-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
(Alashka, Part 1)
by
Janet Rodney and Nathaniel Tarn
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Remember the morning
after the tourists had whooped it up all night
making a ruin of Pennsylvania
we sat in our forest
the one we pretend to own
(until about noon
when the tourists come back to claim it)
and we listened to the birds
with our eyes closed
making time together
outside of history?
It's the poetry going thru us matters I believe
not ourselves as poets
same as the life, bird to bird, season to season
not the bird itself.
Remember in future:
when you can't see the birds
close your eyes and listen --
then they will unfold their major gifts.
As they work, going about survival,
they offer, for whatever purpose of their own
those astonishing sounds
which gives us meaning.
We heard that concert then
which had been kept from us all season
by our "responsibilities,"
day of invisible music
rustling up summer,
opening the road.
"Thank God" we said, "we are going back
to every thing that matters."
Time of patience now, testing out
our memory of roads once travelled
further than night
in an air of crystals.where the breath
is multi-faceted as thought.
Patience hunts the poem.
The poem surrenders, opening
a two-way mirror. Each life answers the other.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Answer a poem. Only this one wasn't dialed. The door opened I stepped inside & found your message on the floor. Answer. I mean, a half of what I say to you comes from you. & I trust you to make the connection when I don't, I rely on your intelligence. People used to write letters. They would get up early and write. While their minds were fresh. Set the day straight in writing. Wire the day with words. A diary for someone other. They would give away their best mind and still have time. Just as there's light at both ends of a tunnel & we carry this bulb from one end to the other, I thought, when I picked up yr. note this is a light transmission: moves so fast it's invisible, moves so slow it's invisible, a feather passing over skin, the gradual brightening of male plumage, the order of seasons. What are you doing now? Each summer I start to record my dreams. We were sitting in a chair back to back with a double face & through our mind a movie flashed of changing shadows, we both could see light but at different ends. I turned to say -- but you weren't there, you were at the back of my mind, eyes staring out of my crown, pulling me towards the light. -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
I sit at one of the crossroads of the city
which is itself all one crossroads of the universe.
Born here: so as to speak.
No stone has moved, n.b.,
the spirit-city still
in essence
inviolate.
First station of the cross,
morning after arrival
gas-chambers monument
at the tip of Notre Dame:
"They went unto the ends of the earth and they
did not return."
I had waited years to see that.
We have been, returned,
and are going again soon.
Later, at the Laboratoire for social anthropology,
fall nose to spine with the British Columbia collection.
Levi-Strauss has seen at last, I am informed,
the Skeena's mist-skirts.
I fly the Alashka flag among crowds
half of which carry the flags and patches of other nations
and are far too busy doing that to care about AK.
I meet with Jacques Roubaud
who will walk three months from Minnesota to Louisiana
setting his spine on Mark Twain's rock.
We might send him a postcard as we cross?
The correspondences cannot end, not if they tried to.
The center is just another margin of another center
bound by whale bones and beach ridges
stretched like time's bow
behind the arctic sea.
Giddings, Louis:
homage to that man who dug us in
thousands of years into the past, back of
first tattle of trekkers hunting land
when all they had to do was stand still.
And did. So as to speak.
The girl at lunch gets up, over and over,
stoops on her lover
so as to show the breasts in her open blouse.
I eat her breasts, among my salad, which is what she wants
and miss your body language.
(Besides which, it is all good cannibalism, within custom.)
Tonight, the Deutsches Requiem at Notre Dame
with my lady mother, city-born also,
who comes here to wake her own mother
lying between death and sleep,
the small, cold waves
bearing the birds of life
on the swell of the Bering Sea.
Tomorrow I read my poems on the French radio
in this language I first spoke--
chatting with dear Deguy and Claude Royet-Journoud
about Alashka.
And, of course, every night, the Seigle, my second parents
who love me from my twenties. My fellow student Chiva too,
and Lucien Biton, cook to the mortal mind,
cousins and uncles also: Claude, Daniel, Marion.
While my mother's mother dies at one end of Paris
and at the other end, another of her sons.
Meanwhile I recommend
our Pennsylvania to you as you wake
since you still sleep there
six hours behind me on the waves of May
among our wrens and orioles.
Until our bones can buck the thaw
and freeze again in old
yet still so virgin summer ice
and feel no pain, life draining out,
as we return outside of human time,
to the great bow
which draws the earth, and every nature in it,
backwards to origin. . .
I travel hard, with little company,
shuttle between the living and the dead,
being of ice now, in my inmost thoughts,
and tho the world beats here with all its blood.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Above the Atlantic many miles high imagine me flying backwards to that place between the ribs, that warmest of all hearts, where they bury their dead. I suppose the priest told them to put up a picket fence: they took their slats from the biggest tree. & what better place than a grove of whalerib. Different from this cage skimming the tops of clouds while somewhere below you walk thru a door or sit at the crossroads where you have been lounging these past days in my mind in that last masque you painted of vegetable family, packed in quilts of ice. -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
To be idle rich not my wish nor idle poor but somewhere between something parasitic maybe unclaimed by gods or men with time to do nothing, or not. As one chooses. To engage the world with time to live & die in doses chosen at will or letting either come as it will to do me in or out, to glide over the mind's cities & woods stepping through the broken lights on pavements or clearings between your eye and mine walking under the rains within that fall, leaving us dry as winter aging in our frames, but with words to say it & let them rise around us, the words, and think: "how they rise like a city around us" or, "how they rise like a forest in our middle" and watch them grow, and watch us grow. -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
This morning I heard a
bird among stars
Egypt was singing
in the dark,
the king's
childhood sat under the falcon's shadow
who had descended from the sun,
down ladders from the sun
and become, in the lower world,
darkness.
--They
made these stones
last some 3000 years
solid and earth-bound
like his grandfather (Ramses's)
who writes the earth down:
birds all the names of
birds & all the trees around.
Fish in blue pools.
Heat / heat. Far from
the ice-cap, bringing down the pole
over the golden faces
of women longing at stars
bulls, geese, hares
plaited in their tresses . . .
Do you know
how OLD we are
to
speak to each other
one in Paris / one in Madrid
(under Velazquez light,
London between, later Pennsylvania
and later still
departure in the dark
again toward the pole?
Old with the world behind us
enough to have made ourselves
in our separation
cry to each other
taking in hand our sexes
each creating
from the rush of it
(brother & sister holding free hands)
an independent world . . .
And a world created from that.
My that and your this.
From the mixing of. My this and your that.
Nor woman/nor man. Bird. Fish.
Hinted at in former times.
Never more.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
This was my piece of Eden once, the clear Velazquez air & sky so close to old stones, rainworn tiles sloping streetward, lines clear as your eye, bells contrapuntal music of the night, clear, as your mind among stars, marking another time, the falcon's, his laser eye (like yours) slept and woke to sound of steps going down rung by rung to darkness, wings spread out like hooks to draw up the fish. But there's nothing of innocence here now, goes back to a sound of laughter, like water, a hand churning deep inside the pools as fish leapt up the ladders of fountains, sun glinting off their scales, they hit the sky dazzling in their flight, their migration north. Now the Eden lies like sun behind the rain, when it comes, revealing all the splendors of darkness. its colors ... -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
From this poverty of nature,
all I can give you right now
is gold among the pines at noon,
dark groves of the Meseta,
their metal strings
sighing above the trenches
where an army of brothers
assailed their brothers in the city.
Today,
flowers were exploding among nettles,
each seed a parachute
ready for the wind.
On that prow of land
I tend most afternoons
to drive out to with my Mother.
pointing (like a ship)
to the Sierra de Guadarrama,
I stood like a mast
as suddenly a gust
rippled the grass
and, sails full,
I was borne off,
Mother waving from the pier,
on a trip of discovery,
you and I back in Alashka,
putting in at coves
where high peaks veer into the sea
& snow falls throughout the year,
delicate lace-tips
hardening on top
while far below, the ice,
softeneing under its own weight
begins to flow
and cracks in the surface
open and close,
the whole mass breathing
as it tramples over woods/lakes
wearing down/
building up
new mountains,
gouging out valleys
where the milk-carrying rivers
deposit their sands,
rubbing the earth's muscle
with sun-golds, moon-silvers and ice-whites.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
This morning I found:
"...and they shall take down
the veil of the screen
and cover the ark
of the testimony with it
and shall put thereon
a covering of sealskin
and shall spread over it
a cloth all of blue..."
What were the seals doing in Israel I asked.
For once the
rabbis couldn't answer.
Of all the outer masks:
the oldest operational again.
I woke to watch my son ceasing to be a child,
wearing, on his shoulders, the shawl
of all humanity, present and absent.
In his voice, a sorrow old as sand:
our people chased like rats out of the Egypt.
This morning I heard the
Egypt singing, a
very sweet bird
I longed for, but 1: (was ice, I came
to the sun and was ice.
In my tradition:
these men left Egypt
aeons ago--since then
leaving the home they found also.
Their aspirations have become
another home
and the ice
has ceased to bother them.
They have no knowledge
of solitude. The race dreams a home
but Isaiah, Elijah, Ezekiel
are no longer among them.
They claim
the thing is live, moves, changes
but have no knowledge of change
or what could bring it about.
In their blindness
the poet-princes of Israel escape them,
they don't see them here.
This morning I heard
the Egypt singing, a
very sweet bird
voice of sunlight, coming out of a pool,
turquoise, with goldfish veins.
Egypt was saying to the prophets
"Princes: unto you the song is given.
The exile which never ends is yours
and goes
beyond the desert, into the fertile land
and beyond the fertile land
into the desert again, but
this time it is a desert of ice
at the ends of
known world.
Where Egypt sings now, you would not
believe it."
And the Diaspora went forward
into eternity as such
is my take on us poets:
we are sundered / sundered and...
the world goes round
in never ending spirals, and,
we remain sundered / rootless / unhoused
until the end.
When the Egypt sings, she has our voice,
People of no country, flesh of the poets:
where Egypt sings now, you would not
believe it.
I watch my son ceasing to be a child
with a coat of sealskin on his shoulders,
his voice rising into the rafters
(to a drum he hears alone)
holding up the house.
His voice keeps him alone,
the people fall off, drop back
into 'their secrets.
My son rises on his own voice
takes up the harpoon
de profundis
from the cloth all of blue:
they have mistaken for the sky,
when it is the sea, mother of all
when it is the cloth of waters
gave us our birthright
and the seal sings in his own voice
far into arctic nights
the race forgot to name
in the first days
when all was gold and silver
white as yet unknown
asleep in the tip of the first harpoon
floating in the ocean.
We that are poor
and yet have riches beyond the dreams
of the men you and I know
out there on the ice
at the very end of world!
This morning I heard the
Egypt singing
a very sweet bird,
all the inheritance of Egypt
all arts and musics
the old and silver poems..
But the Egypt was no Ionger a center.
What is our poverty (in regard to the riches of Egypt)
beside the poverty of those who are poor
in regard to us?
What is it like
that extremity of being poor
on the fringes of the wide skirt of the diaspora
who is homeless to the end of time
out there with her children
the children she has most lost
in the blizzard, on the ice,
at the forward edge
of this thing that is supposedly changing,
that will not change, ever,
until all has been made sun-gold, or moon-silver,
or ice-white?
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
It is so good,
even in letters,
to keep the flesh between us
and the poems happening always
in amorous terms
we both understand.
The meat of a rose
unfolding before our eyes
& as we enter it
in a text so wide
the whole garden
rises & declines there,
we don't feel too much
the loneliness of a long day
spent apart in different lives,
secreting words for an old world
grown dim in its ways
and far from that northern rim
we've been leaning towards
these past years, pushed out
by centrifugal force,
almost driven, from that mythical middle
we call home.
It is, I suppose,
like water cascading down
that never falls
or like the ice
on top of the globe
that flows so slowly
it can only be seen
as still.
And white.
We seem to move out
from center to rim
and back
both poles attracting,
unable to be still.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Your three received
(Alashka/Madrid), my own
London's out
but, necessarily, the speed of light
around the world, into Pt. Hope, and back
not calculated for:
some seizure in the data, something broke.
"It works! It works!"...
Tha-
lassa, Tha-
lassa: we have reached
the sea
(too many musics playing, not sure
the subtlety of this is getting thru) but drafts, drafts
against the future.
This morning
Kluane
between your thighs
not knowing the mixture of waters
white with the snows
formed by our bloods in drainage of each other
what degree of melt, into each other,
as when the river and the sea meet
and become one water.
Kluane,
Klu/a/ni
flowing thru my mind
& our feast day
spreading the cloth of waters between us,
placing the food on the cloth
birds in our eyes
rising, plunging,
the bodies like ships
crossing in the night
executing
complex manoeuvres
around each other,
berthing
BIRTHING
because we are woman
& man
both with words.
I thought I would take the air
as it remains, stubbornly clear for both of us,
a kind of peace
having descended upon us at the same moment,
the air: castille or ile de france or thames
all one pale color, ice,
and, breaking it apart,
reveal our mouths, frost-rimmed, eating each other
and each other's words
as the totem-birds
in the night, invisible,
speeding over our cities,
carrying our thoughts
into each other's minds
our desires into each other's
thighs,
migrating,
mixing the waters...
AND THIS BREAK, ing?
it is a picture of mind
at work, you realize now,
nor idle rich, nor idle poor, but somewhere
in between,
to take, as I have always dreamed,
the whole world to one place & call both home,
the world melted into the place, the place
into the world,
and why should not this be
those far, far, lots but, ah, untravelled so,
they stay so clear in the mind, so crystal clear,
the mind can work on them, not be confused by
world so too much with us, as are now
these cities of the flesh we must transform:
cities of intellect.
Yes, the wind blows
already over our bones.
We must find the
locus of those bones.
Life is the business
death has with us,
it is nothing but
a matter of
recognition.
And out of that the poem.
I'll hunt as never before.
There will be, among children,
nothing like this child:
they will say the ice
works miracles.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
"...and no craftsman, of whatsoever
craft he be, shall be found any more
in thee... for thy merchants were the
great men of the earth; for by thy
sorceries were all nations deceived."
You can listen
to the Egypt sing
lucky you,
but I hear guns
& hoofbeats in the distance,
someone riding all night,
the wind in his cloak
a cancer on his face
from Dover to Philadelphia
to break a tie
changing the course
of what?
Sent Delaware to Revolution
sent men to their graves
sent England finally packing
in the name
of such a hackneyed tale
I don't have to tell you,
you lucky,
a bird in your ear,
myth at least
to make your day
while I
with my bestiary
of ancestors
listen to an ominous drone,
looking for that mud
not in the Nile,
but the cantilevered nest
sending down its cones
under our eaves,
our "promised land"
with its final sting
sending all hope,
all new-found things,
to market.
You can say
it's the Egypt singing
but it's your voice
I hear,
giving it all a season,
joining all the oceans
or taking the whole world
to one place,
your boy
holding up the roof
because you have been standing
since he began
holding up that roof
for him with your song.
In my tradition:
these men left England
not so long ago
and since
have found another home
in their sorceries
with which they deceive
all nations: and home
is what can buy
and what can sell,
all else in exile: how easy
it must have been,
far from land
to see the hills
through which our Delaware moves,
its birds of many kinds
making their homes on its banks
rubbing the air with their wings.
In spite of hardship,
how easy
it would be
for those early travellers
to change their course,
an easy move upriver
to a landscape as yet
unspoiled by history.
Your song, not Egypt's
will stop the lynx, yes,
stupefy him in his tracks,
the rivers will be silent,
for a moment
stop their flow,
the wind
will die down
the leaves will be still
& long after the ice has gashed our feet
I'll remember your rhythm,
how it speaks. of a paradise
where we could grow old together
& where love can grow
as the trees grow,
far from the riches of Egypt.
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
The United States are about to descend upon Alashka. On the ferry, as you sail up the spectacular coastlines, there is nowhere you can escape the "Muzak." The Army of consumers is prevented from realizing that nature is more than just a moving window. The tragedy of this State is that it is the last in the Union (so far as we know) about to be "developed," this time with all the options known and documented. Yet it is already defeated for lack of planning, lack of faith where planning exists, lack of leadership and above all a belief in monolithic "Progress." Progress meaning: "more jobs, more people, more improvements." There is no other notion of "Progress." The garage man at Kachemak Bay told us of an oil pros- pector he threw out because of "overbearing manners." Yet oil itself would ruin his town eventually. We can be individual but not collective in our last stands. The people who homesteaded here had solitude and risk to dignify their poverty. Now the tidal waves flood up, with instant "Culture," instant "Communications," instant "Betterment." Everyone is instantly rich. What can the homesteader do but sell out and move on? For that matter, where to? -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Copyright © 1979 by Janet Rodney and Nathaniel Tarn.
From Atitlan / Alashka, published by Brillig Works.
Go to The Road In, Part 2 of Alashka.
Return to Light and Dust Poets.
Light and Dust @ Grist Mobile Anthology of Poetry.