Writers recall moments when things happened that changed their sense of how they were writing—moments, or an arc of them, in which they see new ways to make a form that was fresh and energizing for them and still allow them to be in their sensibility and temperament and vision. For me, this particular moment wasn’t a flash experience, a revelation, or an epiphany. It was a protracted series of events that happened when I was living in London in the fall of 1988 with my wife and two children. I mark this time by many things, but first by the birth of our son James, who was born at the Great Portland Street Hospital just off Marylebone Road near Regents Park. That September we walked in and out of the maternity ward amid the paparazzi who were roosted there for the birth of Princess Beatrice. We were living in a posh flat because of Colgate University, for whom I was directing the English department’s study group. Living on Cheyne Walk, on the Chelsea Embankment across from the Albert Bridge, gave me an interesting view of history and a beautifully comic sense of displacement.
We were neighbors to a tall, pink, Queen Anne townhouse with its reportedly heated indoor swimming pool, owned by Bianca Jagger, who was recently divorced from Mick. Other nearby neighbors included the National Trust houses of Thomas Carlyle, William Turner, Henry James, and the commemorated spot on Cheyne Walk where Henry VIII’s manor house once stood. The alleyways, mews, and back streets with their Georgian brown brick, their transoms and fanlights, their neoclassical doors and entrance moldings, made daily walks something of a historical jaunt, especially for an American living, for the first time, in this stretch of London. The Albert Bridge lit up the gray Thames all day with its pink and white and pale blue colors. Our local pub, The King’s Head and Eight Bells, was a quiet place with its domestic feel of parlor chairs and tables so unlike the louder, more garish American bar. Here, in the quiet beer-scented air, fresh ales were pumped all day, and our four-year-old daughter Sophia developed a keen taste for stilton, ham off the bone, and fresh tomatoes on crusty bread. We lounged there for dinner a few days a week and later walked along the Embankment and the night-black river.
Teaching contemporary British poetry that fall, I was more engaged with how much the contemporary lyric poem in England was still residing much closer to formal conventions than most American poetry, and how British poets often valued a drier voice that played in wit, in ways that the American poets generally didn’t. I was aware of how little Whitman’s long line—his freer verse and open-endedness—appealed to British poets. There were exceptions, of course, like Basil Bunting, Ted Hughes, and David Jones. But, for the most part, the wilder long line and the more open field kinetics of William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson had been less appropriated by the British mainstream.
I remember having lunch at the Grey Hound pub off Kensington High Street with Andrew Motion, who was coming to my class that day to read his work. He was a young rising star then who would go on to become Poet Laureate. It was a week or so before the celebration of T. S. Eliot’s birthday centennial, and London was gearing up for the event that would be accompanied by the publication of a volume of Eliot’s letters. In anticipation of the releases of the letters and the birthday, the London Times, which was a more intellectual newspaper then, was running a six-part series on Eliot’s life. As an American poet reading the mainstream, popular newspaper of London, I was astonished to see every day that week a several-page spread about Eliot’s life. The pieces included dramatic photographs, facsimiles of manuscripts, drawings, catchy headlines like “A Poet in the Editor’s Chair” and “The Price of a Masterpiece,” and so on. All week I passed out copies of the Times’ spread on Eliot to my students, who were at first bewildered and then increasingly impressed and excited to see that a mainstream newspaper was covering a poet with such depth, flair, and sense importance. Everyone in the class agreed that this would never happen for Whitman or Dickinson, or Faulkner or Hemingway in the United States.
The night before Eliot’s birthday I took my students—all twenty of them, many in dresses and sport jackets (some even wore ties)—to St. Stephen’s Church on Gloucester Road, where Eliot had been a lifetime parishioner. It was a clear, early fall evening, and when we walked into the packed church, there was even a kind of Christmas feeling about it. The celebration involved readings of Eliot’s poems and plays by actors and congregants, and music by the Ockendon string quartet. Eliot’s widow Valerie was present, as were bishops and other distinguished clergy and cultural and political celebrities. It was pageantry and mystery mixed with canonical, authorial literariness, a dying idea it seemed then in the wake of the poststructuralist wars over authorship, language, and literary value. And all this for—a poet—which seemed even a rarer cultural performance for the late 1980s Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism, with its celebration of money and its giddy materialism.
Talking with Motion over one of those pub lunches of warm ale, shepherd’s pie, and Branston pickle, I was taken off guard by his small tirade against all this “Eliot nonsense” that was filling up the city. “Peter,” Andrew said, “England will never accept T. S. Eliot into its poetic tradition.” “Eliot,” he went on, as his calm tone rose a bit, “has nothing to do with us.” Andrew made it clear to me that the modern English poetic tradition began with Houseman and Hardy and went on to Edward Thomas and down to Philip Larkin. I grinned and noted that the Eliots were, after all, New Englanders uprooted to St. Louis before Tom Eliot was shipped back to New England, before he shipped out to Oxford and London, where he converted to Anglo-everything. Andrew quipped, “Well, he should be shipped back to America.”
Walking King’s Road each day to Sloan Square and then tubing it to Kensington, I worked on new poems and read a stash of new books by British and other UK poets. I loved working on poems in the daily rush of urban life, especially on the tube, where, amid the white noise and crowd blur, I could settle into my own zone of phrases and lines. And I could also settle into those thin Faber, or Oxford, or Carcanet, or Bloodaxe paperbacks of poems. The spare, nimble lines of Motion, Tom Paulin, Craig Raine, Carol Rumens, Christopher Reid, and poem titles like “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home,” “Fivemile Town,” “Pea Soup,” “The Dancing Hippo,” or “Outside Oswiecim.” There was a different kind of irony and wry humor that made an interesting face-off with the more lush lyricism or intensified persona voices of the American grain. Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Charles Wright, Galway Kinnell, Adrienne Rich, or even John Ashbery and James Merrill were not in this drier register.
That fall, I got interested again in the point and counterpoint of British and American language-music. I thought of how John Lennon might have heard the voice of Little Richard, or how Michael Jackson might have taken in Mick Jagger, Joe Cocker Ray Charles, or Dusty Springfield, Martha Reeves. Those crisscrossing registers, the music of English across cultures and vernaculars, idioms, and lyric compressions were part of the genius of the language. In the exceptional expanse of the English language, there seemed always new kinds of fusions of sound and rhythm that the full-bodied art of poetry often initiated and introduced into the general language, in the way that poetry creates hybrids within hybrids, lines competing and comingling in their aspirations for some cold eye casting, or sublime seeing, or self-lacerating or self-loving confession.
I was enjoying the lines and the tone of these British poems. It afforded me a fresh moment to think about how tone creates perception, how tone and its relationship to the line creates a perspective, how the line with its arrangement of image and voice opens up possibilities for ingesting experience. I had no strong commitment to the virtue of the long line over the four- and five-beat line, or the skinny, two- and three-beat line. Each musical register offered something potentially rich if the poet could take advantage of it and its musical potential.
In the midst of my own enjoyment of this moment of comparative poetics, I was also feeling a sense of global life more acutely, and while this had something to do with being out of context, as Henry James once put it, the state of things on the planet had begun to feel more chaotic in the past decade. Here in London, I felt bombarded by the very good BBC and TV 3 coverage of the international scene. All through the 1980s, it was hard not to feel more and more bombarded by reports of continual mass violence in faraway places, and by violent paroxysms of the new Wall Street culture and its deregulated assault on the poor and the middle class and the ensuing poverty that often resulted from its abuses. Images on the screen poured over me in ways that disrupted the privileged domestic space in which I lived. Perhaps there was something new about this, perhaps this was as old as the TV Age, which was not that old, but old enough for my life to have been defined by it. But now the TV camera’s focus on the world was more acute and in-depth than it had ever been. It was hard to get images out of one’s head: Iranian students storming the U.S. embassy in Teheran; the space shuttle Challenger disintegrating in tunnels of white smoke in a midnight-blue sky; crowds swarming the Berlin Wall that had come down in seeming spontaneity; Chinese soldiers in Tiananmen Square firing on students; the dead bodies in the mud from the toxic gas leak at Bhopal; the images of wasting men dying of AIDS. I was finding the experience I understood to be shaping the planet increasingly bizarre not dreamlike but nightmarish, pushing the imagination to engage harsh realities that evoked the fantastical, magical, unreal. Such large events had strange ways of bridging time and space in jolting and immediate ways. And during the fall of 1988 in London, I encountered some of these time/space jolts in new ways.
That December we decided not to head home for the Christmas holiday, but rather stay in our pale pink flat with its ivory-white moldings and its blend of Regency furniture and English country chintz. We could get chicken tikka masala, three kinds of taramousalata, eggplant (better known as aubergine in London) rollatini from Sainsbury’s, and continue our explorations of single-malt Scotch at the local Oddbins. Our three-month-old son was happy in his pram, and our daughter was enjoying the cosmopolitan life at the King’s Head and along the Thames, where her day-care school was. It seemed like a moment to relax and go slow rather than rush back to New York.
On Wednesday December 21, I walked down King’s Road in the slightly warm winter gray dark London air to Oakley Street, and then to the Embankment around 7:00 PM on the shortest day of the year. I walked into the flat just as my wife Helen turned on the TV to see images of something exploding in the night sky. It was just light flashing in black air, but the text and broadcast was clear: it was Pan Am 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland. I felt some panic rise in my chest because I knew that some of our students might be on that plane. In a couple minutes, the phone rang, and it was Martha from the Off Campus Study Office at Colgate telling me that one of my students was on the plane. “I’m watching it,” I said. “Are you sure S. was on the plane?” “Yes,” she said, as were numerous students from Syracuse University, including another one of ours who was with their program.” I was staring at my three-month-old son in his pram, his wild brown hair cowlicking up, his eyes alert and looking around the room. December 21 would have been a natural day for us to have flown back to New York, and this would have been a good time of day to have taken Pan Am 103 with the time difference working well for landing at Kennedy. I stood with the phone propped in my neck, watching the flashing light in the sky over Scotland and writing down instructions from Martha back at Colgate about what to do when my student’s parents arrived. How many parents and families would be coming to London to deal with the death of their children who had been blown up in the night sky by a bomb set off by Libyan terrorists? I kept looking at the replay of the exploding plane. I glanced at my son in his pram. I could see my daughter in the next room combing the hair of her toy pony. I was trying to hold these images together, or not together. I was stuck with them. I was beginning to see the world caught/positioned/stuck/divided between such discrepancies and ironies. Holding them together in any kind of relationship was challenging. I felt scissored in a perceptual gap. I felt lucky, thus far at least, to be an onlooker, a bystander who, through prisms and screens, apertures and cracks, takes notes, looks on, tries to grab a filament of the event or materials of the event. Poets hope that sight will yield insight in the register of language rhythm and image viscosity. And that insight will matter to readers, to a wider world.
Two weeks earlier I had turned on the TV in the early morning to see the aftermath of an earthquake in the western section of Armenia, then a Soviet republic. A small landlocked country, the surviving fragment of historic Armenia after the genocide of the Armenians in Turkey in 1915. Seeming always to be holding on by a thread, it was now lodged between Turkey, Iran, Georgia, and Azerbaijan in a matrix of political tensions and internal social problems, many of which evolved from decades of Soviet rule. On December 7, I stayed in most of the day staring at the TV screen, gazing at the remains of Gyumri (formerly Alexandropol and Lennikan), a sizeable city near the Turkish border and at other Armenian towns and villages that had been smashed and avalanched. Tens of thousands were dead; one city, Spitak, was so obliterated it seemed to cease to exist. On the TV screen I could see apartments sliced open, and dressers and lamps, pots and pans, toys and stoves, bookcases, chandeliers smashed, piled in the streets.
The quake happened just before lunchtime, so thousands of children were in classrooms, and small bodies can survive in small places before they succumb to crush syndrome. Crush syndrome, I learned, was something that happened when the slabs of concrete were lifted off a crushed body and the toxins from the crushed limb or area were released in a rush and overwhelmed the kidneys. If adequate dialysis machines were not on hand people would die of kidney failure on the spot. Already the reports said that the smell of decomposing flesh was making the street fires acrid.
Because I had recently finished a book on the American poet Theodore Roethke, I was spending some time that week interviewing Beatrice Lushington, Roethke’s widow who had lived in England with her second husband for decades since Roethke’s death in the early 1960s. Over lunch and tea off Kensington High Street, we talked about Roethke, their lives together, and the poetry scene in the 1950s. She spoke with a certain endearing and quiet candor about Roethke’s drinking, his manic episodes, and his great musical love poems of the 1950s. “Those poems were written to me,” she said. “I know,” I said. “He had discovered Yeats’s line and me at the same time.” “I know,” I said. While part of me was feeling the pleasure of literary nostalgia listening to Mrs. Lushington recount some complicated episodes of her life with Roethke, I was having a hard time focusing on it all. When we finished the last interview in the late afternoon, I took the tube to Heathrow airport where I joined one of the relief projects and loaded clothes and canned food into planes that were flying relief daily to Armenia. I was trying to keep my grief and anger about the Armenian earthquake to myself. Most days that week I took the tube out to Heathrow to load up planes, and the musty stink of used clothes stayed on me all day. When I returned to the city, I found myself going to the Armenian church in South Kensington, where I sat in the quiet dark thinking.
I didn’t want to fall in to the old Armenian syndrome, or the old Jewish syndrome, or was it an old blues syndrome that African Americans had creatively made into art. The mud-bottom moaning, the why-why-why-us syndrome, the isn’t there any end of suffering and misfortune syndrome, etc., etc., etc. Walking back to Cheyne Walk in the dark, I recited poems as a kind of therapy, as a kind of companionship: Emily Dickinson’s “Before I Got My Eye Put Out,” a dart about vulnerability and seeing; Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” a poem that made me feel better about the miserable world; Michael Harper’s “Dear John, Dear Coltrane,” a poem about feeling black; Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Free,” a talking blues poem about the absurdity of the real.
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It seemed to me more and more as I walked around London in the fall of 1988 that the old TV screen was also being supplanted and augmented by the new screens of personal computers and Internet reality, which I was just beginning to use. Screenic culture was making the new into something digitally combustible and seemingly visually inexhaustible; virtual forms and metameanings were becoming new zones of seeing and thinking. Digital life was creating new prods on the brain’s circuitry. This added to a sense of being overwhelmed by political explosions and mass violence in a cultural moment that was defining itself in some new ways.
For various reasons that had something to do with this sense of the world and some inner needs of my own, I wanted to find my own ways for the poem to have a broader reach, to be a wider net, to have a more spacious arena to absorb stuff, things, ideas, voices, bric-a-brac, a bit like a Rauschenberg combine. The idea of what I was privately calling “writing horizontal” was nothing more than an instinct, a personal orientation, a way of feeling and pushing the poem for more space and layers and flexibility.
Whitman and Eliot have always struck me as two primary horizontal poets because they made new forms out of an aesthetic-kinetic force that was able to ingest a social/cultural/historical terrain that pushed and changed the poem. Whitman had opened up the poem’s lens to absorb social scenes in motion, panoramic landscapes as well as the self’s inner crises. His free verse (once considered irreverent by Victorian conventionalists) had gliding rhythms and a candid spoken voice that could incorporate erotic love, fecund nature, the pain of amputees in Civil War hospitals, crowds in streets, transcendent visions, commuters crossing the river, transcendent feeling, solitary depressed longings. Whitman was that noiseless patient spider of his own poem that “marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding” and, in doing so, “launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself.” Whitman’s filaments were also “unreeling” lines as he calls the spider’s process—his ars poetical way of seeing. For Whitman, the soul is synonymous with the poet who seeks to connect the spheres: “And you O my soul where you stand / Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space / Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them.” “Measureless oceans of space”: that was a trope for the new poem of this new age too. Whitman could keep self and other, self and a verifiable world out there, in some interesting kinesis, some dialectic that allowed a part of self—often for Whitman a partially visible self—to mingle intimate feeling with a wider world.
Eliot’s disruptive vision of the poem in “The Waste Land,” was a collage-like assemblage, an expansive box in which the poet could collect and pour a “mish-mash potpourri,” as Eliot called it, to bring disconcerting entities together, to make a form out of disparate materials: texts, voices, discourses that challenge genre boundaries, that let the poem grow into weird spaces and then spaces within spaces. The Waste Land, with its cinematic cuts and shifts, its quick, startling movements from a Hebraic text to a scene in the Bavarian mountains, to lines from a Wagner opera, to a woman’s boudoir, or to a working-class woman talking in a pub, must have seemed like silent film to readers in the 1920s. In Eliot’s ventriloquism and efforts to eschew the personal voice, a visible personal self was far from, if not oppositional to, Whitman’s intimate confessional self. Yet both poets found ways of allowing the poem to be a flexible chamber for the unexpected, the large indigestible experience of culture and self in their many layers.
The world of the late twentieth century struck me—and still strikes me in the early twenty-first—as a fast moving landscape with its multifarious, colliding planes of shifting realities, and jolts to the senses and to our cognitive wires. These kinds of jolting image landscapes—Pan Am 103 exploding in the night sky over Scotland, or a section of Armenia disappearing in a few minutes into rubble and corpses—reproduced on the screen in complexly repeated and protracted ways made the real and the virtual intersecting vectors in the brain; and this changed how the handheld camera in my head was working. Furthermore, the smooth filaments of Whitman’s noiseless, patient spider seemed less accessible, and Eliot’s assurance about the power of Western canonical texts were challenged in new ways. The late twentieth century demanded more ingesting of discordant vectors and fraying wires.
Writing horizontal was for me not an aesthetic program, but rather a way of opening up space both linguistically and in the mind. The horizontal poem, I felt, could still hold on to the verticality of the conceit’s self-reflexiveness, so that the germ at the beginning of the poem could unfurl in ways that could be connected to itself, the way the poems of Donne, Marvell, and Herbert so often did. Verticality could keep the horizontal poem rooted in itself, giving the poetic field a disciplined center. But horizontalness allowed for nuanced feeling and perception that could skitter along mental wires and optical alleyways. It was liberating to play more with splicing and shifting in ways that advanced a larger consciousness of the poem, a spaciousness that meant more opportunities for movement—the music of rhythm could glide into the image in unsettling ways.
Coming back from London that winter, I wanted to capture something about my own personal encounter with living in rural America, as a privileged university professor who receives messages about disasters happening in other parts of the planet. This was a very early sense of my moving horizontal.
FROM “GEESE FLYING OVER HAMILTON, NEW YORK”:
That’s how I woke
to a window of chalk sky
like indifference, like the sheet wrapped
around two people,
and the radio sounded like fuzz
on a boom mike,
the rhetoric needling in about the dead in Croatia
then the light came and the branch
of a sycamore on the wall
was the menorah
on the arch of Titus
I was thinking like
the cows by the paddock in a peel of sun
when they cut a wide arrow—
their feathers oily with tundra,
the gabbling like field-holler.
I looked out to the Fisher-Price toys
blue and yellow in fog,
silver light, gauche on the spruces,
and the words Pol Pot
the geese chromatic, then gone.
Phnom Penh static like snow the day may bring,
like a monsoon sweeping over a menorah
like the falling barn seeming to rise in white air.
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In the late 1990s, I found myself in Amsterdam on a book tour for my memoir Black Dog of Fate, at a time when my eight-year-old son was receiving leukemia treatments back home in central New York. I sat all day on a bright-blue-skied afternoon in an elegant parlor at the Ambassade Hotel on the Herengracht canal, where journalists came and went to talk with writers on tour. I found myself staring at the canal, the sky over the lowlands, the Anne Frank House down the street, and fielding questions from an array of interesting journalists who held a mirror up to American culture. The fallout of the President Clinton–Monica Lewinsky episode was still around, as one journalist made clear. I got interested in the intersecting forces of that moment and wanted to make a weave that might capture the various threads of possible insights.
FROM “LOWLANDS”:
“North Sea’s just over there,”
the Flemish waitress said. You can see
everywhere but you can’t see anything,
then the headlights make the fog a little gold
the way the maples turn in my yard
back in the upstate valley
where my son dives in a leaf pile
on his way to school with his friends,
and I keep turning his ritual over in my mind
two pills of chemo at night,
6 MP it’s called, so familiar now like a ham and cheese sandwich.
Tomorrow when I drive north to Bruges, he’ll get his shot
of methotrexate—nutriphils, platelets, the invisible
hooks between cells. On my book tour in Amsterdam
an Indonesian journalist asked me how
genital contact could bring a President down.
Histerica passio dragged our quarry down.
“Isn’t that Yeats’,” she asked. We giggled but just kept
the tape going. Through the window the canals shined
like they were varnished,
and I could see the lines beginning to form in front
of the Anne Frank House already at 8:30.
The charm of the brown brick
like something out of Vermeer—an absurdity,
on the idea of Jews hiding out in the suffocating dark.
A girl your daughter’s age menstruating there.
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Walking through the bombed-out Bosnian National Library in the summer of 2007, I was observing some residue of the aftermath of the violence of the war and genocide of the mid-1990s that had cracked open Sarajevo, that historically rich and multicultural city with its overlays of intersecting empires—both Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian. The ruined library—a grand Central European building with Moorish features that was an emblem of the cultural richness of the city and of the violent history that was still fresh in the gouged-out stone and broken glass—was being restored and rebuilt. The collision of the renovation in that moment of urban recovery in Sarajevo, with the recent past of the Serbian assault on the smashed library, was haunting. I wanted to create as much space as I could for a poem to explore that moment, that place, its history, and my own way of seeing it through various intersecting and fractured lenses that were part of my personal sense of history.
“SARAJEVO”
1.
The needle of the minaret disappeared in fog
and we were walking between Hapsburg courtyards
and the detonated façade of the National Library,
the wooden scaffolding rising up the Moorish pediments,
the stripped cement and under-brick, and then
the sun came and the Coke stand burned red.
Out of nowhere a guard opened the black metal door—
his boyish face and soft goatee startled us, and you slid inside
before he could shrug as if he were breaking the rules.
The blue poured through the metal grid
on the glass dome and we were walking
where a carillon fell into thumbed pages,
where students worked in the dry air
of glue and vellum, under the octagons
from which the light converged invariant and mosaic.
2.
Under the shanked-up arches I took a shot
of a patch of fresco and the paint flared—
a yellow star on a pink rosette:
Jewish/Muslim/Christian—and if it wasn’t
one of Duccio’s halos, it was drawn
a couple blocks away from where the gracious
open car of the archduke and his wife Sophie
traveled into the shadow of the image,
and then rail-lines were cut
and the city was a shrinking river running down
the hillside where the shelling began from Mount
Trebevi`c, late night August 25, ’92.
3.
I followed you up a half-sliced staircase
into the memory of microfilm and quaint
catalog trays on a second floor landing propped by a plank,
and then you disappeared with your camera,
into the dark apse-space where the steam pipes
melted under molten glass and spread to the manuscripts.
4.
Back in the cool seminar rooms of the Hollywood Hotel,
at the edge of the city our conference went on
in the green din of post-Soviet comfort where
every third channel was porn and the arguments
about ethnic cleansing were spliced by
the disco-falsetto of the Bee Gees
and through the giant windows we watched
the women sun-bathing in the weeds
next to a bulldozer and a pile of rusted cans
as plastic swans of garbage flowed
in the sulfurous river where Princip
the archduke’s assassin tried to drown himself.
5.
At Birkenau there were just white birch trees for a mile
before we reached the caved-in crematoria—so lush
the skeletons of chimneys and incinerated piles of brick surprised us.
Your family disappearing south of Krakow into the soft Polish countryside
by train with their kitchen spoons and sewing kits would have
been confused by the green shade, and even though Euclid
said any two points can be joined by a straight line,
what does that make the line from Budapest to Birkenau,
and where does that leave us under this dome
as order comes down in thin spindles of light into the dust-filled air
where a man stands on a ladder re-drawing a window?
6.
Had we fallen down some volute from the touristy hills
where we drank beer and looked out at the city
at the machines digging up the mud of Marshall Tito street
where no one was eating cabbage off sheet metal,
and the smell of roasting lamb was gorgeous
as it rose from the pavilions with their newly sealed windows.
7.
Down the boulevard past the tavernas
with their burnt offerings of meat,
the Haggadah of Sarajevo was breathing,
and you copied out the marginalia;
the copper and gold almost liquid,
the letters like bullet wounds on the calf-skin pages
from which the ink flew into the margins
of deliverance or extinction—
where Aaron’s spear opened a chapter
the way the enjambed bullets hit the façade
after the lights went out and historical memory
was shaved to a hill of locusts on the flight out of Egypt,
8.
as the silks were blowing into the yellow wind
against the Ottoman pavilions of the Bas´c´ars´ija
and then it came down on us like roof-soot:
the burning pages of black snow
the phantasmal voices of index cards
the extinct dictionaries, the tongues washed away
in the puny brown river—between margins and colophons,
the residue of Quaranic texts that left just a dusting
on the scattered silverware under the bridge,
the invisible wires of verbs in the acid-pocked sky
the burning glue and rag that rose
into the black hole over the library
over the vanquished trees where every letter
was a country lost between latitudes and an internet café.
9.
Past teenagers making out
on benches in the Jewish graveyard
just under the hill where the snipers opened fire
we shot our heretical need
to see the horror of the past
through a wide angled lens
and the shutter speed snipped
the light that unrolled the violets
sprawling down the hill
where more Serbian kids chugged Cokes
and pumped all night with their Kalashnikovs
from the Sarajevo-Pale Road to the high ground.
We heard the rhetoric of goats
as they hacked weeds and ate piles of cellophane
wrapped nougats at the feet of the women
selling scarves and candy
along the riverbank where the sky
snowed pulverized paper and phosphorous shells,
where they had breathed the ash-packed bindings—
and letters broke into wings in the black zinc dish of the sky,
where commas and dashes hooked the encrypted clouds
or reappeared outside the hyperlinks and cellular routers
returning to earth somewhere beyond the medusa
tongues of flags of foreign countries.
11.
Past the houses of no windows,
where the sound of Arabic was less than guttural,
where the refusal to hear the Other’s testimony
was the distortion of a broken CD on a megaphone in a town square,
where the brandy bottles and spent shells
littered the picked-clean kiosk and the trace was washed away.
When we came down from the hills of Porticari
through swaths of fog and ruined houses
you said: we found no Other, just the extension of self in the scratch marks
on the photos of the disappeared.
12.
The sculpted slabs of tombstones
were sinking in the mud, there
where the Book of Splendor opened
between the smack of bullets
and the caved-in mikvah
where the embroidered shawls
and the gold-embossed prayer-books
sank into ruts and the violets went red
like our eyes in the photo
beneath the light that untied the Hasidic knots
in which the soul had Houdinied out
into the wild air after the expulsion from Spain.
13.
You asked: If there is no one to listen to the story, what’s left?
The blown out ceiling with its tinge of Duccio-color?
where we walked in and looked up
at the strange blue coming down through the triangles and octagons,
onto the plaster-dusted marble floor.
De-facing the Other is a response to the transparency of the event—
look at the photos of the missing;
Books disappear like people, no, tombs, the pages stink and then they’re soot,
and then the air is clean again.
14.
The river was clogged with the dialectic of garbage
as we watched books disappear on the rock-barges
that faded in the hammered gold light
that sank to bronze before its aubergine
blotted out the hills, and we let the letters
go, the focus frozen on imagining the intractable.
The restaurant was grilling chops and sausage,
the cabbage sweet, yoghurt smashed with garlic,
Croatian wine dry and cold, the streets still buzzing.