Star of Araby: Drafts and Notes
The following are drafts and elements of a new piece “The Star of Araby” commissioned by Jehanne. One of the sweet things I call her is the “Star of Araby”—I think she first used it. Her father is Egyptian (though her heroes when she was young were both Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Sctos)—and she’d asked me to write a poem to/about her, which has become the starting point for me for a new take on a lot of old stuff that I suppose is really, as usual, about me.
Threshold (or “Before completion the young fox gets its tail wet crossing the ice”)
saint wood be ash wind
thus strong
would be eight by fire
her falling leaves
her book unopened
***
there was an, unsettlement
can I say that to somehow justify those
possible sunnier passages in a time
among others I might have met whose
presents I may have had
***
and so also here is an among
and then, through what imagines
an atrium, a second among,
the passing street just beyond,
that passes in quiet
***
deep in my memory is a girl
white dress with rabbit my
sister I, whose ash unsettled—place
smeared sky after rain
torn a leafen oak
hole in the sky
(years later in a different life I
would come on El Greco’s Toledo
and recognize that sky said)
***
I remember what it is like to be dead
watching the wind the way things changed
also trouble I could not stop that voices
syntax cannot describe it impart
Star of Araby
First Descent
I
Cargo lights out north a bay then sea
sparkled islands swept black, sky
cranes in autumn mixed the way
we say “marsh” or “Cairo horizon”
I’ve never seen so imagined
her father one wadi streetlight with
page turned traces planes that
stars become a threat just rumors
we scuffed white cement—played jew
and nazi & Hamburg where stars
fell I was listening perhaps
the cloud close to summer’s moon
was what was left of last decades
apartment wood stairs & fire.
II
Dutchman turned liner Atlantic
haunted her what Murmansk & Oman
mourned acres—sunk metal at piers
Eliot said was a third barren
river or war—which was it?
Her torn pharaoh & necklace steamer
ricketed we know longer see
whispered black and white sands.
A colonial then, perched by the inkdrawn Charles,
Masacomet drawn sheep in fields
sleep wood stars shawdows
worn down his shoulder he slept
she was saying Sahara, there is no
God but God, roamed.
III
Sounds picked up between Ipswitch
did Alexandria a long leant hour,
somewhere between a high wire
and orchard, a century rememberd
remained dead, peaceful August graves
his was, among what sold, what had
become solid, a soup con the way Pierre
would say we were forgetting.
“We came out of the roaring into bright
Aegean sun bright Elysian radiators”
ill radiant luminous wickery
as saddles and John-John ribbed stairways
a bedroom above, parents adrift in
armchairs, drifted steeples
V
Not yet America aslant in fog shoal
“we went back and forth between
Kiev and Berlin, Paris and back to
Munich our cloth and cardboard bags
Klee drew nights in coal, smudged
violet or crush, whatever dragon
not shtetl gnosms but world rue
climbed cracks in the kitchen
overhung what was spreading
soup, boots clumped fellaheen
the fallen would be wheat so much
chaff and Cologne river, white
cathedral marked skeleton
by a still, anger not Whitman’d”
VI
Echoed Douglas firs I was hiding
beneath the floor casement boots
overhead on Denman Isle east
off Vancouver, there was nowhere
she wouldn’t follow me to like dawn
turned a page candle down, leaned
at window ran oak fingers through
curtains sky rain hair milk
below the eves I stayed
hidden but awoke after Dachau
“all my remains” the shaman
whispered to the sky, here on
an American rock that smoke, human?
ship? papermill?
VII
What’s far off across a decade’s Sundays?
I am climbing steadily into an air,
after the rain we found Guadacanal in
a sandbox, red, ruined, once painted
litanies of battles made sequence by
Time-Life pages in study turned to
memory I was a decade after where crows
still knew, didn’t they? Pine, grenade, scatter
fields fallen from sky in waste
wings all a break not unlike
what memory resists or a stream passes
to see is washed and alit, stumbled
almost. Here and there, winter &
black water, further back.
VIII
Was Jewish once perhaps at night were
stars collect, a sister or bear in midrash oil
drip or house creek snap of ice
broken necked starling she would peer
through August rosy French doors her
loom, strings of honey locust shadows
in half angled across a table I first read
between a darker room and light
each weight must be tested I said
“dirty jew” his name was David with
white cowboy hat and gun belt
a basement or laundry room these
places were not there but remained
among menorah or branched pale green.
IX
She’d sit by my bed she was gone
and would talk in German as polite
in my ear what everyone had
was lost in photos of a strasse
written glass I’d walk across in-dreamt
an Iron Brigade regiment my brother
he’d seen bent over a comic book
of Jean d’Arc we’d think her ashes too
my sister’s autumn mirror in years. moths,
camphor in the ceder closet
close the door and hide beneath
grandmother’s red fox stole, soldiers I was Jewish
looked at me, then started away
tall tress on either side.
X
To be shorn bitter Han’s sores
his hand bites—on either side of
an artic urn they drew back skirts
to say “he didn’t like children,
we hid in old books like clay
or paintboxes our remains a
muddye blue, groan index of
no world spelt but gone”
All a-grow, pastures rain split and spelled
two sisters a dance Celan sang
Blacksmith and Cather blonde
cobbled “oh myth, oh myth’s time
oh shorn oh stone granted throat”
wish was broken aura’s flame.
First Ascent
Nosegay on a sill as pale paintbox
mixes the storm in its accents
as what remains is left as images
we must draw, depict sadness as grate
his pearls were to recall, dim sewer glint
as a sister’s eyes—the other stacked rag corpsed
a fingered moon folded several pages across
a girl in a wooden window above a wedding
you can almost hear the newsprint establish its
orientations, not fiction cluttered by history was
we know that’s gone, this other story its harder
to say, which we mourn, which we prefer would stay?
her arms stacked like kindling she was Amsterdam lifted
steeple sky, a day’s sunlight like any other
how the sun is good, is close armor and as little as we are
here, which needed a comma to be said right, after being,
hung over us its branches and star she was watching
though a grate, how many times.
Was I reborn between the fire’s approach, a serial
she’d lost, as torch, a sky sent scrolled?
Second Descent
Was I reborn between the fire’s approach, a serial
she’d lost, as torch, a sky sent scrolled?
Bodies burn, grey in heaps I seem a brick arch as
symbol, the design for it, somewhere, overgrown
to have buried this card, in among others, a linked thread,
girl I was a dance, joy, we make, we are for, to be said.
Dad’s sister Mary was dead dead he’d rather man fell from
the sky saw it later dark, not Kansas, dirigible ropes adangle
a long way is linked, all the words were exploding in
my brother’s dreams, Darger numbered, supermarket “K”
ground a tremble & spirits arrow in the air aspy
“we’ve been watching you a long time” she shut a window
I am not laced in birth her many leaves of muslin to be
safe but also, thrown to the fire, stone thrown further
born yellow sea dream-buried stone she said, “say the
way breaks between lives I am still you, sister”
folded Berea sidewalk this time membered, sun, black
birds, establish we are tied.
Malkuth
1. Dad’s sister Mary died I’d say 1930 not in China where he was born (at the Navy compound in Tsing Tao, but maybe Philly) I see a white nightdress, a baby rolled over in her crib. No one knows why & so a mystery I suppose. What he remembers is not this, but an air show he went to at that time at which a dirigible broke free, lifting up and away with men hanging on the lines carried up and then falling. [A newspaper report from 1932 suggests it maybe was in San Diego, when the USS Akron attempted to land.] Each of my siblings and I had a Teddy Bear—my younger sister Barbara named her Teddy Bear “Mary”. One morning she woke up to find the bear gone. No one knows to this day what happened to it. Simply not in the room. I’ve always associated this memory with a memory of a dream in which I see a large bear hug my sister on our front lawn.
2. My brother Bruce and I became completely enthralled by Jean d’Arc after reading an Illustrated History comic book bought at Schugel’s Drugs up on Pearl St. Discussed going to France to find her ashes (I’d always think they’d melted into the Seine, but perhaps some had fallen on land, mixed in grass) or the bones of her horse. Later I write a short little fable called “St. Joan and the Bear”.
3. I have had some dreams that suggest I was a Jew who lived during the Holocaust. Was I a boy or girl. The first time I read about the Kabbalah, I have a strong sense of recognition, though it was a Christian Gnostic “White Lodge” kind of thing by Dion Fortune. Maybe a boy then, or maybe not. I seem to have had my throat cut at some time.
4. I am not sure I believe in sequential reincarnation. I’ve certainly thought about it given my study and practice of Buddhist thought. The phenomena of recalling past lives or other memories appears to occur. However, Buddhist accounts of mind, death, and transmigration just don’t work if you treat the process as a serial or sequential process. In fact, the only way you can really explain the relation between one event and another is to abandon time as an inherently real structure. Very briefly, the problem concerns how karma (a causal potential) can endure through a series of sequential moments in a latent state given the Buddha’s insistence on impermanence. And, especially, how does it get from one life to the next. Thus, far easier than sequence is simply to post a relation which expresses itself in some form. Hence, where linear time exists as a difference, a given relation could be posed in those terms. No problem with duration and sequence, since time is bent or folded anyway.
5. Hence, not so much that, in a prior life I was killed in the holocaust, or survived it, or was imprisoned, but that in some very direct way I recall someone else’s memory somehow—we could say haunted—and have an identification confusion because I am remembering two tracks (at minimum), there is a stereo affect, birds startle, there is a fold in the sky, and , in the basement or attic, or in an adjacent room, pages are shuffled I have some relation to.
6. When the Ganden Tripa visited Amherst, he talked about seeing Niagra Falls from an airplane and thinking that life passed just like that. He was talking us through the three-fold analysis of the unsatisfactory aspects of death, and I had a sudden get that “I” wouldn’t be reborn, no matter what was happening. Even from a sequentialist perspective it’d be someone else. Death ends this bloom, even if it relates, touches, impinges on other lives.
But also that, in this life, I can be visited by the dead quite easily.
7. A common narrative fragment in yogic mythemes from about 1100 CE is the motif of the yogin who is trapped for some reason in a well. There is an echo of this of course in St. Juan de la Cruz “Dark Night” descriptions (and of course, he was in prison). The relevant pieces to me are a) that the yogin is awake, alert in the well, b) that a small section of sky and stars is visible above the well, perhaps the moon drifts far enough north to appear, c) wells involve water and containment, hence a holding/cistern, d) the I-Ching says “A city can be moved, but not a well”, so that a well, is, in someway, necessary or requires something of us. The yogin’s ordeal in the well is not utter misery, but it is a bit like the part of a story where the hero is under a spell, perhaps forced to wear a bear’s skin. Stuck there until he or she finds a rope, or a spirit guide assists. A detainment or detour.
8. I have sometimes thought my life involved just such a detour.
9. A dream I had as a teenager (fallen asleep reading in my Dad’s chair) of fighting in Czech resistance in sewer systems under Andover MA (and thus suspiciously close to the underground sections of the Snake’s Castle, just 10 miles away along the Merrimac, perched up on the hill over Lowell) and, on the way back, coming to a house on the long uphill from the Shawsheen River, with dutch window’d door, where I meet the Anderson Sisters. Thus, the Anderson Sisters I’ve decided here are maybe Hans Christian’s sisters, Hans Christian who didn’t like children.
10. I was terrified and stricken by the story of the Little Matchstick Girl who freezes to death watching the Christmas star.
11. And the terrible death of the little tin soldier. Thrown into fire.
I don’t think the Anderson Sisters are really Hans Christian’s sisters, but its fun to think on it. Anderson is a name from the north, but its also a Civil War kind of name. So it is hard to establish. Perhaps it was their voices I heard calling my name when I was playing on the swing, or later, when I slept out for a month in the back yard of an anti-nuclear activist’s house in Tempe Arizona.
12. Anslem Keifer’s beautiful work attempting to visually recall the Nazi years and Volk Myth. Brick kilns, and wooden beamed halls, with torches. In Atlanta, in one painting the constellation Draco steps down across the horizon/shore. One of the few artists whose tried to say anything about WW II.
13. Celan’s beautiful poetry, his Shulamith, his Catherine. Glinting grates, and silent pockets of snow. As testimony.
14. In the Kabbalah, the descent of the Shekinah into form to become the crown of the king is likened to the birth of a daughter, or, a jewel which ornaments and thus established the crown. Elsewhere, Athena springs fully armored from her father’s brow. In the Luriac Kabbalah, this descent or movement is the result of a catastrophe by which the vessels of creation were broken. [But what kind of a lyric moment is a catastrophe, and which of these stories is the more patriarchal?]
15. I’ve composed a number of poems based on structure of Sefiroah, a lattice of ten topoi one must descend and then climb four times. Thus a lyric that involves fall and rise, and a weaving of these—Orphic descent and return, his daughter’s footsteps on the stairs.
16. In the early 1990’s, I had a dream that the current Dalai Lama was on stage playing a guitar and then took the form of a 3 or 4 year old girl, with black eyes, full of that striking and amazing charm girls this age have, the mastery of feeling, attention and pride. An old monk complained we were all dancing, and so the girl told him to get a book from the attic. After he’d left, she laughed and said, “that will take him awhile” and we continued to dance, I leaving the hall, walking on my hands.
17. Just north of Montague Center in Western Massachusetts, there is a small community that was perhaps a vacation community at one time around a small kettle pond called “Lake Pleasant”. Since the early 1900’s, a spiritualist community has lived there. They hold regular fairs, where one can get a psychic reading. In the foyer, there are books that explain that the current community split off from a different branch over the question of reincarnation in the 1940’s. I’ve been twice. The first time I was told I had a “joy spirit” that was my companion, a curly black haired girl. Also that my father’s father, who I never knew or thought of much, spent a good deal of time watching me.
18. Henry Darger’s epic narrative “The Story of the Vivian Girls” struck me as a recognizable, though fictionalized, account of a secret narrative of the 20th century I occasionally have had a part in.
19. Rainer Maria Rilke’s writing was often triggered by the news of the death of a young girl. This is particularly true of the storm that broke in 1922 with the conclusion of the Duino Elegies and the sublime “Sonnets to Orpheus”. A decade earlier, he and his patron, the Princess Marie von Taxis und Turin, went to visit a garden he’d played in when young. He’d had a friend, a little girl, whom he met there to play. The two of them had a code; if one of them couldn’t meet, he or she would leave a small nosegay of violets or such on a bench, so the other would know not to wait. Rilke had heard that the girl had recently died young; he and the Princess went by the bench, and there was a small nosegay that had been left there. By someone, or by the hands of children following what had become, perhaps, a custom, or by the girl, to say he shouldn’t wait.
20. In grade school, I had an active fantasy—I guess erotic—in which several girls from my class had been kidnapped and were missing. (I would carefully chose the girls I liked the best.) I discovered they were being kept down in the sewers beneath a manhole that was in the center of the playground field. I’d go down and rescue them, though I’d be injured. And then we would recuperate together in a hospital ward. Another time, I dreamed that, after a bomb drill, the field was full of empty planes and ships. There were no children anywhere, and only a silence, and I played among the ships and planes, climbing them like playground equipment.
21. In the same story with the one about St. Joan and the Bear, I created a character who made statues of Pluto, rising up from the ground to take Persephone. The sculptor herself disappeared one day, caught in a spell in which, at night, in her dreams, she lived with Pluto, dreams that, upon awakening, she’d forget. And, each morning she’d wake up into a different life, slowly search about to find its clothes, go off to her job, be absorbed in the days work, until, as the sunset, she began to remember her dreams in snatches, riding home on the bus, or in her car on the arcing paths of her commute home.
22. The woman’s husband then suffered a decline, gradually spending more and more time with his studies of the Civil War, until his son found him one day completely unresponsive to the sense world and endlessly reciting the battalion commanders of Union and Confederate Armies as drawn up at Shiloh, Gettysburg, Antietam…
Yesod
the problem with the object is that it makes three
thus never an object not thought I prefer to accept
as limiting condition this near wall (a tow-hair with
cowboy lunch box and I along the lunch hour
sidewalk in search of clue, behind us the boys
flipping girls skirts with long sticks back by the
fence) I say too much about—division as fact we
thus separate which makes it possible to kiss behind
the garage or upstairs if we’re allowed to be there
then you leave I have to digest that we can work along
the rows of apples trees this way, each pulling a bag
ordinary dirt the sun also goes its way and thus
shadows tell change (near Little Big Horn, another
guy and I slept on hay bales after talking half-way
across Montana as to whether things were in constant
change—my position pointing at the highway berms
and cut hills—or permanent and unchanging at depth,
a Upanisadic yogic or guy from Plato despite the
long hair) an argument I keep up today being faithful
to light
star off in the distance not a plane a second thing I
am thinking is to mistake the first as thing instead
of synesthesia we do okay with anyway—it is not
confusing not to know, later you learn how to
arrange these moments of longing into a reason
or perform a prior arrangement conveyed by
continual performances bird calls really not reasons
but tests or stakes
it is actually possible to be in love and not bad script
duty once acquired I mean it is not all about you he
said who else am I worried about I thought there is a
piece missing in this unit despite apparent function
and I have to care for it anyway
lunar aspect as drift we are subliminal
feel it slide into your side a coin in the slot
your chance to disappear and become surface for
Astellas Pharma tickertape or depth we call
tradition in America, weird because unwritten
and primarily about siding and other exterior
finishes—Sherwin Williams covers the Globe
after all, old Chevys or Oakie women are studded
with the results, reflect some kind of sky and
future its hard to say
probably the nine of rods
somewhere this libidinates or transpires we say
sublime we mean gases off or leached
her old music in leaves by the black walnut piano
the roof gone all sepia or broken into thus
not aspected or forced to say “yes a cathedral at
Tours was ruined and potato black earth rutted
bore nothing & slick rain, ago, it was ago &
the constant, the constant ever going leaves
“La Claire de Lune” my next hour she was not in
***
often as a teenager I would awaken unable to move and once got up from my bed and tried to hit the wall unable to do so as if I had an energy field six inches or so outside my body she would sit on me this way as a suggestion that is one way to say it, a language for it, you might have another I bet it didn’t include the way we were folded where our edges touched
The following are drafts and elements of a new piece “The Star of Araby” commissioned by Jehanne. One of the sweet things I call her is the “Star of Araby”—I think she first used it. Her father is Egyptian (though her heroes when she was young were both Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Sctos)—and she’d asked me to write a poem to/about her, which has become the starting point for me for a new take on a lot of old stuff that I suppose is really, as usual, about me.
Threshold (or “Before completion the young fox gets its tail wet crossing the ice”)
saint wood be ash wind
thus strong
would be eight by fire
her falling leaves
her book unopened
***
there was an, unsettlement
can I say that to somehow justify those
possible sunnier passages in a time
among others I might have met whose
presents I may have had
***
and so also here is an among
and then, through what imagines
an atrium, a second among,
the passing street just beyond,
that passes in quiet
***
deep in my memory is a girl
white dress with rabbit my
sister I, whose ash unsettled—place
smeared sky after rain
torn a leafen oak
hole in the sky
(years later in a different life I
would come on El Greco’s Toledo
and recognize that sky said)
***
I remember what it is like to be dead
watching the wind the way things changed
also trouble I could not stop that voices
syntax cannot describe it impart
Star of Araby
First Descent
I
Cargo lights out north a bay then sea
sparkled islands swept black, sky
cranes in autumn mixed the way
we say “marsh” or “Cairo horizon”
I’ve never seen so imagined
her father one wadi streetlight with
page turned traces planes that
stars become a threat just rumors
we scuffed white cement—played jew
and nazi & Hamburg where stars
fell I was listening perhaps
the cloud close to summer’s moon
was what was left of last decades
apartment wood stairs & fire.
II
Dutchman turned liner Atlantic
haunted her what Murmansk & Oman
mourned acres—sunk metal at piers
Eliot said was a third barren
river or war—which was it?
Her torn pharaoh & necklace steamer
ricketed we know longer see
whispered black and white sands.
A colonial then, perched by the inkdrawn Charles,
Masacomet drawn sheep in fields
sleep wood stars shawdows
worn down his shoulder he slept
she was saying Sahara, there is no
God but God, roamed.
III
Sounds picked up between Ipswitch
did Alexandria a long leant hour,
somewhere between a high wire
and orchard, a century rememberd
remained dead, peaceful August graves
his was, among what sold, what had
become solid, a soup con the way Pierre
would say we were forgetting.
“We came out of the roaring into bright
Aegean sun bright Elysian radiators”
ill radiant luminous wickery
as saddles and John-John ribbed stairways
a bedroom above, parents adrift in
armchairs, drifted steeples
V
Not yet America aslant in fog shoal
“we went back and forth between
Kiev and Berlin, Paris and back to
Munich our cloth and cardboard bags
Klee drew nights in coal, smudged
violet or crush, whatever dragon
not shtetl gnosms but world rue
climbed cracks in the kitchen
overhung what was spreading
soup, boots clumped fellaheen
the fallen would be wheat so much
chaff and Cologne river, white
cathedral marked skeleton
by a still, anger not Whitman’d”
VI
Echoed Douglas firs I was hiding
beneath the floor casement boots
overhead on Denman Isle east
off Vancouver, there was nowhere
she wouldn’t follow me to like dawn
turned a page candle down, leaned
at window ran oak fingers through
curtains sky rain hair milk
below the eves I stayed
hidden but awoke after Dachau
“all my remains” the shaman
whispered to the sky, here on
an American rock that smoke, human?
ship? papermill?
VII
What’s far off across a decade’s Sundays?
I am climbing steadily into an air,
after the rain we found Guadacanal in
a sandbox, red, ruined, once painted
litanies of battles made sequence by
Time-Life pages in study turned to
memory I was a decade after where crows
still knew, didn’t they? Pine, grenade, scatter
fields fallen from sky in waste
wings all a break not unlike
what memory resists or a stream passes
to see is washed and alit, stumbled
almost. Here and there, winter &
black water, further back.
VIII
Was Jewish once perhaps at night were
stars collect, a sister or bear in midrash oil
drip or house creek snap of ice
broken necked starling she would peer
through August rosy French doors her
loom, strings of honey locust shadows
in half angled across a table I first read
between a darker room and light
each weight must be tested I said
“dirty jew” his name was David with
white cowboy hat and gun belt
a basement or laundry room these
places were not there but remained
among menorah or branched pale green.
IX
She’d sit by my bed she was gone
and would talk in German as polite
in my ear what everyone had
was lost in photos of a strasse
written glass I’d walk across in-dreamt
an Iron Brigade regiment my brother
he’d seen bent over a comic book
of Jean d’Arc we’d think her ashes too
my sister’s autumn mirror in years. moths,
camphor in the ceder closet
close the door and hide beneath
grandmother’s red fox stole, soldiers I was Jewish
looked at me, then started away
tall tress on either side.
X
To be shorn bitter Han’s sores
his hand bites—on either side of
an artic urn they drew back skirts
to say “he didn’t like children,
we hid in old books like clay
or paintboxes our remains a
muddye blue, groan index of
no world spelt but gone”
All a-grow, pastures rain split and spelled
two sisters a dance Celan sang
Blacksmith and Cather blonde
cobbled “oh myth, oh myth’s time
oh shorn oh stone granted throat”
wish was broken aura’s flame.
First Ascent
Nosegay on a sill as pale paintbox
mixes the storm in its accents
as what remains is left as images
we must draw, depict sadness as grate
his pearls were to recall, dim sewer glint
as a sister’s eyes—the other stacked rag corpsed
a fingered moon folded several pages across
a girl in a wooden window above a wedding
you can almost hear the newsprint establish its
orientations, not fiction cluttered by history was
we know that’s gone, this other story its harder
to say, which we mourn, which we prefer would stay?
her arms stacked like kindling she was Amsterdam lifted
steeple sky, a day’s sunlight like any other
how the sun is good, is close armor and as little as we are
here, which needed a comma to be said right, after being,
hung over us its branches and star she was watching
though a grate, how many times.
Was I reborn between the fire’s approach, a serial
she’d lost, as torch, a sky sent scrolled?
Second Descent
Was I reborn between the fire’s approach, a serial
she’d lost, as torch, a sky sent scrolled?
Bodies burn, grey in heaps I seem a brick arch as
symbol, the design for it, somewhere, overgrown
to have buried this card, in among others, a linked thread,
girl I was a dance, joy, we make, we are for, to be said.
Dad’s sister Mary was dead dead he’d rather man fell from
the sky saw it later dark, not Kansas, dirigible ropes adangle
a long way is linked, all the words were exploding in
my brother’s dreams, Darger numbered, supermarket “K”
ground a tremble & spirits arrow in the air aspy
“we’ve been watching you a long time” she shut a window
I am not laced in birth her many leaves of muslin to be
safe but also, thrown to the fire, stone thrown further
born yellow sea dream-buried stone she said, “say the
way breaks between lives I am still you, sister”
folded Berea sidewalk this time membered, sun, black
birds, establish we are tied.
Malkuth
1. Dad’s sister Mary died I’d say 1930 not in China where he was born (at the Navy compound in Tsing Tao, but maybe Philly) I see a white nightdress, a baby rolled over in her crib. No one knows why & so a mystery I suppose. What he remembers is not this, but an air show he went to at that time at which a dirigible broke free, lifting up and away with men hanging on the lines carried up and then falling. [A newspaper report from 1932 suggests it maybe was in San Diego, when the USS Akron attempted to land.] Each of my siblings and I had a Teddy Bear—my younger sister Barbara named her Teddy Bear “Mary”. One morning she woke up to find the bear gone. No one knows to this day what happened to it. Simply not in the room. I’ve always associated this memory with a memory of a dream in which I see a large bear hug my sister on our front lawn.
2. My brother Bruce and I became completely enthralled by Jean d’Arc after reading an Illustrated History comic book bought at Schugel’s Drugs up on Pearl St. Discussed going to France to find her ashes (I’d always think they’d melted into the Seine, but perhaps some had fallen on land, mixed in grass) or the bones of her horse. Later I write a short little fable called “St. Joan and the Bear”.
3. I have had some dreams that suggest I was a Jew who lived during the Holocaust. Was I a boy or girl. The first time I read about the Kabbalah, I have a strong sense of recognition, though it was a Christian Gnostic “White Lodge” kind of thing by Dion Fortune. Maybe a boy then, or maybe not. I seem to have had my throat cut at some time.
4. I am not sure I believe in sequential reincarnation. I’ve certainly thought about it given my study and practice of Buddhist thought. The phenomena of recalling past lives or other memories appears to occur. However, Buddhist accounts of mind, death, and transmigration just don’t work if you treat the process as a serial or sequential process. In fact, the only way you can really explain the relation between one event and another is to abandon time as an inherently real structure. Very briefly, the problem concerns how karma (a causal potential) can endure through a series of sequential moments in a latent state given the Buddha’s insistence on impermanence. And, especially, how does it get from one life to the next. Thus, far easier than sequence is simply to post a relation which expresses itself in some form. Hence, where linear time exists as a difference, a given relation could be posed in those terms. No problem with duration and sequence, since time is bent or folded anyway.
5. Hence, not so much that, in a prior life I was killed in the holocaust, or survived it, or was imprisoned, but that in some very direct way I recall someone else’s memory somehow—we could say haunted—and have an identification confusion because I am remembering two tracks (at minimum), there is a stereo affect, birds startle, there is a fold in the sky, and , in the basement or attic, or in an adjacent room, pages are shuffled I have some relation to.
6. When the Ganden Tripa visited Amherst, he talked about seeing Niagra Falls from an airplane and thinking that life passed just like that. He was talking us through the three-fold analysis of the unsatisfactory aspects of death, and I had a sudden get that “I” wouldn’t be reborn, no matter what was happening. Even from a sequentialist perspective it’d be someone else. Death ends this bloom, even if it relates, touches, impinges on other lives.
But also that, in this life, I can be visited by the dead quite easily.
7. A common narrative fragment in yogic mythemes from about 1100 CE is the motif of the yogin who is trapped for some reason in a well. There is an echo of this of course in St. Juan de la Cruz “Dark Night” descriptions (and of course, he was in prison). The relevant pieces to me are a) that the yogin is awake, alert in the well, b) that a small section of sky and stars is visible above the well, perhaps the moon drifts far enough north to appear, c) wells involve water and containment, hence a holding/cistern, d) the I-Ching says “A city can be moved, but not a well”, so that a well, is, in someway, necessary or requires something of us. The yogin’s ordeal in the well is not utter misery, but it is a bit like the part of a story where the hero is under a spell, perhaps forced to wear a bear’s skin. Stuck there until he or she finds a rope, or a spirit guide assists. A detainment or detour.
8. I have sometimes thought my life involved just such a detour.
9. A dream I had as a teenager (fallen asleep reading in my Dad’s chair) of fighting in Czech resistance in sewer systems under Andover MA (and thus suspiciously close to the underground sections of the Snake’s Castle, just 10 miles away along the Merrimac, perched up on the hill over Lowell) and, on the way back, coming to a house on the long uphill from the Shawsheen River, with dutch window’d door, where I meet the Anderson Sisters. Thus, the Anderson Sisters I’ve decided here are maybe Hans Christian’s sisters, Hans Christian who didn’t like children.
10. I was terrified and stricken by the story of the Little Matchstick Girl who freezes to death watching the Christmas star.
11. And the terrible death of the little tin soldier. Thrown into fire.
I don’t think the Anderson Sisters are really Hans Christian’s sisters, but its fun to think on it. Anderson is a name from the north, but its also a Civil War kind of name. So it is hard to establish. Perhaps it was their voices I heard calling my name when I was playing on the swing, or later, when I slept out for a month in the back yard of an anti-nuclear activist’s house in Tempe Arizona.
12. Anslem Keifer’s beautiful work attempting to visually recall the Nazi years and Volk Myth. Brick kilns, and wooden beamed halls, with torches. In Atlanta, in one painting the constellation Draco steps down across the horizon/shore. One of the few artists whose tried to say anything about WW II.
13. Celan’s beautiful poetry, his Shulamith, his Catherine. Glinting grates, and silent pockets of snow. As testimony.
14. In the Kabbalah, the descent of the Shekinah into form to become the crown of the king is likened to the birth of a daughter, or, a jewel which ornaments and thus established the crown. Elsewhere, Athena springs fully armored from her father’s brow. In the Luriac Kabbalah, this descent or movement is the result of a catastrophe by which the vessels of creation were broken. [But what kind of a lyric moment is a catastrophe, and which of these stories is the more patriarchal?]
15. I’ve composed a number of poems based on structure of Sefiroah, a lattice of ten topoi one must descend and then climb four times. Thus a lyric that involves fall and rise, and a weaving of these—Orphic descent and return, his daughter’s footsteps on the stairs.
16. In the early 1990’s, I had a dream that the current Dalai Lama was on stage playing a guitar and then took the form of a 3 or 4 year old girl, with black eyes, full of that striking and amazing charm girls this age have, the mastery of feeling, attention and pride. An old monk complained we were all dancing, and so the girl told him to get a book from the attic. After he’d left, she laughed and said, “that will take him awhile” and we continued to dance, I leaving the hall, walking on my hands.
17. Just north of Montague Center in Western Massachusetts, there is a small community that was perhaps a vacation community at one time around a small kettle pond called “Lake Pleasant”. Since the early 1900’s, a spiritualist community has lived there. They hold regular fairs, where one can get a psychic reading. In the foyer, there are books that explain that the current community split off from a different branch over the question of reincarnation in the 1940’s. I’ve been twice. The first time I was told I had a “joy spirit” that was my companion, a curly black haired girl. Also that my father’s father, who I never knew or thought of much, spent a good deal of time watching me.
18. Henry Darger’s epic narrative “The Story of the Vivian Girls” struck me as a recognizable, though fictionalized, account of a secret narrative of the 20th century I occasionally have had a part in.
19. Rainer Maria Rilke’s writing was often triggered by the news of the death of a young girl. This is particularly true of the storm that broke in 1922 with the conclusion of the Duino Elegies and the sublime “Sonnets to Orpheus”. A decade earlier, he and his patron, the Princess Marie von Taxis und Turin, went to visit a garden he’d played in when young. He’d had a friend, a little girl, whom he met there to play. The two of them had a code; if one of them couldn’t meet, he or she would leave a small nosegay of violets or such on a bench, so the other would know not to wait. Rilke had heard that the girl had recently died young; he and the Princess went by the bench, and there was a small nosegay that had been left there. By someone, or by the hands of children following what had become, perhaps, a custom, or by the girl, to say he shouldn’t wait.
20. In grade school, I had an active fantasy—I guess erotic—in which several girls from my class had been kidnapped and were missing. (I would carefully chose the girls I liked the best.) I discovered they were being kept down in the sewers beneath a manhole that was in the center of the playground field. I’d go down and rescue them, though I’d be injured. And then we would recuperate together in a hospital ward. Another time, I dreamed that, after a bomb drill, the field was full of empty planes and ships. There were no children anywhere, and only a silence, and I played among the ships and planes, climbing them like playground equipment.
21. In the same story with the one about St. Joan and the Bear, I created a character who made statues of Pluto, rising up from the ground to take Persephone. The sculptor herself disappeared one day, caught in a spell in which, at night, in her dreams, she lived with Pluto, dreams that, upon awakening, she’d forget. And, each morning she’d wake up into a different life, slowly search about to find its clothes, go off to her job, be absorbed in the days work, until, as the sunset, she began to remember her dreams in snatches, riding home on the bus, or in her car on the arcing paths of her commute home.
22. The woman’s husband then suffered a decline, gradually spending more and more time with his studies of the Civil War, until his son found him one day completely unresponsive to the sense world and endlessly reciting the battalion commanders of Union and Confederate Armies as drawn up at Shiloh, Gettysburg, Antietam…
Yesod
the problem with the object is that it makes three
thus never an object not thought I prefer to accept
as limiting condition this near wall (a tow-hair with
cowboy lunch box and I along the lunch hour
sidewalk in search of clue, behind us the boys
flipping girls skirts with long sticks back by the
fence) I say too much about—division as fact we
thus separate which makes it possible to kiss behind
the garage or upstairs if we’re allowed to be there
then you leave I have to digest that we can work along
the rows of apples trees this way, each pulling a bag
ordinary dirt the sun also goes its way and thus
shadows tell change (near Little Big Horn, another
guy and I slept on hay bales after talking half-way
across Montana as to whether things were in constant
change—my position pointing at the highway berms
and cut hills—or permanent and unchanging at depth,
a Upanisadic yogic or guy from Plato despite the
long hair) an argument I keep up today being faithful
to light
star off in the distance not a plane a second thing I
am thinking is to mistake the first as thing instead
of synesthesia we do okay with anyway—it is not
confusing not to know, later you learn how to
arrange these moments of longing into a reason
or perform a prior arrangement conveyed by
continual performances bird calls really not reasons
but tests or stakes
it is actually possible to be in love and not bad script
duty once acquired I mean it is not all about you he
said who else am I worried about I thought there is a
piece missing in this unit despite apparent function
and I have to care for it anyway
lunar aspect as drift we are subliminal
feel it slide into your side a coin in the slot
your chance to disappear and become surface for
Astellas Pharma tickertape or depth we call
tradition in America, weird because unwritten
and primarily about siding and other exterior
finishes—Sherwin Williams covers the Globe
after all, old Chevys or Oakie women are studded
with the results, reflect some kind of sky and
future its hard to say
probably the nine of rods
somewhere this libidinates or transpires we say
sublime we mean gases off or leached
her old music in leaves by the black walnut piano
the roof gone all sepia or broken into thus
not aspected or forced to say “yes a cathedral at
Tours was ruined and potato black earth rutted
bore nothing & slick rain, ago, it was ago &
the constant, the constant ever going leaves
“La Claire de Lune” my next hour she was not in
***
often as a teenager I would awaken unable to move and once got up from my bed and tried to hit the wall unable to do so as if I had an energy field six inches or so outside my body she would sit on me this way as a suggestion that is one way to say it, a language for it, you might have another I bet it didn’t include the way we were folded where our edges touched
posted by David Need at
10:13 AM
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