely by the hair)
Again, a niece!
(releases her)
You are the issue of redundancy.
ANTIGONE
(rising, looking away from Creon)
A soft recession of patter, as whispered as pity,
Bells the fathom of sequent extents.
Black masses rage the air,
Ring us in their hurtling, commit us to their quaking;
Their wings batter out their noiselessness,
Banter and tongue the nightfall with a bristling frenzy.
45
CREON
You’ve had a bad time of it.
ANTIGONE
Is this inpressed immensity of silence settled
Thick enough to lodge my surging doom?
Is it damp enough to waive a destiny?
His eyes were wet enough to weep eternity.
CREON
Yours is the last.
ANTIGONE
I recall a movement.
Once in a candle, wincing the light,
Forever stove and corridored
The howling dessication of the vein.
All that was currency,
Drowned with the precipitation of the days,
Cascaded the embroiling rush of liquid twilight,
Boiled the racing stars.
Imperatives in shadow ran grey thunder,
Dragged along the haul of time.
46
CREON
Cause (indicating their chamber) and effect.
Where did this begin?
ANTIGONE
With me it will be still installed
Beneath the dripping linen.
CREON
You are here in this time, you are now in this place.
Name the thing that brought you to this, Antigone.
ANTIGONE
There was, amid the wracking, center set,
A kindled trenchancy,
Furious densely, endlessly in outline.
This, with another sense, too, I recall.
47
CREON
Antigone, relapse in her cell.
Confounded by the trembling of her hands.
Pull yourself together.
ANTIGONE
A compounding,
We were a fusing, a reflection on,
The tissue of a radiant intent.
CREON
Concentrate, Antigone, and ponder me.
The door has been encumbered and plowed in,
The guards distributed at watch,
The general disposition has been crafted and disbursed.
The light is kneeling, withered, and grows sear,
Thumbing shadows gouge the recesses of your cavern,
And all your breath goes dark in the drawing cold.
You are alone here.
Sealed by my stamp and buried, as a corpse.
Your wax is streaming off,
The flame of your revolt is waning.
48
ANTIGONE
As it was a story, something else was meant.
CREON
It was a pounding, a confusing!
That tissue radiated only pestilence
And billowing obscenity!
And the cause was yours.
You, alone.
But, still, you presume the gavel.
ANTIGONE
The wax is a swelling to vault, a moment persisting,
Bloomed spacious to a stay.
By the crease of its vacancy,
Biased to an attitude,
Leaning a feel, an atmosphere,
To reel and angled oddly,
Veering toward the hint of something
That exceeds your range.
CREON
You are dying, girl, by my word.
49
ANTIGONE
You wallow in biology.
CREON
Ah. In a logical order.Very good, Antigone.
Soon, it will come naturally to you again.
Tell me more.
ANTIGONE
Remit the gods with silence.
(Creon’s mocking laughter.)
CREON
It’s too late for that.You follow me.
ANTIGONE
Brought to this position, spelled beyond the rupture,
50
Cast as asynchronic conformation,
Manifolded trace of everlasting.
My chaste and domal dreaming.
CREON
You are beautiful between words.
ANTIGONE
We have had enough of that!
CREON
There was a fusing, indeed.
(Antigone shrieks her revulsion.)
CREON
Articulate. Direct and to the point.
That horror and contagion, that uproar of my order
Was wholely, precisely, and merely what it seemed.
It streamed from its source to douse and devour the living,
The organed and several body of an entire people.
51
It blighted the porch and the altar,
Afflicted the scales, the plumb, the scythe.
I will give you your image: the crown is in the soil!
ANTIGONE
The exhalation of my disaster,
I find myself my latency and roiling placidly
And fulgent in the sapphire dusk.
Layer after layer, terrace on terrace,
Tufts of ruby’s sheen, fire opals
Meteorize my ghostly capabilities.
Turquoise sprays, topaz spumes, froths of azurite
Coordinate them to their mapping scintillations,
Rainbow-lacquered suns, arch my setting in with
The spectral tears of the earth.
CREON
Let us proceed.
Antigone, how many sons were there?
ANTIGONE
No. A seizure of the lineal.You cannot escape that.
52
CREON
None escaped me. I am your accomplishment,
Your only end.
ANTIGONE
Beveled to my depths.
CREON
Time is for you to recant.
ANTIGONE
In that . . . it is my turn.
CREON
Where will you be tomorrow?
ANTIGONE
Damn you.You will not let me go.
53
CREON
The candle either is lit or not.
ANTIGONE
No exile’s void, he passes . . . elsewhere.
A nulling, your ordinary thought.
(Creon does not respond.)
ANTIGONE
I respect Death its silence.
Something . . . I would steal from it.
CREON
All rivers grave my bosom, drink their moist
Foundations from the tears of my sad, lavish,
Pitying and clement dispensation.
My fingers crescent in the harbors, transverse
Draft and fret my paling, reining in
Proportions, germination rides my breath.
The foaming lilacs ornament the mantle,
54
Flowing grasses fabric out the dress.
Constituent hands moil to draw the textures
Of the loins, elementary eyes
Graze sinews, tendons, bulk, the heft and muscle
Regioning, and every fragment footsole
Pads and combs and curries meek appeals,
Ear, nuque, lung, livers, flexors, withers, hold
A commerce with, in this all bourning court:
All lives are particles of one well being,
Cupped and coped beneath the spectacled
Disposal of supernal contemplation,
Thread integer to integer, gleam-inked,
Concatenated on the skin of heaven;
All deaths returning, dream through flesh to marrow,
Ore the siftings of eternal passions.
I am this very thing, the very thing
Itself and solely. Speculate on nothing
More than strength that stands before your frailty,
The cringing that you character in sidle,
Hems, in import glotta, intimations,
In unfaced, endless, skirting, indirections.
Counter rebuttal.
ANTIGONE
Speculate on nothing, more than strength.
My fluency’s obliquity . . .
55
CREON
In quibbling senseless quiddities and indirections.
ANTIGONE
In this direction, fluent as my sensings,
Pours to tangents, spheres a quiddity.
CREON
Essentially obtuse, poor in your philosophy of action,
Poured from monsterous obliquity,
Burbling tangential streams.
ANTIGONE
Rank with slab obliquity,
These quiddities you would occlude.
CREON
Yes! Directed by obliquity your quiddities occulted.
(Silence.)
56
ANTIGONE
To do nothing is superfluous . . . at this point.
CREON
Now.
ANTIGONE
Here.
CREON
Much was done before that brings us to this warrant.
ANTIGONE
And earlier. There was,
Behind the secret flutes of gentian, hidden,
Brewed with fragrances of jonquil, absent,
To be heard, safe and swarmed by jets of heather,
And the hellebore, as rose, as thick
With life, and as intangible as garnet.
57
Their petals filmed and lightly, shook
Upon the breath of every moment.
Packed rich with such unsummable detail,
It took longer to pass through those years
Than any I’ve known since. They never leave me,
These increments of memory,
They clot the vacancies of the accelerating days
And tug the nodding aftward. They wing upon,
Circling and band my sagging time,
As like the ever birds that cruxed
The knot with wrestling savagery;
They argued the air, shattering,
Shivered it and cuneal,
Cycloned in the image, girthed in whorling phreatic,
The imponderous face, multiple imposing,
The cipherous title chiselled in the seething smoke,
Without the courtly progress, core crush-featured,
Portents gored and galed, the nidor in recoil.
And then the cataclysm.You were there.
CREON
I am. And that brings us to this.
Now, Antigone.
Let us face the facts of your confessed recusancy.
The courtly progress has lit you on this spot,
And I have generalled your inurnment.
58
ANTIGONE
From you, inhumation.
CREON
More than ever, you are in my realm.
(with slowly building malice)
Explain to me your meaning, girl,
Elucidate your framed opacities,
Minimum your art to understanding,
Make this matter plain. Speak to me
In language my ordinary thought can seize.
Let royal tongue pertain the royal ear.
ANTIGONE
I tire of the drumbeat, my lord, metonymic accession.
Break me into darkness.
CREON
In darkness, the hollow of those fallen, downcast,
Face first eyes, in two, I will.
59
ANTIGONE
That was all it meant to you.
CREON
And I have put you here.
ANTIGONE
Brought me down to earth. I feel myself Eurydice,
Stumbling gardenless in Erebus, woven vainly,
Unwedded to grieve, wrenched beyond the living
Rhythms, plaintive in the tomb.
CREON
Never mouth that name!
She has no part in this, and no relation
To the fell, the filth in your descent,
The sabering of arrogate, thrust
And the harrowing transgress of your line!
Eye her, enmansioned in her rectitude,
Positioned, aired in stately dignity
And lofting, do not think that conjuncture.
60
(Silence.)
ANTIGONE
I take upon me my past, my lord,
I take upon me my future.
I fold them into me, petalled interior into night
And the limestone smoke of sleep,
Close to shade and vibrancy congealed,
Collected, cradled to my soil.
Against your racing flood of happenstance I stand.
CREON
Expound, dire princess.
ANTIGONE
Confront each other deftly, nape to nape.
CREON
My poverty of means, begging purse of sense.
Let us pursue this line of inquiry.
Drop me in the rapids of your brackish
Atticisms. Have we, heir apparent,
61
An opinion? Have we judgment?
Enucleate this matter for me!
(With an uncaged animal ferocity, Antigone flies at Creon. He
catches her by the wrists, easily holding her off as she struggles to
tear at his eyes. He laughs, considers her fury, then strikes her
brutally, audibly across the mouth. The blow hurls Antigone to the
stage floor, landing her at the edge of the light pool.)
ANTIGONE
(barely discernable)
Warrant. I had no trial.
CREON
This is the trial. Mine.
ANTIGONE
(in soft horror)
Melic tatters cut and tailored to the figure.
62
CREON
Creep across your years, Antigone, be dicast,
Mint you to a mode beyond your native span.
Gravitate your means, reel in your voices,
Scion into entity an alien Heliaea.
You are here to judge me for the thing
That brought you here. I submit.
ANTIGONE
Such philosophies of action are
But steam above the kettle, and serve to skin
Our gloving of the pilot hands,
Crooked to spellbind, palpate into pawning,
Dactylologically, feeling their way,
Fingering a tale into kinesics,
Conjuring the signing tyronic
To lessoning chirology.
CREON
I am culprit alone, the guilt is mine, whole.
“You are dying by my word.”
“I have generalled your inurnment.”
“You are in my realm.” I make no plea.
My defense is my abduction;
My witnesses my rotting, dropping shreds;
63
My summation, my lessening of breath.
ANTIGONE
We charade, some will obscure, to appoint,
That flickers through.
The silence of the mob is its one lie.
The silence of the soul’s its only truth.
CREON
I fall beneath the law of natural sequence.
You hoist to jury because you are my victim.
Not for suffering my sins, these are not my sins,
And there is no virtue of philosophy in this,
Your actions are not in ascendance,
No judgment presides you.
It is merely in that you persist; this is a lingering result,
A vestige of events, the smoking scrap. However,
You remain, you are still here. And everywhere,
From throne to theatre, from temple to tomb,
I must listen to the ticking of your thoughts.
You’re fixed in your damnation and,
Having damned you, you are intimate to me.
I hear the movement of your gentle sadness,
I slide along the slip of your sensations,
My thinking’s thickly topped with your imagings.
You are ever doomed and ever I am filled with you,
64
Minute, after minute, . . . after minute.
Your mind’s the stitching progress of my rule.
ANTIGONE
You would rein me back to the very hour!
Ram me to the sluice and throes into finality!
CREON
Take this hand, Antigone, the middle ring,
Kiss it in your naming censure.
Seam your circuit accusation
And verdict tight around me. Clamp me,
Bond me to your blame.
Brace me in with your conviction.
Absorb me in your condemnation,
Absorb me entire.
ANTIGONE
(despite herself)
No, I accuse you nothing.
65
CREON
We are gripped close in this.
There is a general scheme, a universal calculation,
Which I cannot explain to you.
We two are wheeled on one fate, bolted to a single rim.
We two are carted here together.
We share a tense breaking inevitability.
Together, we submit, the eternal thought.
ANTIGONE
(tentatively reaching forward to her forgotten mirror)
A configuration . . . lifted . . .
Stable in the conflict vagaries . . .
The mirror-shimmering silver pool of myself.
CREON
There is a ritual I’ve seen will be much used.
On one unreeling line we have come in;
The future stems now from only me.
I bear the ponderous, the tragic weight is mine.
Drench me, dear Antigone, rinse me in your sorrow,
Sight me once again within your streaming vision,
Clear me in your dripping seas.
In your revolt you lifted an authority,
Grant me now your mystery in mercy.
66
Acquit me and absolve me.
ANTIGONE
Behind the surface sheen I sensed a depth . . .
And a tender pull, a forward secluded and melting . . .
I looked to search that soft infinity,
But, with every movement, my vision blocked my vista.
CREON
(closing the jaws)
Once you thought to judge. Which will it be?
Choose, girl, weigh the matter.
Perpend and take a stand.
ANTIGONE
(continuing with deliberate calm)
And I could not see past my own impression,
My face eclipsed my delicate abyss.
CREON
Damn me, my Antigone,
The pounding fist of ravage and upbraiding.
67
Forgive me, my Antigone,
The bending eyes of outpaced contemplation.
(in soft threat)
Antigone, continue it.
ANTIGONE
A boy kneels low and turns to gaze into the glazing float.
He is a mirror facing to a pool,
Transparency returns transparency.
From this there grows uncountable complexity,
Brilliance coils, light rebounds to brightness,
Narcissus ranging wildly, image after image,
Endless as the flowers that nod and beckon
The oracular grounds.
CREON
Did you ever think to look behind yourself?
ANTIGONE
You were behind me.
68
CREON
I was above you, I am above you now!
(pointing to the mirror she has mimed)
That is where you fold into yourself under the mass,
The crush of my imperial retribution!
There you couch and shiver, little girl,
Winding in your self-absorption!
Your last salvage, a soul it is my power to erase!
You wallow in your own tautology!
(Silence. Antigone smiles. She has won.)
ANTIGONE
(not to Creon)
Yes.
The feral wisps umbilical to blank and instinct,
The marble absence wound in silken
Cerements and deathless. My apprehension
Foundered once and tried to tear an empire.
I peer, and empty to its filling witness,
Before a polished vacancy, before the mirror’s
Frozen stream. The ice clouds of my memory are yours.
I recall your estate. The clarity is mine,
And more. The drowning torrent of fear
Furls to the curling, the crooking of fingers around
The blood-lined, eye-impaling hands.
69
The boundless combustion of outrage storms into
The steal of bending knees before the raining earth.
The onslaught of sensation, fluidity in pique,
Rush in flux and animates coolly
The figures of my feelings.
I see the fixtured gesture of my mood.
The shape is its deep, field and feature fused,
The next and nether, never and near,
Infolded they inside itself.
The feature cast, as in the ductile means,
Ceremonied in the stone, fluent in the verging tints,
Choired in the carving; the field it amples,
Swamps in welling, radiating out the radii
And tresses over bound on bound.
I see myself, for I am ardent,
Brutal, seething, and meticulous,
A fathom close to bestial,
A ravaging placidity, a delving in immobile,
In density indelible, springs into intractable
And forever winters come to me recurring.
Exit absolute.
Here the grave has given gravity
And massed a firming mask,
Conforming to an antique governance,
Fresh tongued and forming timelessly before the infinite,
Framing ancient passions.
The issue is born still,
Antigone’s the product of compression.
70
In time, I saw a boy, walking a street of your city. He stopped and
looked at me briefly, looked at me directly, but his face betrayed
no expression, it offered up no register, as if he hadn’t noticed me.
He glanced around him, trailing some unheard tone that had
assembled his attention; an almost imperceptible sneer lazed across
his mouth, a slight grimace twisted his cheek, and it was gone. He
turned forward again, his face eased through its slow pivot, stopped
to stare at me again, impassive for a moment, and he began to
laugh. At first it was quiet, almost silent, and then the laughter
grew louder, grew raucous, it began to shake him, as if it siphoned
some well of vigor in him, transcribing his very vigor. And it was
self-aware, the laughter of a boy who thoroughly knew himself at
play, knew only that. I saw this, but I can’t say what triggered it,
what started him to this strange, caroming laughter, this laughter
nearly rioting to delirium. It does not matter. And I can’t say what
he was laughing at. He was laughing at nothing, and moment by
moment he caught the laughter from himself. This thing he
suffered was hermetic, self-sealed, self-perpetuating, it fed on its
own infection, as laughter is contagious, a contagion to itself. I
searched his face again, I tried to capture his eyes, and then I saw
his features virtually had dissolved, been wiped clean from the
quaking egg shell, all except that roaring mouth. Its ends began to
spread and crack levin threads across the then convulsing nacreous
rock. Patches of his skin began to pustulate and rot, stumps of
muscle liquefied to pulp, oozed and spattered to the ground.
Maggots and vermin broke through the skin at his joints, hideous,
teeming in the seeping pus and bile. And still the laughter grew
more hysterical.Valves, finned tendons, suckers on atrocious flora
71
that erupted from the thighs and sides, reverted in the stenching
air and grappled with his flesh. Crumbling skeletal excretions burst
through black and scorched. Loathsome violet serpents strung and
flowed the loins, the iris of the fundament was fouled with the
sweetness of tears. Larvae deposited the larynx, dazzling worms
bored the spewing gut into torturous spasms. Dried blood on the
hands smoked in poisonous mists that mingled with the bellowing
laughter in the blazing white helium. Out of the pavement around
the howling carcass, enormous spiders arose, with phosphorous
blue eyes, cattle snouts, and formidable profiles, devouring the
rancid droppings. The sky flamed silver, three suns scoured the
heavens, buildings gnarled and bansheed, whole cities chaosed in
crimson horror, breaking their habitual assortment. Florid vertigo
gurged us, a dimming nausea choked off the acrid sting of the
swirling fog. In it, he had been dispersed, he had lost his shape, his
very living soul. Then the smoke began to slow, and to dissolve,
And, winnowed slimmed to weaving strands,
Eddy and tenuous, in curtainous phrasings,
Wafting tortuous and supple. The sundering,
Raging, reft, and stipulation ebbed,
Lapsed, and palmed me, necessary,
Lissome from shock waves to wavering mysteries,
Abandon in vaporous richness, out of wretchedness
And wedging downgrade, quiet into transport.
Then I saw, composed in the lulling veil,
Inlined in the haloing, heliographic glow,
Reflecting on me, static in agile, arc in serene,
My own face.
And I strove to gaze into the eyes I strained to lift.
72
CREON
Narcissus cracked like fired ice,
As you will in time.
ANTIGONE
That turbulence was your descent.
That boy was Haemon.
(Creon howls out his horror, his hands claw at his face, and he
crumbles to the floor, writhing.)
ANTIGONE
He will not be coming here to die,
This time. The plot is at halt.
(Creon remains on the floor, incapable. Antigone considers him
several moments, emotionless. Then she gazes off to the wings.)
ANTIGONE
I remember craning at the heat of distant fires,
73
They pearled a thunderline.
My course was snarled and Gordian by your enterprises,
Smeared and clogged with your commerce,
Your bartering and merchant skills,
Bladed in the valley of your riches.
I was not left to follow through my simple purposes.
Uprise was the first endeavor, renewing the triumph.
The first was in your time, for here is purity.
Damn you! Damn your reign.Yours is the past
In death.
There is a world betides between two breaths,
Bubbles up to globe, it fancies, falls,
A bay of wonder transitted between
The expirations, rumination’s den.
Within each one that instant’s atmosphere
Stages out a drama; converse, parries,
Adverse, soliloquies and arguments,
A cause discoursed, a tormentor returned,
A victory, sculpt an emotion, anatomizing
Attitude, imaging a mood:
A wish reacted, the fabling of gilt,
The myth of a brood, the legend of a sigh.
Dreamt at dawn alone before a grove,
Before a lover, before a coming death,
Subsists a second and subsides, followed
By another, every time but once.
74
But I will chrysalis in capture, spill
Up, percolate the vacant, fisting into
Misting riveted, from circuit’s cell,
And pass through to the inverse out of time.
I will exalt me, escalate, escape
Into the momentary still imagined,
And endow me out above the belting,
The horizoning currents you have cut.
It is . . . the one place left for me to go.
And what if all’s . . . And what if God,
And what if death, and what if all creation
Is not criminal, what if it is the victim?
What if the resonance I’ve felt in everything
Is the trembling of a child?
(Antigone stoops and returns to her embers. Creon rouses himself
and turns on her, weak and infuriated.)
ANTIGONE
But breathless they deflect, the ending seize in languor,
Linger flash and phrasing, frozen in,
Scintilla set my bay of speculation,
Finalized . . .
75
CREON
Longer! I’ll fray, in my unending siege,
I will fray and raze and finish your implosive selfhood!
ANTIGONE
(detached)
Listen to the augment of your stricture.
CREON
You will not crack and shiver to my stricture?
You will not deign to totter from your horst,
Crack and shatter to my flaming stricture?
I will make you topple! I pronounce the sentence!
ANTIGONE
You bay your cacophonous naught.
CREON
You cannot elide from me!
All I state is utter!
76
ANTIGONE
You wallow.
CREON
The accession’s added to by every will to dam the run.
Every thought tails to the last.
ANTIGONE
Guide the river, my lord, if you will;
Helm the torrent. Pass me by.
CREON
Run by will to dam it.
You have encircled yourself.
ANTIGONE
As you say.
77
(Here the two freeze a beat. Then Creon rises to his feet, entirely
calm.)
ANTIGONE
I have avoided your succession, eluded your eternity.
And I have spun another, in absentia.
By virtue of my passion.
CREON
By virtue of my crime. Fare well, Antigone.
(During Antigone’s final speech, Creon slowly steps backward out
of the light, vanishing at the precise point from which he entered.)
ANTIGONE
In silver smooth and coruscating, glistening
The only motion, back, the mirror inverse
Of the punctured night sky’s mind.
They punctuate and scale in frieze of light
The dungeons where we age and wrestle,
Lay the ice and diamond claim.
78
Like a crucible inverted,
Lanced as sacs and light evacuated,
Abjure to abscess, relegate as aposteme,
Clamped back to the soil and socketing the earth.
So sinters the dross. Locked to its landing,
Leveled by its conflagration,
Pressured by pressure, pocked, smote and bitumen,
To a politic bulk and bearing pressure’s mold.
Its what hums to vapor’s concentrate, the rarity,
Strained on to distill, shudder to shimmer,
My lifting surge of quiet rise,
Will coalesce my resolutions’ statuary,
Firm and drift into the compact and the breach.
Like fallen, drifting leaves and petals, blown,
Emerald shreds and shavings of spinel,
By his billowing. But lofted
By the acquiescing birds, slit along the air lanes
That they crosstide, stream, and carry on,
Discipled to the harvest, prophets to the sowing.
Tatters to the fall deposited,
The thirst of dry leaves sizzling in the throat of doors,
Astride of the star scheme, pattern past the clamor,
Constanting, con-sequential, clot the shrines
And altars, heap to muzzle the cult’s state
And light into regalia of permanence and cease.
Like the veiling of garnet, arras the hang of the garment
79
Void of its victim, lunged down, and softly,
The vertical still of the dark, a stall of the vacuum,
Sheering the centering absence,
As if reflecting silence, absence set in verse.
Pulled out of life, unpawned, unpuppeted, unanimated
By no breeze, no breath, no hand,
Expressed beyond the vary and retort and immigrant,
Cast to unravening, as by the Dactyl,
Where knowledge brings with it a grace,
— The clamor and mesh of reluct is related
To webbings relucent, found and founded
The antique to come — returned to whence I came.
Laid to the pull and accorded,
Last to the gravity, left and imponderable,
An empty robe hung in an empty room.
(Antigone is still for several moments, then folds into herself. The
light fades slowly and
Blackout.)
Selected Poems
82
The Hollow At The Core
There is still a difference between something and nothing, but it is purely geometrical
and there is nothing behind the geometry.
— Martin Gardner
As os arcs arctic argencies spine light.
A throw’s a mere extrapolated here,
A man’s a mere ascription, nominon.
The hyal cyan slits, shoot iris shoal,
And flutes flowed florid, asps of scarlet apse,
The squint rose sprays to layers membranes blaze,
The world whorl whirled bowl by concurrent seas;
A hand to glove, a Chinese box of eyes.
Or space will spiral spied by site unscene,
Or orifice will orb the common scroll.
Or porcelain resigns a mating hail,
And face to face to fan in symmetries,
The specular repair to rhyme in tiers.
A glaze will glance to gain the puppet gaze,
Or rivet to the glare in coupling sheen.
Pane clarified the fetch fled and relapse,
And plunge the spread refuse and folds reply,
And whispered fields repleat in non on non.
The rain ran runnels down the pulsant wail;
The curling smoke of genius wraps the night.
83
The Last
In memory of Rhoda Spielman
The soil has sieved her, drawn her, steeped her, downed
And flocked her to the bedding of its ought;
A granulate, soft sift to silent drifts,
Lit lightning wince of every saber thought.
The seep unsoled her, souled her, sold her sleep,
A gravitate of galaxies of she,
The purchase of the ground, her weep to black,
And percolate into infinity.
The settle fractions strew to grid a term:
The snow of her in melting, sinking rime;
And darkness curls in darkness coils about
The velvet bones beneath the skin of time.
A roll suspension rounding on a dearth;
The particles geometry the last
And trace a correlate continuance:
But every torment figured in its cast.
Self matricied and gentle to its gone,
And damped, dissolved, devolved upon the earth;
The thunders whish her breathing, storms converse
Her generation, seas beat on her birth.
84
Tremor
reflux de vie en toutes fosses, hommes debout sur toutes dalles,
et la vie reprenant toutes choses sous son aile!
— St.-John Perse
The night she died three stars fell.
Mulling under dormant nascencies,
Cobalt and recumbent, unconcerned,
Glister-chipped and pasturing my moods.
The glimmering sands gash, the sky keel caves
Shore beads, still blazing, sheen scales, seething schemes
In scatter, rider gleams, on flowing skeins
The glance skates, flake, skim, and die, skip back:
The diamond trails. The heavens hazard light
And rock. Sculpture powder luminate
Hung gravitating foams, bleeds brilliancies;
Incendiary lace, jewel steaming rib,
Barreling beauty to the closeting
Lips’ edge, — fast vapors gem the hemisphere,
Cut figures in the night, — recombinant
Star sleeve, meridians a maw.
Out from the choke of graves,
85
Close and clot of sifting dynasties,
Cool whisked the burden dust.
The rush, the thunder, rumination ran —
The dark a range and laving — long and limned
A genius swell.
The diamond spattering,
Scintilla shot the clarity, the breeze in sheen,
Vibrancy in gleaming speculation, spumed
A churning hush of luster in the lull.
One diamond rimed a phrase in preface,
Clean as triumph, lord as flung,
But then the ghosts were breathing promises.
Black winds wound the sand weeds,
Restless at the steep sea edge,
Splintered, bristling as the weathered ash.
Trident cracked by bolts of blinding ire,
The rife of every splay and seething spread
A talon flashing, cnidoblastic cleave,
Abruptly sidelit latent architecture,
Dark’s girders, roots, profiled foundations for
The simmering ukase. Light breaks like glass.
At base black ordonnance, while white weal crown,
Strike silver geysers, flame and blare the stone
Rake, train the slab of cloudwork, brandle, known
86
To quelling, bombard back the river’s tone,
And in unheeding chase with all unending
Consequences of conceiving, seize! —
A corps to bore, braze, close the tempered glow,
A battery for the core quietness.
A tatter rags a bay wind, beats and snaps
And dangles to the hush of thoughtlessness.
At shattered woods, winds, broken stones
The fuming, preying bone breath coiled
Sentences, plaited a pillared loom, walled
(And vapors lift like souls) a mass, a musing cavity,
Within the nearly crystallized enclave, almost silence,
Almost scorched to glass.
Ash stunted, fusion flexed and solder masked,
His marrow graphite as he signatures the breeze.
Consecutively strands unclasped the auricle,
Rung down on the vitrifying masque, rung down three
times, —
She wove and stormed the vacuum fisted distances
That throat the clutching, every movement making maze, the
fear wrung forms;
At air shock grasses stiffened, fingerstalks uncurled.
From Nausicaa he wafted free, launched by his beneficence.
87
These forged and fragmentary runes have strewn the sands.
The strands were plowed by thunder,
Continented, valed, and river snarled,
Grimaced in a hissing mesh of foam,
Engraved to lace the late geography,
Resound the lay of hollow competences,
Thread to map the slipping empery cut in
Diminishing relief.
Brass pantomime and lithic colloquies
That echo by a casting generation,
Wrung out, rung iron, mere reverberations,
Sized, a dying fall.
Scraps of light clatter, beam broken memory,
The blood and cinder stub scrawls, spangle ooze exuding,
By oscillations in and out of night,
Reflecting, vibrant to a tone.
The hollow resonates with its own depth,
The cinctures drum and range caverns to
Absence; white acid grinds the sand tract; breath
The lotic hope slips back, uncorridors
The flood to stall, evacuates the cope.
One stream the sparkling grume smear draws and veins
The venom line, the stemming scar, the planets,
88
Sick with their redundancy, light hot
To bite the sky curb, cool enough to rattle
Moon thin tissues, leaf the tides.
By three roads, tapped by three names —
Dorje staggered; tombstone looped:
The slowly pooling slide to swirling
Witnesses, the spinning pit, the quarry,
Belting torrent of dissolving rock
Throng lunar ancestry and auditors
Deposited in every hell, the mind —
An estuarial confluence of flows;
There’s one I can’t recall.
I’d thought great heart would pump life into apertures of
mire,
Tide a vital light;
The mouths mound merely ceca.
Reclining, cratered brash, crumbling talus spokes an ebbing
web,
Awkward, angled over his implicit crypt,
Beatling his doom.
At nearly silver shore, at broken palings,
White thumbs cracked to the domed densities,
Jawed by channels, mandibled by sheens,
89
Gripped grains dribble to the still wave amassing.
Granule by granule, stone by stone,
Tremor to treble,
I took this to the near dawn end:
My hourglass dialectics.
In stilled, in stable midnight,
With folded wings the granite fates like lead,
The blown, star scalded bays,
The Theocritan hounds,
And all my precious people dead.
The gargoyled soot,
The embering wale,
My dire people burning in the air.
Écoute, écoute, ô mon amour,
le bruit que fait un grand amour au reflux de la vie.
90
The Eyes Lear Never Lost
Une description ou représentation exacte de le qu’on pense —
comme d’un phénomène — suffit à ruiner toute métaphysique.
— Valéry, Cahiers, 28:540
What’s all that’s matter mats what’s matter’s more,
Laired inward let long low hum stallsome stilldom awe sum,
Chamber laid like lay low vein sew staid so thought sow,
All so, stressed, breath feathered, canistered
A heart subcrest and bedded to arrest,
Compressed vent, ovum-auraed, nucleaired,
Ore-aura-awed, core-aurum-aired, decorum
Underlie declare. Thought thumb threads etch,
At impress updraft, fume from draw, sit squints
The site, the bite bit cream green pucker, blooms
In vinegar run involution, mints
Indelible to grave, lay intricates
Voluptuous, dealt daedalus the gouge;
Come cauterize cum vacancy, accaust
Acuity incise; displacement dales
Through drawing on, an involute’s volition’s
Will, rist involute’s incharacter,
Transmission in inevident direction,
Socket print appropriate to thumb.
The glove’s the hand inhabiting the glove.
Endow induces seemliness to seem,
The rectitude re realize, the real
91
Of eyes read relative to undersee
(The labyrinth is struck upon the sea)
Submerse’s axioms of gracefulness.
Like live wire wormward lamps what’s vacant amps,
The frame alit lasts brackets in, as twine
Through skin, form fingers, fashions as a hand,
It tungstens flush fasts facts and figures, fleshes
Cues wills watts with lines of paradigm:
The signing out of cite play underlay,
The under breath, for say; writ rightness of
A disposition, cleanness of a cut;
Put patterning musts matter makes aware.
For crystal drench the turn and crook of grate,
The crystal lays in latency, the resin
Of the resonate, the standing waves,
Stood understanding, white lace nets to turmoil
(Introspection funnels down this skin),
Turned tangency turned graph, grown graphics, strokes
To siteless graphite, irresoluble,
Confusion, fusion, formants, turbulence
For controversy, paradigms preveil.
Well wetware whelms in wondermeant, so soft,
Sum set coordinate, coordination
Plan plot pulleyed, gear winch work the blush.
The hint purusance hunted through the door
Still stands behind the door. More mood enmesh,
92
Most atmosphere dimensions, compasses
Con vergings, drafts protracts, determination
Morphic made, the vague irresolute,
Place in the pace of perpendiculars
(Lost legend at the bottom of the drawer).
In order’s psyche, stall’s still patience, make
The matter, imaging imagining,
And patient paints in patency, as plain,
As plane, as sensible as algebra,
As state as territory to deter,
As architecture as dismay, as scrawl
Recalling, ward with wary atmostfear.
His fingers to the air, the stub is stump,
Is stumped, a wall touched is touched by a wall.
The factor out forever beat, forefeeling
Fourth of axial or fathom fall
Or logic logarithmic to a lore.
A butterslab of dark keyholes the hall
But every beat that bats through black abuts,
Their soundless wings wave water night and spasm
Light, the smoky current hemicranic,
But’s the batter, battens back, the muffled
And concussive slams, the cotton rams,
The pressure packs, the hammer thuds. The shocks
Of an unnatural air. The feel full cotton
Wadding wades in punctureless supernal
93
Close. So solid is the solitude.
The oil, the seeping rich, the surface slick,
The thick of it’s what’s lubricates the pass.
The buff of burnish buffets back and busy
Busses, nudging press against the head,
And stresses dense, with languid floral force;
And wing shear prickles fibers at the nape.
At startle distance, fed afar from, fathom
Float, the limbs pulse rhythm with the wavers,
With the waves, what, with the winds, the grazing
Drifts, the algorhythmic afferent shifts;
The wadding tides and tremors with the winds.
The fiber feelers tease the thud to thought;
Profundity’s a plummet sound, and faintly
Found: the drumming of dubiety,
The deadfall of the doubt. And every swerve
Of depths is stomach deep, the sweep of shadows
Fluming cobalt drowning into greys.
The metaphor’s, the meta’s for sweat swelling
Of distinguishments, in bellying
Auxesis, teaming merisis, for somite
Be the nuances, since surging rares
Of vertigo, by dilating dilution.
An I by eye? gurged absence viscous tense
Immensed braced concentration of a gape,
Coagulation clod the pleaching wisps.
Dark pivots and unlocks the door.
94
What’s more than matter’s matter made and maps
In memory, remade is, moments membered
Into’s, strung on veins of once, remind,
And memory’s remembering. A thought
Will manufactures feel, feel factory
Through thought, conceive by broods, digest, reflect
Reflection, mime mentate, amok of metrics,
In affect an ideation, ape
Prehension, visceral intends; to see
Is grasping what’s pronounced; name tensible
Growth wordward transmits; thinking makes it sow.
The mind makes matter matters, matters matter,
Mat´·ûr(s). But an idea is a fact,
The soul’s in fact, and time. A term’s a tangent
Tangible. The period’s a word.
Now, naught but neurons are but neurons are
Inferred, inknown in noun, a noun’s a host
And in declension heard: a knower known’s
No knower: knower non, nor knowing none,
Now nowhere known: anon a noun aknown.
It’s pranked and bowed by levering. So souling
Hand fans phantom. Brain’s branch fantoccini,
Fantoccini catered with an eye.
The piercing thought transfixed and framed full fractions
Of discern. The drink of velveting
Of sense, informed, infused, to making sense,
95
And seen, unscene, the circularity
Of pointlessness. Think it through. It dies.
Aridities the venture of a sound
Regard the serious untempered mind.
The sense of sense concentrics keys the mingle
Everything with everything, corruption
Falls the all with all, call calculations
Figured into veer in, sere in, frothing
Wadding packed in back the door, but passage,
Prone, to turn to wadding packed behind
The door. And instincts twine and twine their feelers.
Mist of charcoal dust in billows fogs
And graze between the trees, and dusk the evening
Into sober deeps, the choking sleeps
The marshfire of the named erase, the noteless
Trace, or order’s ordinariness.
The fading photo phantom-fails and ghost
Entrails and trickles down the mindment maze.
To ruminate is ruination. Smudge
Of knowledge, what is after, smears across
A folding screen. The lasting hum aware
Is worn and selves the particles of wake
That hinder in the gelatin of swarming,
Nest the hive of pillowing replies,
Hover to the destituting foam,
And turn as sleeper, smother in and settle
Like the gelid hand of absolution,
96
Spectral soft descending in the sieving
Snow, pollinating nothingness;
Given in the gravitate of grave.
Leave green pincers into tan, canaries
Caliper in slate, the marigold
Is bled cerise, the calcium’s distressed.
Indigo and naples yellow, turquoise
And the orange lake. A lake’s a ground,
A jet’s a hurtle blank, and lemon banks
The Dresden blue; the auric lazes, tendons
Lapis; viridescence crescents shades.
The mandarin, not dun, rose madder, hoared
His silver, sanguine grown, he burnt sienna
And the ochre of the Florentine.
Monsignor’s swathed in plies of saffron, speaks
Of puce and blent to whin. The salmon peaks
At peach, the flaxen tarts in mignonette,
Electrum wavers come incarnate. Mauve
It gazes at the damsel in cyan.
Monsignor spatters ash. Ceruleans
In orchid sleep, in lavender retire.
The fluency of gold is lost in thought.
The seep Cezannes a tissue into wash
And tints to rice paper transparent seas.
A double hinge heard disappears the door.
97
The grid recedes in ocean waves, the butter
Wire cut, departs through churning batter,
Struts cross struts, hatch halls the voiceless clamor,
Towers loom, and magister by blocks,
By ranks, the air between withstands in damp
And drumming dusk, their warp weft weaves to tidal
Slides, the rinsing lines, the hazing shallows
Flourishing, the washing cees, the running
Esses, undulations synergies.
The minarets of vantage ornament
Mathesis of delight, the run of tear
Refines the curl, precisions spoke the light;
And wave on wave on pane eradicates
The reign, dissolves the dreaming, vistas drain,
Returns to geometrics of the night.
A mannequin is stalling mid step through,
To turn again, to turn back to the door.
An echo rhythms closure down the hall.
Musty light cat crawls the alley grate
In hunching glides and hungers after flames.
A numb is thumbing fire out of thought.
Towers loom a cenotaphic doom.
And moving rights, rutwrit, by fingers, soul
Sets center to the censure of its sense;
The nails across the wall hatch nibs that scrawl.
The grid is writ in water, writ in waves.
A pin has written age on faces, neural
98
Traces trim the play across the outward
Plasm splay (the street lamps arc in grins),
A scrim of skin, caress is carcass, stroke
A fingerstub, and fingerstub a sheath.
But whether wind will finger through the cards
Of harvest, toy the scrap of alley, scrape
The chisel of a wedge and clinic breach
To ledge, the foottread is an alley carbon,
Carrion a cleft. The flesh is chess.
The media are night air, rainpause pats,
Slow indigo piano echoes, glisten
Sills, and listen, snow ghosts whisker vapor
Lacing ghost, and neon fragrance rinses,
The lift, in pitch, the ocean orbs, what wallow,
Rise, in lilting waver raise, in scale,
A candle lit corona nape, the ripple
Shadow greens, the coral carnadine,
The lingeringly undulate, the well,
The wadding lip, the felt, the putty numbing
Of the fingertip, and distance chiming
In the trees, the breathing of anxiety,
The tick omit, spaces as expanse,
Expend, the ominous of monotone,
Accession of the monodramas, rustlings
And the sapphire drift, and memory,
And firelight. The set is mediated
And the media invents. Invention
99
As in protoplasm. Every verging’s
Circle, circuit closes, circles chaining,
Rimming prison cell. Lorn lingers lace,
Four fingers case a case for, spaces space,
For tensor mysteries. For every tremor
Nears a technics, spasm is insight.
The hand that trembles pleads the door lock, wincing
Is its prayer. Hands tremble at their close.
A pathic reasoning, a need, a dream,
Hypothesis a wake left being dreamt,
Dream figures flesh and figure out the dream.
Futility of thought well thought, whelm felt,
Pasts passionately lent (what’s left is lean
And lean into is curling, curling cees):
The philosophic gouge, the lesion doubt,
The shiver thought, the eyes Lear never lost.
The aspect of interiority
Condensates to the tears upon, the glance,
Glare mordant burnish of the circum-stance.
The made of matter are the tears of time.
What’s phasing matters, what are phasing matters,
Woof and filler aromatics, steams,
Wolframiums and texts; and death is death,
What’s dun is done, as figures factor out,
As dreamer figures on; what’s time is thyme.
And gone is gone, a door gone is adore.
100
Conjunction Of The Senses
Alles Lebendige bildet eine Atmosphäre um sich her.
— Goethe
I n jedem Nu beginnt das Sein; um jedes Hier rollt sich die Kugel Dort.
Die Mitte ist überall.
— Nietzsche
as Bekannte ist das Gewohnte; und das Gewohnte ist am schwersten
D
zu »erkennen«, das heisst als Problem zu sehen, das heisst als fremd,
als fern, als »ausser uns« zu sehn.
— Nietzsche
There are no relative densities of here;
A hammerblow recoils a latitude,
Occurrence curts extensity and curls
The view round to; finger drum, pierce patience
Through, englobes, entones entirety;
However far rains whisper in the ear.
Core looms, a muteness clots, appear’s within
A circuit: subjects object aggregate,
Inhere, they nave the felloe, play deploy,
Coheres, the pillar swings surround and jars
The sloven, ports in current lay in line,
Glass cylinder can disabuse the eye;
And fragrant textures rush the halls of sound.
A life are loci for the pith of time
And stories in the tendency of flow:
A boy enroll, in toll, the spirit’s sole
And every each that cinctures all’s an utter;
101
The boy inturned immensity, concerned
The tow and themed the role of history
(The point her touch’s would be filigree),
He closed the door and sored the broken wheel;
And drops will crater wave a way, a world.
The rain drop rings the water globe.
Event winds what was west left, vests bereft,
It sweeps the ocean rim of light, it cables,
Atmospheres, enalls; and so, content
Reforms to content, extent lie of extant
Foci pleat to superimposition,
Being in position: so an augend
Is its sum, each utter argues, augurs,
Is, each ardor, every spot is here;
Soft spots of sound closed round the step of thought.
And night range folds in rain lights, simmers faint
Felt fiber cracks, and droplets douse the seemings,
Satin thunder patter, draw the house,
The lawn, the eaves, they recollect the leaves.
And he’s as many me’s as memories.
Splay fountain spray’s concentric resonance
And mercuries in thrilling hushing down;
So in a sense, a moment’s, sense construes
(In fluid intimate) in tenor, tone
(The tenor’s tone) and vehicles a sense,
(In all I feel, I feel, I feel myself)
Wrapped aura, all recall’s a redolence:
102
A suffered thing, a thing done is a tone.
But memory deposits memory,
A time upends a time. The pivots place,
Fact simple situates (effectual:
Affectual) and chemistries the outposts
To a fold (and drips its linen tones).
The splash’s (equaling) the only moment.
Any lit cognition trains in thus
And filaments the hemisphere of fore:
Remarks remark, unarc, resign, a line,
No utter’s more an axiom than other,
Laterally, latterly, or late,
Without us, ask us, Ascus, for Lycurgus
Grounds the earth, or else, the endomorphic
Transformation of Antigone.
(And she’s as many me’s as memories.)
The quantum’s a society. In sum,
Perspective withers in the ear. Hear,
The single stitch of place and lace is ever
Referent; and darkness spatters wisp
Of lull allure (in heart-height nearly herd
Alarms); and every sound regalaxies
The infinite macadam crust; (the moisture
Pace, the trace) and tattered lace is shred
And falling stains of clarity; one,
And after, one. And memory reposits
Memory, a time appends a time.
103
The tear drop wrings the water globe.
Therefore; for every thought’s the point of touch
(The mind’s I is a fingertip), and instant
Is the premises, a logic lodged,
And what’s approximate is absolute,
And memory is hereing. Particular
Is singular, acute; and water gutters
Like a flame; or harboring in patient
Weight; or conjugates centricity.
In all, a moment’s a philosophy.
Recall: the moment whole, the moment gone,
The moment missed, the moment hole; absense.
(But barely breathéd tufted pounds pulsepause.)
The world is a redundancy of world.
Reflection’s written on the night-smudged glass
Of actuality, centrifugal,
Ellipsing luxury. A null imports
Without, and being cored, and every cycle
Oughts to magnet counter nucleate.
But distance delves, unearths, so sounding sounds
Unsound, unseen, undone and innosense.
The weightless hub, the capital regard
Forms fixture in the intrados revolve,
Such pageant light the spill and transport drift;
Hence, through a casement septuary stills
Congeal for foreign, far forms ever else.
104
To Tender
tingling of the lips and tongue, loss of motor coordination, floating
sensation, hypersalivation, numbness of the entire body, muscular
paralysis, difficulty in swallowing, weakness, nausea, vomiting,
convulsions, about 60 percent fatality in humans; no known antidote
— Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition,Volume 14, p. 613
For I have seen the blowfish face fulfilled,
Et sein, und arrondie, with slapping, sucking
Sounds: the membrane boom a fumarole,
Thrustmass open-grinned, engorged — and gorgeous
The inflected lashes, febrile tendrils
Foam gesticulating lacings — flush
Flood-lunged and fluid-forged; luminous
In taeniate midnight, humid lamp the lower
(Surging is stropped to a stoke on the capuchin glower),
Lunar funicular; fore the gore’s agape
A waiting. Prickle fibers of a loll,
And fiber jolt at whisk and whisper (def.),
But a bauble of juice-tensile shimmies and murmurs its edge.
Fused mongrel warp the tugging street and bandy
Yahweh’s figure, lunge-locked, overlapping
Loiter, in the shiver frame of lane.
Tear hand as the tore arm drug by tendon
Thread, pendulumed by a tissue string,
Viscera-twist and perilous by a hair.
Valence-intricating intercepts
105
And trends into intussusceptive blends;
Nodule of mammal brims its filament,
Giddies tear, drops, spalshes, crawls away.
And burbles glint and carom down an endless
Unastonished stare. Just; so, soft
And gave (medusae throb in basin sobs),
As such conger seas a congeries.
So, pliancy and dilate pitying —
A bed unbend to laze and flourishing
Ateem (the grotesque’s tumescent and limpid) a languid
Ghosts, adream, apulse, a pulmonary
Inspiration (the siamesed made mirror) —
Eye salt seas the paralytic gleam —
(And tumid for slaught), in lieu’d, plasticity
(They unite, untie, and toe unto
An undulating corps in creasing ever
Dormancy) — die, late and lurid of
Alighting, dunning, coreward ease, a turmoil
Seizing, furling, teasing out of rhythmic
Tick, time’s talk; to torrent the lacking, the laving,
To laking the torments, doused, drowsy, beating, downed
Into the solvent, darkly twining heart;
In dolence (valves logic); as organa
Coral falters, opal altars nod;
By wrath in wraith; of verging, callosal and Orpheus,
Starlight and tackle, carbon and gossamer cycles bonds
Phosphor and rife. Ours is not the life.
106
La Pièga: A Gio’ Pomodoro
Neoß ef hmerh hlioß.
(The sun is new every day.)
Hrakleitoy
The instigation of the surface wrecks
The plate self-mating mind. The convolutions
Interfuse and flag the conflagration
Drags, the ruffles mountain contours to
The fold. They ridden, scaling, billow, boost
And hidden ridge in viscid mull: the mind
Amoeba jelly snaps and withers to
A pulse. A reflex through a light’s impress
And through an amniotic ever spirits
A dispersive tactic in convulsive sheens
The shudder thought: One thought by thought it shimmers
As it pails and plunges, plash, in creases,
Serpentines a film a touch recoils.
Pushed surfaces in ripple sinews supple
Currents flex and press, the tendons and
The cartilage of stone and casting spasms.
Black and lactic skins the balks and girders
Running to, the geometric jutting
Through, an architecture pressure its
Relief up through the flesh. Convenings lip
Conversant brims and mercury precession
107
Lathes (Congealing seethes, the insect feeler
Teeming rooting shoots in time, with labyrinths
Stowed in the puzzle haze. The grip
A multiple of grip. Futility
To steam the ice.), for boxes formulate
Themselves in algebraical device,
To clock the frieze in algorithmic rime.
Sun’s serpent rears for Galileo, eye
The spindle to the sky, when winched with highness
By the fathoms, by the comprehend.
And undersea unseen sensations pillar
Felt and movements ooze recesses to
The depths. Bacon trickled blood eruptions.
Bloodless curdles in the slow denote
Deep featureless upheavals roil and furnace
Blast the vents. The vertical intents
In tensions jet the heat degrees in torsion
Reify aphelions, vortex coolly,
Slap the syrup coal, vapor round
The gimbal, sift and settle through the lens:
Diffraction to orthogonal to shift;
The lateral of latency to drift;
And softly Debussy’s submersing down.
And then the coiling of the Euclid sun.
Paces swabbed with velvet black have crimped the alley grate.
108
Her hand has half reached out in prose,
Her hand in pause, feeling forth descended
The unenvisioned city of the lair.
Behind the air has shed the brownstones
And the wholesale bricks upon a street, still,
Dispensive sediment impacted, devoutly undevolved.
The air has drizzled down the fashionable rubble.
The night’s a sawtooth cataract. She seas
Remembered moments, drinking subtle coffees,
Reading Berenson among the hotel flowers,
On the viewside of Fiesole.
Handmade pages, bound in leather, blank,
Closed upon the table. Remembered just in time.
Recalled, she never saw the moon in daylight
Then, never just the moon.
And tried, to choose between the ardency
Of Renaissance of Florence or
The imperatorial of antique Rome;
To choose between the sentiment and the will.
The cradle of her neck has now gone cold.
And she has half looked back perhaps, perhaps
In flections out of curiosity.
The spikes and spires and vectors bunch and batter
Bout centrifugal, the scaffolding
Infists. The mental squared, compression to
Emulsify, encounters through: the contours,
Cramps, and flutter ribbons, crash of sequents,
109
Slapping belts and cracking to the rolls.
This justice pairs irreconcilably
The matrimony of the flash and sleight,
The flesh tones, flux in weave and overwhelming,
The very and veridical deny.
The sun deposed to melting heaps, the runnels
Simply run and snake the wreckage of
A stonish mound. And then the foments and
Entangle, meticulous and to the lacing
Bind, and to the lacing borne.
In memory a resonance returned,
To broach and slow the repetition shore.
The watch has stopped, the grit streams from the docks,
A grip in flicker, purchase of about.
The Vladimir wing wraps the breeze without.
110
The Planetary Flaw
The deadly misfires scorched the lawn of languor,
Vagaries, and hate. The frozen cascade
Stands occurrence. The astral gate has slammed
And sand has broken through the glass and strewn
To lock this time machineries of noon;
Successions stammer to geography.
In faery fields, past mist concorded straits,
On distant islands, nowhere, does she wait.
The fearsome and dismay redemption chats
Retick and grin the installation map,
For what you wield can’t be which will wield you.
In meantime, skin is flaking from the skull.
Forlorn for circumstance, for me, for fate
It isn’t floats the fever stains of faith,
The vector grimace inclination trait,
Or parametrics of the levitate.
And Venus hasn’t risen with the dawn.
111
The Radical Of Mars
The wind has picked by miles and descends
Upon the flue and combs and fingers through
The drifted ashen particles construe,
The patency of gardened discontents,
And mounds in figures bundled into trusts.
The fuse has blown the radical of Mars,
And drawn, and starlight breathlessly arriving
Vaporizes in the stew of argyle,
Blatancy, and rest. The sizzle fizzes
Steam into the rue. True heart is blacked
And sooted through credentials of the means.
The ligature of visible retain
Contracts to fragrant intimation cusps.
A single atom figures out its thrust.
112
White Tactics of the Stone
The mind rides high and spites the sainted coils
That spike the vinegar of spasm, spur
The skeletal remains behind and bends to wrack.
The streets of ruin track the serpent’s guts
In labyrinthine smuggle of the phantom
Hounds in fathom downs to slip the tooth
To comprehensive throat. A hand breaks through
The ice to tangle ligaments of thought
And pull them to. The ligature of spiral
Binds the snake of intellected column.
Child mind abouts the blundered grave and solemn,
Pule and purling drifts of innocence
Are geared to increments of the omit,
And ratcheted to lapse, the red balloon and bloody,
And unencumbered by the flight to drive,
To recommence the fantasies of done.
Ice splinters tick the netting of intents.
The artisan in dreaming act obtain
Invisibly white tactics of the stone,
Strategics, pressed in darkness, fold alone.
And braced to bronze and poured to spine, and Donatello said,
As boys rehearse their music lessons by the severed head.
113
Museo Missionario
Convento di San Francesco, Fiesole, Italy
The fossils of the social beast
Have etched the repetition self.
Where polar slabs have slit their teeth:
The Cadmus strown along the shelf.
The mirror shaved the worst to least.
Some pharaohs rose up from the wood.
They letter out identically
The Bacchic spell of quietude.
The sunshines scald afflation wheels,
The sand in back their vitrine home.
The figurines their must can spleen.
In aeons now they stand alone.
Behind them grind the slipping grist,
The fisted gaze, the palsy burned.
They flying buttress elbow list
The moment that one’s back is turned.
The Kewpies standing stalwart fan.
Their regal faces pock the glass.
The mandible erects the grin,
114
Incisors whish the warm command.
The oars reduced the turbid sheen,
The obelisk helium lit,
Cartouche sand scored in absency
The labyrinthine tombs omit.
The temples hollowed through with wind,
Colossi crumbled through to dust,
From Thebes to Thebes the pillars thinned,
The mind Antigone impulsed.
The fatted calf walked water lanes
And shattered down to salt the waves.
The casting wade bred settle grains:
Benignity’s ten thousand graves.
The chorus line turns back to bow,
The gods to take the rahs, the murk
Of ferment seas foamed faith and brow,
Beatific missionary work.
They will not see, they will not speak
And more than three for they repeat.
The ghosted backhand butts the meek;
The fatid ponder quits the seat.
115
By peer on peer they melt a door:
The savage glass imposing sun.
The world’s a fido waiting for
A master who will never come.
116
Twice
No stone remotes the smoke in being made.
The hazes play to animate,
Inphases fade through multiplate;
Some riven into galaxies the writhe,
The star stream flows in bullets of the night.
The powder steam storms, thud thrown dust forms figures
Flicker feint, ghosts of hand articulate
In mime, remind, pan flat, and dispirate.
The pounding spray grooms imagery of grace,
The waft to settlement congealing down.
The guttering of squander rains in black
To quail to pulse of mean, or near, or meant,
Float gaze back punctuations through to rent.
Each shudder to the hollow of the bone.
Such snow on ink. The snow does not descent.
As marble slopes absorb the marble pour.
While still stone stands, forms foams at mallet rise;
The cloud ways waver, hammer at the eyes.
Eyes puncture to the running liquor night.
Curbed constellations quiver at no breath,
No beat, no peace, the florin resonance.
Thoughts chewing at the corner of the mouth.
Each incarnation, each incarceration
117
Drinks and preens the slam, the tensile thought,
The drill bite, bit with antiquary shunt.
The momentary intrigue bides the binary of hence.
The spuming of the calcium, black ink
Streaks charcoal streets, while white chalk phases fail.
Cerebral re-creations claim selfsame disparity.
Medusae shrill the visually air.
The chisel slit, the hammer ram, the blow,
Among the dissipating merge, the verge
Of vaporizing trails, confirm the ledge;
Twin faces stood at quarters to the hedge.
118
Ravel
The hand that unintended lifts
The mirror to the fingertips.
The mouth disposed to glazier sips
Indues the understanding rifts.
The knowledge of deployment hangs
The kettlebar with polaric hands
That rayed concentricated bands
Beneath the corticated bangs.
The roil up foamed the planar ball
About the dislocation oar
A hesitation riveled or
Arrhythmic arithmetic pall.
The intersection of the round
Bay slit and cleaved the wings in doubt,
Performed the pas de deux devout
And consecrated on the sound.
A turbid thought immovable,
Firmed fuming fixed centrifugal
Omits the fourth orthogonal:
The spasm of intangible.
119
The palm that calmed the forehead claims
The vapor dissipate remains
The scarp of memory disdains;
An ovoid hovering the frames.
The volume stacked of echoes such
That binding clouds and pores to sup
The mesmerizing coffee cup;
The paper thickens to the touch.
Reflection’s whetted at the mattes
And hues, recall’s the humid pass
That jarred the smudge upon the glass:
The spherical before the flats.
The passing to forever was
The passion gone to kingdom come,
The bearing slipping from the thumb,
Now done undoing what it does.
And tantamount to being facts
Remount the febrile hand to act,
The sculpted forms resound and blacked,
And music seals the thumbprint wax.
120
Terza Rima
The sucking pit the sea in hollow thumbs
The gouge thalassa gurgitates in thought
The crags of castle rip tooth through the hail
And granite tatters cobwebs into time
The grains abrasion gravel scours air
The vinegar pinch squints to pressure dent
Serration is the furrow of this brow
The pucker drubbing pushes back the give
The shifting of the totter ticks the seethe
A barometric smattering of sunk
Through intermittence honeycombs intend
Amazement labors labyrinthically
The grottoes of the mulling roil the stew
Gnarl gorgon concentrations mate the streams
The play of mind is pattern in the fray
So daedal condign by vapidity
The freedom plunging packs to make a scene
The fault of falter fails infantasies
The acts commission sets by their constrain
121
Hands strain to raise against the blazing squall
Sulfuric destitutions dilate haze
The waters of depression drown the seas
The drift is lost in matters ruminate
The thresh in wishes trundles fluencies
Retaining walls re-semble in the mist
The blow is balanced in exact by wait
A composition magnetizes drone
The sea is tears acquired into lapse
Dispel discharges charge is block by block
A milk white wind and gusting razor smooth
For mirror reifies eradicate
The slice of life and in take equaling
Exhaust but wind will while it doesn’t knot
A soul’s abillow bellows to its leave
The slit through slid stamps sliver to the leaves
In clenches drop corruption to its sheen
The shiver shaping shelters in as sheath
And rhythms static serrying its team
The tremor breathes back terror in its teem
122
Idyll Of Spring
The scented vapors mingle with the breeze
And cooling dusk swells, smothering the day;
They gather up the wine-drops of the trees
As I walk with Apollo by the bay.
The quiet waves drink in the thundercrack
That dissipates above these sons and daughters
Of robes of lavender, eyes ivory black;
With carelessness she kneels to kiss the waters.
Her gesturings are, in this gentle gloom,
Grandiloquence of indolence that must,
Despite the ardency that you assume,
Withdraw to leave you writhing in the dust.