Predation has its solar remainder:
Only the sun
in the morning
covered him
with flies
Then only
after the grubs
had done him
did the earth
let her robe
uncover and her part
take him in
Robinson Jeffers documents a late encounter, “Vulture,” in which the bird of prey sizes up the aged poet and savors him for another time. “I tell you solemnly / That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes— / What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life after death.” And what else could this be but Hart Crane’s visit with Melville’s tomb,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.
Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.
The stars speckle the sea surface with the patterned stencil of an answering report, while the nautical depths perform another labor:
… anything
nature puts in the sea
comes up,
it is cornucopia
to see it
working up a sluggish
treadle,
from a ship’s hold
to the truck
which takes it to the De-Hy
to be turned into catfood,
and fertilizer, for nature’s
fields
~
afternoon Manatee of my mind? Rock picture
of a beast? Lausel woman, holding out a ladle? Actually
sluggish treadle up which nature
climbed Wet white body dried Old picture Andromeda
awash Norn nurse waitress.
The “great mother” is not a personage but a nest of deposited urges, a port of access to the underworld signaled by the herm, its stones like magnetic embers of a final mappa mundi. “Work the old images from the hoard, / el trabajo en oro that gives wealth semblance / and furnishes ground for the gods to flourish.” Masa confusa.
The pageant, growing ever more curious, reaches
An ultimate turning point. Now everything is going to be
Not dark, but on the contrary, charged with so much light
It looks dark, because things are now packed so closely together.
We see it with our teeth.
Workers on the real guide the threads, sort the grains, bind the seams. Heraclitus is distantly signaled there where Olson sees him disappearing into the ability of humans to know themselves as their own matter—Heraclitus among the few who acknowledged as workers the sleeping and the dead (“Even sleeping men are doing the world’s business and helping it along”—which answers in polyphony to another adage, “We assume a new being in death : we become protectors of the living and the dead” [Davenport translation, 22,31]).
“Be the Oedipus of your life and the Sphinx of your tomb,” a spirit-medium told Victor Hugo, indicating the dual creative labor of life ventured in poetry by day and by dreams in sleep.
All night long
I was a Eumolpidae
as I slept
putting things together
which had not previously
fit
The work of the dead and the sleeping is the work of discerning the bottom, the earth as ground of the upside down or inside out, as vowels and consonants are ambassadors of arrival and departure:
upside-down trees
and sky, shadowy, at the bottom
other step-stone
holes in the world.
Zukofsky derives his poetics in “A” 12 while mourning his dead father and marveling at language,
That closed and open sounds saw
Things,
See somehow everlastingly
Out of the eye of sky.
My father died in the spring.
Half of a fence was built that summer.
For minutes as I drove nails in the lower stringer
The sunset upside down
Tops of trees, even an inverted hill,
Gauze.
~
Who bury the dead
must from the grave
establish a habit
~
for ‘the
blossoms to
fall up’
for the
under round
of our
world had
TOP marked
hopefully for
a printer.
~
… Only when the Flower—only when the uproar
has driven the Soul
out of me, only then shall the God
strike
the three Towns. The three Towns
shall first
be born again. The Flower shall
grow down.
The mud of the
Bottom
is the floor
of the Upside Down.
~
as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky.
The stars are hermetic implements, making explicit an implicate order.* “The eyes, clamped shut, squeeze to a star”—
those stars in beautiful cosmology
if no other reason to be than this—.
Feeling oneself a “head full of stars,” and “lost / as earth in such a / world,” the balance of inner and outer, self and other, planetary content and astral provocation raises a challenging question : “how / can I expel these roomy stars?” Expelled, they constellate the sky; ingested, they crowd awareness and perception until figure and ground collapse into one unfigured groundlessness. But from that opening lapse or collapse the zero speaks and encompasses, revivifies in concentric constellation the ouroboros of the blood tides.
The immense stellar phenomenon
Of dawn focuses in the egret
And flows out, and focuses in me
And flows infinitely away
To touch the last galactic dust.
This is the prime reality—
Bird and man, the individual
Discriminate, the self evalued
Actual, the operation
Of infinite, ordered potential.
Birds, sand grains, and souls bleed into being
~
The orders
are elaborate:
the strings are tuned.
Inside every image
another is visible.
In the lust of traces (the venatic paradigm of Carlo Ginzburg) we convulsively follow Hermes’s precedent, piling signs around any gap, cut, space, lack, sacrifice, incision. Every stylus, in the track of its spinning groove, tropes its own motion. Daimonic fatality—Nietzsche’s amor fati—has less to do with extinction or cessation than with the wild palpation, the syncope that heaves being from one point to another in a spasm of unbinding, a declaration of the discontinuous that any medium (music, art, dance, writing) adapts to its own form. So representation pulsates with its own libidinously declared fractures that simultaneously bind and separate.*
I looked up and saw
its form
through everything
—it is sewn
in all parts, under
and over
~
… no tomb
is solid,
not even
this hour
holds.
~
can it be said to have come forth from the tomb?
Or is the tomb
forever
so much
part of its story
it carries it with it
wherever it goes?
Zukofsky makes ear a bier and wonders whether this is abstract or concrete, All or “A.”
When I am dead in the empty ear
you might ask …
what if the song preserves us?
As you said stone sculpture’s still and moves
and to intrigue us further the mobile moves
with its sustaining current the space is still:
which is less abstract solid or more sensed?
~
Tell us of excess.
What was the sign that limited?