Two Poems

Lyn Hejinian

THE DISTANCE

Banned from ships as if I were fate herself, I nonetheless long hankered after adventures

At sea

But buckets, lifeboats, gulls, and fishguts on wharves were as near as I got

Or the beach. The ban was inoperative on the sands, I boarded

Wrecks. The terns, godwits and gulls were ashore as at sea, and I learned the fine points

By which one can distinguish between the sandpipers

Just as I learned that there are many fine points to fate

Which divulges what comes to pass indefinitely

So that we can hardly say of things that happen that they were meant to be

Or that they were not. Like a pupil

I was ruled by obedience

To rules I broke. I floundered around

And enjoyed my choices—I was eager

To receive—

But not without perplexity, I was endowed with doubt

And that is one of the few things I can say of myself then that I can say of myself

Now, for the most part there has been little confluence. I’ve been swept

Against objects, lost habits,

Knowledge grows

But it has to be connected to things.

And that connection is usually best achieved

So they say

Through perceiving similarities. No way!

Winds blow in a giant circle and set up resistance to anyone going the other way.

Still it came about that the ban was lifted

Suddenly one fall

And I went to sea after all

And shaped a course away from the trees that framed the seascape

Beyond my mother’s house, incandescent birches and fiery maples as well as forbidding clouds of hemlock and pine,

A forest that was like a terrestrial sky

But is much less so now in memory. I don’t remember why

It was said that a woman’s presence on a ship at sea would bring disaster down on everyone aboard, the gods of mythology seem to have liked us well enough

Or maybe they liked us too well, chasing us in animal form

With violent winds.

But mythology gave

Way to history

And now history is going

The way of bedtime stories. A path, bricks, innocents—they are additions, but odd

Additions to oddity.

Gullibility is an expression of enthusiasm

So great it makes decisions. But I am throwing off faith, bound to regard the sea

As a prison holding people whom their childhood friends cannot believe capable of crime.

It is midsummer and the sun is lost in the sun, visibility is  accomplished. Can credibility

Be far behind?

But I won’t pretend

To be an historian, how could I, when I have no idea of today’s date

And though I know we embarked one morning early in May

I have no idea how long ago that was

And I don’t care. I breathe, I twist my hair.

I watch the sea. At times it resembles an eye but it isn’t watching me.

Some days ago a “native kayak” appeared and then disappeared, winding through a lead in the ice.

The first mate kept close watch for several hours after the kayak, following a shimmering band of water west, disappeared

Or, as the first mate put it, “withdrew”—the mate insisting that the occupant might be a pirate

Or some other type with hostile intent

Emboldened by the ice

Approaching

In broad daylight. A strange expression. Soon there will be no more than a band of pink against the darkness,

Narrow daylight

As at the beginning or end

Of a day in the habitable latitudes,

Where breadth is what is assumed of days

As it is of the sea even when mist closes in around the ship. She is called the Distance.

We go where she goes

And arrive willy-nilly at times and places of whose existence we’d known nothing before

And which therefore, though we come upon them inevitably (there being always somewhere and always in or at it something—whether material or musical—that establishes its “somewhereness”), we reach involuntarily,

It’s to these that we hope to go and from these that we hope to return.

But beset by such hopefulness (cold,

Ominous, and calm) we’re getting nowhere

And tempers are short.

I’ve grown hard of hearing, the first mate said this morning in a tone dripping with sarcasm.

Did you ask for a hard-boiled egg?

Jean-Pierre is no longer included in the games the other children are playing, soon he’ll be an adolescent, already he’s hovering over the figurehead,

A woman holding a telescope to her left eye.

For the most part it is trained on the horizon.

She is establishing herself.

According to the Greeks metamorphoses have to be complete

And are impossible. Things may change

But nothing can become the opposite

Of what it is. The sea cannot

Be not the sea. Yet

I can see it

Both ways.

Then yet again I hardly remember who it was I was instead of this  back when I longed to go to sea and couldn’t.

I gazed up through branches tossing in the wind at the blue planes of the sky and felt rooted, even at an early age,

Perhaps to gods but if so my deities were streaming

Or grinding like a boat being hauled out of the waves over stony

ground. The sound

Gives me pleasure still though it is fugitive. Pleasures are synonymous with power (and with powers

Though these are very different things),

And lest they become dangerous they must be fugitive.

How strangely our course approaches forks, how variously we decide which tack to take. We ourselves are fugitives,

The world is strange. It appears to last and appears so as to last,

In the dark of night or of storms, into which it disappears to last as well. We have come in the dark

Upon landforms, shores, islands without knowing what to expect.  On some

One may enter into friendship, on others into endless complaint.

But there must be more to friendship than a placid acceptance of misunderstandings.

And interruptions, though these have the effect of inevitabilities

We encounter constantly.

Someone remarks “there’s something over there” or, more urgently, “there’s something ahead!”

The boat tacks—I say that though the engines are running.

We have no destination. One can’t foretell

What may or may not be pointless.

The boat arches, bends, turns—it is shaping itself. Sometimes I climb into a lifeboat to think

And there I dream confusedly that we’ve “varied” and come to an island

Which can be approached only through one of forty doors,

At each one of which sits a perched bird that can disclose the mysteries of logic to me in an ancient language which I will understand.

The gist of what occurs according to the birds is unlikeliness.

We are all so busy it seems sometimes that the only time we can appreciate being

Is when we are at sea

Subject to capriciousness

Though we sleep slung in binding hammocks

Like spiders or netted fish

Or like trapeze artists bouncing to ground level at the end of their act. Tonight the sea

Has twisted in turbulence. Observing the effects I’ve grown vertiginously

Calm. How odd it is to be out.

At best one can know only the knowledge of this time. When one reaches the limit of that

One must make way for those who know in and for the time next

To this.

In and for I say hospitably.

Between ourselves we speak the language of these parts.

The communications are never concise.

Whatever we say is best understood if contextualized, so contexts are what we say, and they too are best understood if contextualized

And so it goes, sometimes inward and sometimes outward bound

Not round and round but as if over the bridge

From top to toe

Or pegbox to tailpiece

Of a vast violin—strung—

What we speak is strung

And we cling to it as to a shroud.

The wind sweeps across the sea but cannot enter it. Both are variable. It is always safe to predict

Variability. Great cumulous clouds hang overhead one moment

And terns another. The sun on my face is cold

And yet I often feel heat. Perhaps we are all small suns.

The sunflower in its pot on deck doesn’t think so. It turns

Frantically

But not to us

As the Distance rides the sea and sends the sun sliding violently into all the compass corners.

Am I compassionate? Or is it merely out of enthusiasm

That I give a thumbs up

As the Distance slows so as to pass gently through a flock of floating seabirds?

Their kind must be persistent

And have been here long before the first human flutterings

Whose own persistence brought us here

To no end

Unless what and when we turn can be termed an end.

If one undertakes when outward bound to sail to the ends of the earth, one must hope also ultimately to come inward bound

From them again.

How hospitable circumstances can be!

The earth seems young—raucous, ravenous, quick. The earth exists

With gusto. Things fall to it and stick, things are rooted in it

And rise. This cannot be said of the sea. It’s impossible to clear the way and come within sight of my subject.

Obscure emotions cling to it—obscuring emotions, I mean. The analytical imagination

Naturally undertakes analysis of the imagination

While the emotional imagination does what, emote? I’ve tried to  give emotions

The slip

By attributing them to other people—

An iffy strategy at best. Not everyone’s motives are my own.

Emotions stem from belief,

And motives are meant to establish what’s believed.

William is afraid of ghosts

Which he says live in and on the ice

More and more of which we’ve been seeing

Day and night passing us as we pass

If indeed we are passing. At times it seems as if we are simply riding a gentle swell

Washing the edges of the habitable world. A glance into the distance

Raises these doubts and I take them as signs of aesthetic wellness.

One thing I’ve discovered is that nothing that’s experienced is allegorical—

There is no moral. Nothing is contained. Sure one can say that the woman who sets sail

Will cross reefs

Or that science is the practice of unknowing

Or that given enough time every circumstance will betray what it promised

To guarantee

But these are, as I see it, unbound, uninhibited, nonsuccinct

Observations—things that take time and space to develop

Into whatever truth or truths they offer. All in all

There is very little containment in the universe

Except what’s temporarily contained in the bodies of things as presence or in animate bodies as life.

The sea though not silent subjects one to silence—that’s the only name I know for the distance

Though it has noisy spans.

They cascade and splash. I know these words

But my thoughts of things go on without them.

NIGHTS

Ooooh, oooooh, ooooh, says the voice of a girl:

“I’ve been attacked by owls,

by owls with towels,

I’ve been attacked

by snakes with rakes.

It is just this kind of ridiculous language, banal but lacking even banality’s pretense at relevance and sense, that I hear in my sleep; I wake, feeling irritable and depressed.

*

The sadness! the injustice!

It’s true I want to know, I want to look

But what is it?

*

The fingers leave their owls in a calm

Sleep figures the features

Sleep speaks for the bird, the animal

For the round and the residual

Sleep soaks from experience

But why and what?

*

Suddenly I remember having rescued a spider from the bathtub in the morning. I imagined that I had established rapport with my environment. I observed the spider eerily. I was in harmony with life and my times. Not only will things go on but this going on will repeat.

After all, I can vow kindness in relation to something I cannot know.

The spider, when it appears within “a range of alternatives,” will be rescued—dished out of the nicked and polished porcelain tub and knocked onto the shrubbery just outside the open window.

Of course, it will not be the same spider each time but a sequence of spiders.

*

The 23rd night was very dark.

It was cold.

My eyes were drawn to the window.

I thought I saw a turtledove nesting on a waffle

Then I saw it was a rat doing something awful

But anarchy doesn’t bother me now any more than it used to

I thought I saw a woman writing verses on a bottle

Then I saw it was a foot stepping on the throttle

But naturally freedom can be understood in many different ways

I thought I saw a fireman hosing down some straw

Then I saw it was a horse grazing in a draw

But it’s always the case that in their struggle to survive, animate objects must be aided

I thought I saw a rhubarb pie sitting on the stove

Then I saw it was the tide receding from a cove

But although I have strong emotions when I watch a movie, jealousy is never one of them.

I thought I saw a bicyclist racing down the road

Then I saw it was a note, a message still in code

But sense is always either being raised to or lowered from the sky

*

A voice says, The ambered bed flag fills.

A voice says, This is voltage island.

A voice says, The wall past which girls wander flicks is built of baffled face bricks.

*

I saw a juxtaposition

It happened to be between an acrobat and a sense of obligation

Pure poetry

Of course there is a great difference between withering and a napping man

And flailing in relation to fossils in a stone is different from a set of dominoes

Still I don’t worry less about the same old worries

*

I’m of a mule age, I dare like a log.

I live where I live, and I’ll bulk graciously

—to zero.

*

But the worst of speaking in the dark is that the sounds we emit are strange and hollow.

*

The moon was solemnly full.

Jim Trotmeyer assertively declared, Emotions can’t be governed by rules.

Millie Corcoran politely requested, Don’t overwhelm me.

To this Jim Trotmeyer delightfully responded, But the azures of spring truly rush.

Millie Corcoran remarked astutely, Azures rush, yes, but composedly.

Jim Trotmeyer mused pensively, The clouds do indeed puzzle.

Millie Corcoran said sociably, They appear above the crowd.

Oswald Proskaniewicz interrupted furiously, You, Jim Trotmeyer, are not the radical you say you are.

*

As for me, I want to be Banambitan

and leave kind ships vitalities by art.

I am untouchable.