Two Poems
Gustaf Sobin
A SELF-PORTRAIT IN LATE AUTUMN
… through that ever-
expanding interval, were never more
than these
late bees you’d
scribble: what hung, like sucklings, from the
fat,
dangling clusters; than these desolate, verb-
studded landscapes you’d
murmur, even
hiss into
some other, some ever else-
where’s
ear.
TRANSPARENT ITINERARIES: 1999
that interval, you wrote, between the inadequacies of the
given and the imperatives of the inferred.
(that additive without which isn’t).
_______
through that veil, that
billowing gauze, that interface with face-
lessness it-
self.
_______
language: a density, you’d called it, in the service of its
own evanescent releases.
fabricating as it went the otherwise inaccessible.
_______
was always in the
elsewhere, wasn’t it: in the
rented rooms of those
out-
lying districts that you’d begun drafting the
portrait; begun restituting—feature by feature—its
oblit-
erated mirrors.
_______
as if destiny weren’t the unravelling of some predetermined dictate but the patient reconstitution of the intended.
the resuscitation of so many suppressed ur-words by the bias of a yet-to-be articulated grammar.
(what lay secreted within the parched hollow of our each and every exhalation).
was why you’d lowered yourself into those ruins, wasn’t it? why you’d tape-measured whatever vestiges remained in an attempt to interpolate—from their least sequential sections—the full thrust of such an obfuscated dynamic.
_______
… were roots, the white irises’, you’d
discovered, that had
gagged the
idol’s
eyes.
_______
far too late for anything, now, but those earliest ideations.
the unearthing, therein, of the eventual.
wasn’t this why the bodies grappled the way they did?
cherished the incipient against their own ineluctable
depletions?
their teeth bared; their breath broken.
why, too, you’d have uttered—just then—that word with-
out words: that elision glittering in the very midst of so much spent syntax.
and heard, so doing, the silence—thus solicited—sound.