They say Apollinaire wrote
culling scraps of conversation
overheard in cafes in Montmartre: cubist perspectives,
like the clippings in the journal of Juan Gris,
snares
where the backdrop is sharper than the cynosure,
the foreground a bit disfigured, reduced to angles and spirals – the colours livelier in twilit windows: a clang
in the cabin of childhood – Hölderlin talked of that,
they were chambers: preceptor, red damask, Venetian mirror,
Wozu dichter in dürftiger Zeit, and Goethe would write Schiller that his young friend,
though still a bit timid and, naturally, wanting in experience
(everything in that letter’s tone makes manifest the older man’s benevolent contempt for the poetry of the younger: he had already written verses – so it struck him – far serener, or better, or if not, of a classicism such as would vouchsafe his immortality)
because classic art is imperishable: Hölderlin, in his late years, wrote to his mother
respectfully, with turns of phrase he had learned as a boy,
asking only for underwear, a pair of badly darned socks, small commonplace things,
like Rimbaud in Abyssinia, or at the sickhouse
– Que je suis donc devenu malheureux! –
And so poets end: injured, annulled, dead-alive, and hence we call them poets.
And so? The crucifixion of a few is perhaps no more than a sign
and grandeur and death the equilibrium of others,
and Yeats’s phosphorescence (Byzantium, like a gong at twilight) the price to be paid
for him whose name was writ in water.
Because a price must be paid, you can be sure of it: Eurydice still lies dead
over the circuits and the blue of a room tepid like the carcass of a mahogany piano.
Orpheus’s world is that of the mirror’s backing: Orpheus’s fall,
like Eurydice’s journey home from Hell, the bicycles, the boys chewing gum on their way back from playing tennis,
backs red, bodies golden – and fragile – the girls in red leggings with Adriatic blue eyes sipping gin and orange,
the ones who swam nude in the novels of Pavese, and we dubbed them the topolino girls
(I’m not sure you know the topolino: it was a car fashionable, or maybe just often to be seen, in the roaring forties).
But I’m older now, even if old is not quite the right word, but the colour of gin and orange
où sont où sont the dreams that money can buy?
This poem is
a succession of snares: for
reader and
proofreader
and for the editor of the poem.
To be clear,
no one has told me what
the snares conceal, because
that would be like telling me the figure
in the carpet, and this, as
James has made clear, is not
possible.