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lizmckague-blog · 6 years

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Excerpt from The Paper Boat

by Elizabeth McKague

O wild west wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing...

He made them in crafty, rapid gestures, folding the pages of a manuscript he’d carried to the river. Thinking he would read it, he planned to sit on his favorite rock until the mud of the bank crept into his only pair of leather shoes and the October dusk erased what light was left in the sky.

The white sheets of paper were slick and delicate. His tiny boats easily drifted from the water’s edge in measured breaths and sailed down river in a balanced breeze. The Arno looked murky and heavy, a green shade in the last pale slants of daylight. He creased and folded his stanzas and cantos, turning the corners of each page into lips that held a silence. A silence before voyage, a silence released from the futility of whatever permanence he had originally intended by attempting to write the damn thing. He started to work faster in a synchronized fury, setting each paper boat upon the water as soon as it was made. He got a paper cut, then another, and his fingers grew cramped in the sharp, cold air hovering over the river with the approaching night.

At last he folded his hands together in a buckle around his knees and relaxed. His posture copied the shape of the rock. He stared hypnotically at the flotilla of paper boats he had made. Spreading out along the river’s dreary current, they passed beneath the Ponte Solferino until page one was a white speck in the distance. Then page two and page three, until the entire paper fleet, like defeated warrior ships, slowly disappeared into a blinding mist, moving westward toward the Mediterranean Sea. The sun sped away and the Arno became gray and opaque.

As a child, he had made paper boats with such concentration that nothing existed in his mind but the movement of his fingers against the sheets of paper. He tore them from a random notebook he had discovered about the house. They felt at once flimsy yet stiff, soft and cold. It was the autumn of 1802. He had left his sisters to their music lesson and wandered out of doors alone. He descended the wide steps in the front of the mansion, crossed the circular drive of gritty stones where the carriages came in, and continued through a maze of clipped green hedges in the courtyard. He was not even aware that he had left the house without a guardian. He remembered a sense of freedom and the sad scent of his mother’s neglected garden. Fading, pink chrysanthemums and frosted white colored roses danced, nonchalantly withering in symmetric rows. He walked beside the white washed fence that was then twice his height and passed the stables without being noticed. The horses were being let out from their stalls into the meadow. He strode over a damp, grassy hill and finally came to Field Place pond. The gray-green water quivered in a slight breeze. He found a flat spot of dry pebbles situated amongst tall yellow reeds at the edge of the pond. He sat down and felt hidden. He watched some fallen maple leaves drift in the water, aimlessly spinning this way then that. He sat there that day for hours, making boats and watching them float. At one point, the sun broke through the late afternoon clouds and illuminated the pond. His paper boats shone. He took a stick and made ripples. He was ten years old.

Perhaps he was punished for wandering about the Estate alone that day. He didn’t remember. He didn’t remember much from his childhood. Just the boats, the ghost stories he wrote with his eldest sister, the airless smell of the perfumed ladies who visited his mother’s tea room, the fear he felt each time he passed the door to his father’s stale library, a book of poems by Thomas Chatterton and that particular day when he sat at the pond alone. For something happened in the late hour of that afternoon. He sat watching the rings of ripples grow around his tiny spinning boats in the water, listening to the croak of a concealed, lone toad and the hoots of wild geese hunting for their winter home across the gray sky. Then it happened. It lasted for a moment but a moment that appeared to throw away all time.

He looked up to watch the flock of geese pass by. The black branches of an ominous oak clawed at the sky like some ancient, crippled beast scraping its tentacles against a pane of silver light. He looked down into the water for a sudden burst of light in the atmosphere nearly blinded him. He saw his reflection in the pond. He held his breath or could not breathe, maybe he had shrieked for the image terrified him. He was standing now and could see his entire figure in the water; a thin little boy with messy golden locks and blue eyes like gleaming sapphires and... wings! The whole world seemed upside down. He saw himself as an angel and it horrified him. He dared not look back up into the clouds for he was afraid he’d find a hole through which perhaps his subtle body had fallen. He never saw the angel again.

A discarded light from the street lamps along the quay beside the Arno made sharp arrows over the river that had by now gone black. Shelley rose and ascended the bank, snatching his long gray coat at the collar where buttons were lost and tried to bow his head under the harsh current of the wind.

He reached the Piazza Solferino where the very last rays of a tangerine sunset seemed to singe the edges of brown leaves drifting clumsily off chestnut trees. The square was fairly empty. A few parked carriages, a street musician wrapping his guitar in a tattered wool cloth, the shadowy lamplighter making his rounds and the rose colored glow in the two tall windows of a crowded restaurant. The bells of San Nicola struck at six o’clock. He stopped to listen, a habit he had developed since his exile into Italy, to simply stop and stand still for those few moments of ringing. He didn’t pray, he didn’t think, he didn’t speak, just breathed and listened. San Sepolcro, Santa Croce, Saint Marks, Saint Peters, San Giorgino Maggiore; the bells of each church unique to his attention. The bells of Westminster Abbey or any cathedral he’d lived by in England only reminded him of time, wrung his nerves, made him worry. A sort of bell toll anxiety he experienced even on his wedding day, or rather, both wedding days.

He turned onto the Lungarno Pacinotti, a wide avenue that traced the river. The chilly air forced him to quicken his stride. He watched a fisherman ahead, dragging his net out of the water and onto the shore. It was filled with silver perch flapping away. But that’s not what Shelley saw. He saw a woman’s body; silver, bloated, frozen, dead. The same body he saw in his mind when Mary returned from the post that afternoon and read him the letter, the only way she could, quickly, without expression, her voice laden, calm and dry.

“Harriet Westbrook, age 26, found drowned in the Serpentine. Cause of death, suicide.”

He had neither seen nor communicated with his ex-wife for ten years. The news did not shock him and his demeanor remained as blank as Mary’s. He went into his attic den alone for an hour. Then tucking the manuscript in his jacket left the apartment quietly, telling her he was off to Byron’s early. Instead, he went to the river, knowing ‘the haunting’ was about to return. He had seen ghosts all over Field Place as a child. He even discovered their hideouts and would often sneak into the pantry, the coal cellar or beneath the stair just to sit with them for the moments before he was found out. In college, in London, in Whales, in Ireland... wherever he’d traveled since, the ghosts would follow. By now such episodes had become a kind of state that was so familiar, that although it made him ache, like bouts of loneliness or sadness, he saw the spectral visitors as natural invitations into the enigma of the mind. He accepted his visions as markers or signs, invisible notices of eviction from one house of the spirit into another. The doctors called his visions ‘hallucinations,” but Shelley believed more in the ghosts than the doctors.

“Good evening!” The happy fisherman called up to Shelley who was scuffling along the road above the riverbank.

“Good evening.” Shelley echoed, “Looks like you have a good catch there.”

“A very good catch. Buona sera, Signore.”

He felt free of the haunting as he crossed the Ponte della Fortezza where the reflection of the street lamps blurred on the dark river. He walked on until he reached the steps of the Palazzo Lanfranchi, which he had named, “Lord Byron’s Circean Palace,” for the enormous rooms were forever littered, with not only a tropical menagerie of plants but also all kinds of exceptional animals.

“What a sorcerer you are, my Lord.” Shelley had commented when he first encountered Byron’s collection of pets in Ravenna, “I see you’ve brought Cicero back from the underworld in the form of a ferret and metamorphosed the old stoic Seneca into an owl!”

Byron had laughed, then added quite seriously, “You know, when I was at Cambridge I kept a grizzly bear in my rooms and I must confess that at one point I truly believed he was Marcus Aurelius Antonius himself.”

Although the bear was no longer a part of Byron’s zoo, the spectacle of his domesticated animals never ceased to amaze Shelley. As he crossed the Palace’s threshold, even though he’d done so one hundred times before, the scenery helped to lighten his thoughts and soon enough he became almost giddy.

In the foyer he was greeted by two German shepherds, composed as the Queen’s guards, while a majestic falcon perched on the head of a statue of Hermes in its center. Next, in the front hall, he paraded past an army of cats curled up upon the embroidered cushions of French rococo chairs that were set flush against the long frescoed wall. Byron’s three white monkeys were swinging in mocking gaiety from a monstrous glass chandelier. One of the monkeys bounced down into the corridor and the cats hunched up and hissed. He turned into a gallery where he was spied upon by the incandescent eyes of peacocks opening their feathers like a lady’s fan and when he reached the stairs to the second story, he was forced to experience a philosophical confrontation with a wandering Egyptian crane. At the entry to Byron’s private lodgings, a set of purebred Russian wolfhounds lounged on wooden benches at either end of an enormous hearth, perpetually oblivious to the sporadic swarms of yellow canaries flying in and out of the lush green ferns of potted plants. And finally, as he climbed the stairs, the echoes of fiery red and mint blue parrots aligned along the banister sang out in scratchy harmony, “The King is dead! The King is dead!”

Byron’s butler informed Shelley that the gentlemen were in the billiard room. He entered through the open door very quietly, clinging to the shadows elongated against a paneled wall by a blazing fire. They were playing a close game, Williams and Byron against Trelawny and Robert Southey. He sat down in a green velvet chair that was tucked into a discreet corner. Across the room sat Thomas Moore, crouched on the sofa, reading the fresh ink of Byron’s newest poem with a crinkled brow. They were all sipping sherry out of thin crystal glasses whilst Robert Southey captivated them with an animated review of his recent encounter in Switzerland.

“And just as we were leaving the hotel with the predicted blizzard upon us, Mr. Wordsworth wrapped his scarf around his long neck and ended our conversation about ‘Mad Shelley’ by saying, ‘A poet who has not produced a good poem before the age of twenty five, we may conclude, cannot and never will do so.’ In all earnest, I mentioned Shelley’s Queen Mab but Mr. Wordsworth just growled and said, ‘Won’t do. This hairy fellow is our flea trap!’ The words of William Wordsworth I tell you! Straight from the mouth of the man who is sure to be England’s next poet laureate.” He then grew silent to watch Byron nudge his last ball just to the edge of the middle bumper. Southey grinned, tapped his cue stick three times on the floor, then bent over the table, squinting through his awkward monocle and biting a mole that hung, gathering spittle upon the bulb of his lower lip as he muttered, “Sorry, old man,” and pounced forward on his stick to win the game. The rest of the group laughed at the amusement but Byron did not. He rolled his dark eyes about the smoky room and noticed his friend hiding in the green chair and limped toward it instantly.

“Shelley! We didn’t hear you come in.”

“I didn’t want to disturb your game.” He stood and took a deep breath. The room was stuffy and smelled of burnished wood.

“Southey here had a run-in with Wordsworth in Geneva.” Byron gripped Shelley's slim wrist.

“I heard.” He warmly shook his hand.

Robert rushed to meet the young poet, his face pink with embarrassment, “I don’t think he’s ever even read your work, really. And the weather was abominable that day, we were all out of our wits, truly.”

“Pleased to see you again too, Robert.” Shelley bowed his head slightly, “But my dear sir, there is no need to apologize. Now I know what England’s finest contemporary poet has to say about my work and I respect him all the more for it.” He leaned toward Southey’s quivering shoulders and whispered bitterly, “As a matter of fact I never did write a good poem before I was twenty-five. I suppose that means the last four years have been quite a waste of time.” Shelley straightened his posture and tugged at his waistcoat as he turned to Byron with a clandestine wink and announced, “You know, I do believe that as of this very moment I shall throw away my quill and commit my life’s work to perfecting the art of bird watching.”

Southey’s meaty shoulders began to shake. Byron chummily slapped his back, “Come now ol’ chap, let’s don’t get unruffled. Shelley is teasing us. Let Wordsworth have his say! Our boy here probably doesn’t give a damn!”

Robert’s eyes widened then narrowed into slits like a snake before its prey. Byron quickly leapt between them and challenged Robert to another game. Trelawny offered Shelley a glass of sherry that he declined. Instead he accepted the loose pages Tom had finished reading, the seventh canto of Byron’s Don Juan, which he took to the green velvet chair with a sense of relief. But as he settled down to read it, Byron, who had crossed the room to obtain a better cue stick, stopped abruptly behind Shelley’s chair and whispered, “Shall we throw him to the dogs?”

Shelley grinned, “No. Let the monkeys have him.”

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lizmckague-blog · 6 years

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Rimbaud the Son, by Pierre Michon

Translated by Jody Gladding and Elizabeth Deshays

Yale University Press, 2013

If you’re going to single out the agony of “the gift”, the iron in irony, the embodiment of the tormented artist, the lost son of all sons, it would be Rimbaud.

It would be human and masculine.

It would be what is recovered

L’éternité.

It would be what is pure

La mer mêlée au soleil.

“History is all about fathers, sons and whores.”

-Duncan McNaughton

Or the dark well of a single mother who can’t, just can’t- because the farm in Charleville is a daydream surfacing only in the sallow yellow sunbeam that comes out from the attic window like a church bell on Sunday when everything is hideous and you’re supposed to remember.

Remember what?

Infamy and alchemy, perhaps.

Yet the ‘Carabosse’ (mommy) can’t breathe, so fades into the shadow of her dark fingers, like Eurydice, gripping the edge of the bowl of the dark well, lined with wild forget-me-nots.

Whether rebellion is a curse or a blessing, it’s still poetry.

So he walked. Back and forth from the future into the past and back again from 1854 to 1891.

Crossed the Alps on foot. In Italy (if I remember correctly)- walking, walking, walking until his ribs cut into his Siddhartha stomach lining.

Burst!

He wanted to burst from the very first time he watched a spider.

He became a saint behind the closed shutters in Camden Town, perching like a peacock in the presence of a devil.

Drown in the green fairy and rise out of the lake like a Lancelot with a sword wound by violets whose roots are stronger than your thin wrist.

So after the offenses and defenses, after the crime of the enfant terrible, and all along the solitude, the one thing that loved you- solitude, you plunged, like Eurydice, back into the dark, fecund pantomime of the earth below the earth

And in Abyssinia, illegally exported guns.

Maybe once upon a dream you remembered your boyhood with three sisters, an older brother, the haystacks, the color of each letter of the alphabet and the lapis-lazuli chunks of sky blinding the pillows of clouds where you chose to hide

Your wings.

Until the day you took the train

Without a ticket

To the Gods.

Michon thinks you were nervous before the steps to Zeus’s Palace.

I do not.

Zeus doesn’t give a crap about peonies and the prodigal son has eyes like Novalis’ blue flower

and a body protected by thorns.

You were sixteen.

You wanted the hue of that vast, endless sky

Seen from the well of the soul

It’s not a good view.

But it’s focused in a circle that is beyond you.

Was it at nineteen, or in Cypress, or in Africa, when you finally understood how freedom spoiled you? Surrender, surrender to the sands of the line, to the banks of Lethe. And plaster your fasting with a belt made of gold.

She was as black as the country wife’s fingers.

She emerged from the dead cavern of Verlaine and the blood of the lonesome soldier in the meadow and the invisible city of the barracks across oceans.

Once it stopped

There was beauty.

That spider crawling in the attic, in the sallow yellow sunbeam, is a messenger from Izambard, the ferryman, telling you to give him a penny

but instead you knocked on the door and had your photograph taken.

Who gives a fuck about the crooked bow tie? It was brown, the color of shit. Not your own shit, or Paul’s, or Banville’s, or Hugo’s, or your mother’s or father’s or sisters’ or brother’s, or even Monsieur Carjat in the black hood over the plate of silver nitrate… The bow tie in the black and white photograph is the color of Jesus’s shit.

Carjat wanted to touch it (the crooked bow tie), to adjust it-

But dude, if you were in front of Jesus’s shit would you adjust it?

(Touch it, maybe, but adjust it?)

You were hung over. Then you were drunk and then you were hung over. Fuck Virgil, fuck Dante, fuck Shakespeare, fuck Hugo, fuck Mallarme, fuck Baudelaire…

No, not Baudelaire, he’s my baby.

History is reversed. I’m the first.

A charcoal sky over Paris, day after day. They all want me. They are hungry. I am not. So I stay. Their soup is spiced with my piss, their lips are parched by my invisible sun. They laugh, imagining how my white ass must be luminous as the moon.

I wanted grace. I didn’t know it then, but I wanted it.

Books were gentle. The pages were silky. The bindings were hard. They smelled like History. They smelled like the well.

I saw the sea, remembered love and learned how to bring it against me.

Wave after wave after wave…

A La Recherche du Temps Perdu by Marcel Proust

Translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin

Three volumes, 1107 pages, Vintage, New York, 1982

My friend Miles Bellamy’s father, Dick Bellamy, owner of the once rather notorious Oil & Steel art gallery on the Hudson river in New York, died with the first volume of A Le Recherche du Temps Perdu open in his hands. The portrait here being that dear Dick, knowing he was taking his last breaths, remembered that the one thing he had yet to accomplish in life was… well, you get it. Unfortunately poor Dick never read did the whole thing, all 1,267,064 words, but I did. And before I die, I might attempt to do so again.

When I did finish this monumental work, I vowed that it must be the greatest book of time… and then I read Jean Santeuil (see below), yet still say yes, it’s the greatest work of all time. It’s the delicacy of feeling, the stamina of that delicacy, the persistence… days turning into years of sunlight scattered through clouds.

If asked what this novel is about, I’d answer, “The end of the aristocracy in France.” Simple. But it’s about everything not only ending, but spreading out and folding back on itself. It’s about love. It’s about mysticism.

The famous madeleine dipped in tea in the beginning opens up the space for, well, enlightenment really, and when Marcel accidently trips on uneven stones in the path to the Guermantes mansion in the end, that very path is raised into another, higher dimension and you go there too… bursting through clouds, transformed.

It’s hard to say what actually happens in this moment but one is undeniably transformed. *

James, a co-worker of mine at a used bookstore, (way back when- when there was a happy abundance of used bookstores)- came into work one day kind of glowing, radiating and outside of himself, almost floating. He said, “I just finished reading Proust,” then added, “sitting on the stone steps of a church.” I don’t remember where I was when I finished it, probably in my garden in the darkening twilight, unable to move until the end of the last page, or more likely, propped up against pillows in my bed at four in the morning or something, nothing as romantic as the steps of a church, or a chair in a room on the Hudson River in the glow of lamp, but I do remember that when I did finish it, yeah- I was in some kind of nebula, my perspective of the mundane egg (as Blake terms our world)- changed and I was stronger. Inside, there was this new strength of fragility, my own and every one else’s, even strangers, even the dead… perhaps, thinking back on it now, especially the dead…

This has stayed with me, this joy of (at the risk of being cliché)- an inner knowledge that was had, and could only be had, by reading A Le Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Of course I am familiar with a book entitled “How Proust Can Change Your Life”, I’ve never read it and never will because the title alone is so pretentious it makes me nauseous and the fact that someone would write a book for the sole purpose of self-propaganda really makes me want to puke.

Looking for St. Loop

by Elizabeth McKague (1999)

“I thought I saw in his eyes that thirst for more sublime happiness, that un-avowed melancholy which aspires to something better than we can know here below, and which, for the romantic soul, however placed by chance or revolution,

“still prompts the celestial sight,

for which we wish to live, or dare to die.”

(Ultima lettera di Bianca a sua madre. Forli, 1817)

-Stendhal, “On Love”

Looking for St. Loup

The gallant boy ran across the tables

like Holderlin’s comet through a mad sky.

There is no system for this.

Monsieur Melandrine came from the theater

to the Place de Clichy in work pants on a scooter.

We ate oysters and drank champagne

in the same corner where Baudelaire

sank into reverie, after a shoe shine.

The gentlemen arrive, all in black, from the Garden

and wish to enter the dark forest

yet wily nymphs hold them back.

No one believes it, although you were right

about the Minotaur- now he’s using a cane.

It’s time for change when the familiar

becomes a loneliness one can not breathe.

Leopardi said Slyia reached out to her own grave.

His red cloak flying over their heads-

He seemed to be swinging from a garland of bells!

I must find invitations to better dramas.

Philosophy, the kiss, your paint box even

that has been emptied into this night

are lost so quickly, I can’t stand, I can’t walk,

I want to limp.

I gazed over the shoulders of so many others

as he leapt past an orgy of apocalyptic monsters

made by the shadows of coats and hats on racks

behind the French double doors.

He gathered his whole life into his arms to bring,

dashing, that fearless taste of the fruit-

blind to all but Surrender, to the approach

of a movement where feeling becomes a circle of light

drifting you upwards s that your heels

are actually rising from the small,

round, marble faces, arranged for reflection

against the great window, like a sliced up moon.

II.

He wants

the word

one word

from the

beginning

to after

the end.

Some temperance

and arrangement

of the muscles

like flowers

in a vase.

Young Werther spoke of a kind of horse

that would bite open it’s own vein to relieve a fever.

Di te mi dole: Tu me manques.

A posture of Spring time in the cultured rows of sailboats.

The secret gathering is to live

as foreigners forced by the archer

to almost touch the shore.

marked obscura. The phantom swooped into the realm.

I revealed my dream.

“You mean, you actually want them t put you in the ground?”

Bones. Maybe. And daughters leaving azaleas.

My favorite part was when he drove up alone

and stepped out in front of the hotel.

How the sun carried him then, how

he lingered inside it

even as he entered the mulberry carpeted lounge.

Sultry wives, embarrassed by the heat, heaved out loud.

Bellhops hopped and stray men snatched

a second mind from the ice bucket

to place atop their usual, girdles of ennui.

She’ll torture herself with those pink hawthorns

a few hundred years from now.

Some erziehungsroman left in a box unfinished

in the closet and pithoi and stone cellar where

Thomas Aquinas once lived across the street

When once the body, the earth listened and

men walked where ever they found

an arresting feeling waiting in the distance.

It is necessary.

III.

As he watched the fawn

climb from the thicket

through unsteady branches

black with a melting frost

Play of time

the clouds bore down

another spirit upon

his wounded mind.

IV.

I’ll rent a studio where the river

becomes a dragon at the end of May.

Read Giuseppe Ungaretti at the round cafe

in the Piazza Giuseppe Poggi there is

a piece of shade shaped like an angel

from one certain elm.

If I asked you to read the palm on the hill.

You could be anybody reaching

the purple turrets in a limehaze.

I can see a missing chapter

in the prow of your hands,

mouth at the edge of a miracle.

It has been too long now not to know what to believe.

A shock went through the back of his neck.

A marching band stepped on the train.

He sat with a silent

tuba in his ear.

Another espresso in Rome.

Best one he ever had.

She walked through the Piazza della Repubblica

guitar on her back with a

pineapple and an eggplant, one in each arm.

The street musicians wondered,

“Must be some kinda California minestrone.”

She left her letters in the Hotel Vienne, 1814.

The unfinished dawn bleeding through crepe de che curtains and

the boys in stone statues across the Rue Raspail

when everything has happened in the presence of desire

and the Saints came in after kissing the trees-

She knew she could see across the expanse

but how could she scramble such love into the margins?

The sky moved closer, became charcoal and smoked.

They pierced the continual sky with an auger,

threw loops up to heaven

and hung down like acrobats.

Sprung from a doubtless tube of royalty; he owned up

and saw truth as a visible object, a kind of crystal ball

in which nothing was false but the tints

of lavender in the hair and cheeks of so many Duchesses,

Princesses and Marquises’.

St. Loup laughed to cheer others.

In the hearth he burnt only the finest timber

to keep you warmer, longer.

He would soon ride again.

She escaped out under the trellises where

the quiet, gold days waiting for the post

spread out like tea with lemon.

On his own orders, later, after the pride

turned to pain (for no particular reason);

he went to the Front of the Line, crossed

the bloody battlefield in Auverres.

Endymion fought the jackals then rested his sword between her breast.

Tristan turned into Hermes when suddenly

everything on his back moved over his neck like a breeze.

It was always a trust.

In his last years he visited homosexual brothels.

His alienation pulsed. After all the gifts, still it was

like a bonfire all the way down the Champs Elysees,

it was like the dried figs at Christmas-

Perhaps there’d been too many sensations outside of himself,

he could no longer measure the end.

Perhaps it had past.

Perhaps he missed it.

You ask why it is a question of wandering?

Because somewhere the last line contains

a horizon of Nobility.

VI.

I’m in that painting; rushed through the Vatican.

Justine taught me the eye trick how when you focus

on Hell then move slowly up and above

it’s all buoyancy and heavy globes.

I found my ecstatic consciousness on the map.

What a relief. (I was getting weaker from surviving

on the nebula of the dead).

T’was not I who wrote bitterness into the third novel.

Monmartre mattresscake on bare stone and gazing

naked into the long dawn and ashes of Chesterfields.

“Comme un paysage après l’orage, attention a la mélancolie,

c’est la plus belle mélodie de l’amour

c’est aussi la plus cruel et plus difficile.

Soit prudent avec ton coeur et rendre un peu triste.”

Someday, I’m going to the

top of the hill to live

with the Capuchin sisters.

I wanted the stillness to come and last, beside some one.

It speaks when we are children as a form of protection-

to find placement amongst that which is sensual.

Each memory in its own making like a sun

surrounded by a sun, surrounded by a sun... and so on;

if you can believe such a thing.

They say it all began with the Danube,

from the Black Sea to 1001 night’s heads resting on jewels in the great net covering all.

Then Calvalcanti came in with the key and the Pieta, the Pieta and the Pieta danced

all night out back of Hamlet’s Mill. He just wanted to prove that it’s real-

that everything touches it, that it feels like Rouen blue

and haunted by crimson,

corrosive moss

that took the mouths of gargoyles.

He distinguished a solitude far beyond the waves and valleys of reason.

His precipice divided the elliptic and he finally slept when the moon left Paris,

was carried off to Asia where he studied new characters; hieroglyphs of lover’s

limbs.

No, see

MIND Body

is the first

and second half

of attention.

Then habit oppresses

soluble links to the night.

The machinery itself looks dangerous.

I wanted to tell you

how nice it would have been

when it was possible

to escape.

And now, there’s that.

That it affected you so much.

Maybe it could have been more

than these pall books to carry us,

to weave the way in.

VII.

He walked along the shore, throwing each thought that started

in his groin and moved North over his shoulders

back in to the water.

I have married many shepherds.

It was too orange- that light

in his North Beach hotel room.

Now he’s making violins for Carnagie Hall.

We’d watched the sun like we planted it,

even the noise of traffic and Ave Marias

from the laundromat below his rotting window, drowned.

Nobody talks about the Upyia Gallery anymore,

sometimes, a siren brings the needles and trumpets back into your brain.

Then the stranger appears, feeding the birds.

I couldn’t make anything new anymore, I wanted

to give it all away. Forgive me,

the East is precious, but, forgive me.

St. Loup is an archetype

the misunderstood troubadour

and the violence of another world.

Ternion in chains in the Caucasus Mountains,

no one can find you there.

the monsters come, the monsters go...

He’d never say her name in writing.

It meant house. House of peaches.

VIII.

St. Loup surrounded himself with the resistless type.

He liked to tame them. But you were the one

he appreciated. You were the dark self, the delicate solitaire.

Conversation was pure. It was only a favor. So,

he traveled to her hiding place

and learned she had died.

He told you by telegram, “I’m sorry.

She went horse riding in the planets.”

He rarely slept in the barracks.

When the Great War came he went in barefoot

and lonely, following demons for secrets

and no one to save.

He never had a photograph taken of himself.

Leave, was three days in Nueilly-

But you’d been salvaged

into the asylum.

I’m not going to be calm about this.

I believe there’s an answer.

If I could say, “Tonight, my love...”

but my voice is fainter, transient,

like a sliver of ice.

You must be brave. learn to balance

the antiquity of character with laughter.

The shetayan who is wise never returns-

you go there- in the periphery of the campfire.

Each bridge in Prague is like the bow of a violin.

For every two French people there is only one mirror.

Proust and Stendhal differ on the idea of love.

What idea?

Friends have run off to Nederland, Colorado.

Dreadlocks in Switzerland.

The Trenitalia are always right on time, to the second.

and mothers and grooms waving good-bye.

I’m concerned about the lighting (not too dark, not too cold...)

the Byzantine painter, who is eccentric, is coming.

“If you impress them too much they’ll end up thinking

you’re a survivor.”

Gray, gray, the color of storm

and that soft, yellow patch,

and the chimes, and the albatross.

The carriage waited. The shadowy lamplighter alone,

walking down the Boulevard de Batignolles in a mist.

St. Loup entertained his table until midnight.

Who are you looking at?

Let’s have another round.

His red cloak hanging on the back of his chair like Shelley’s ghosts.

The underpainting the color of brown glass

then Mediterranean light and a tiny bottle of arsenic.

Chatterton as Icarus on the bed in the attic.

You were right, about culture, how it’s all about

fathers, sons, and whores.

Monsieur Melandrine had such a fucking

intelligent looking upper lip. He abandoned

everything to position himself between feeling what is illusion and what is manifest.

I pictured his boyhood,

tangerines and linden trees, imagination at Fontainebleau.

It was the last time.

I watched an old man pour soapy water on the steps,

then sweep it away with a broom.

IX.

The sullen wind

cherry blossom snow

it is Spring.

I still have your banjo. I threw away the case.

It looked like Rimbaud’s passport.

She wrapped the souvenirs in the pretty printed paper from the confiserie

and left them in the front zipper pocket of her suitcase

when she got home, unpacking.

Forever that midnight.

He did look a bit surprised when she lay down

on the floor of pine needles in the spreading moonlight,

beyond the red stones, over the wall, out back of someone

unknown’s villa, through the dewy meadow

in an atrium of skinny trees

where Dvorak had the inspiration to compose his-

“So did you get those cool sandals...?”

“At the bazaar, in Cairo.”

Allegro ma non troppo.

St. Loup was killed in battle.

Blown up and scattered.

No one knew, but himself, then-

at that very moment,

that he really wished

for truth and freedom,

that he had plans,

that he wanted to continue

the task that

in this little globe

one can still find

some definition

of virtue.

2005

Jean Santeuil by Marcel Proust,

Translated by Gerald Hopkins

Simon & Shuster, New York, 1956, 2nd printing, first printing 1955

Bernard de Fallios, a young Proust scholar, found several boxes of torn manuscript pages and seventy notebooks in Marcel’s cork-lined room at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. Written, and obviously abandoned, when Proust was around 25, these pages were carefully reassembled by Fallios and published in Paris as the novel, “Jean Santeuil” in 1952.

This probably my foremost favorite novel, although Le Recherche is absolutely a greater work, Jean is… well, it’s like a raindrop. (And the dated, pale pink cover is really cool!)

It is the tender story of a poet. An indulgence in sentimentality. A bath of isolated sensuality. Lonesomeness. Illness. Growth. The humor of adolescence, hypersensitivity, innocence, natural voyeurism, connection points into the center of sexuality, naiveté and intelligence merged by poetic vision into the beauty of windows out onto the ‘health’ of society when one is so young and so ill. Jean Santeuil is the beacon on the lighthouse. Portrait of an artist as a lover alone. (Yet, aren’t all artists lovers alone?) It’s a bout a boy taking the boy into the man no matter what…

From page 369, when Jean’s mother calls him while he is away from her for the first time (if I remember correctly): And also, the telephone is a new invention at this time in history:

“Quickly, he put the receiver to his ear… then, all of a sudden, as if everyone had left the room and he was throwing himself into his mother’s arms- he was aware, close beside him, gentle, fragile, delicate, so clear, so melting, like a tiny scrap of broken ice- of her voice.”

The mature Marcel (see above) finds strength in fragility. Jean Santeuil creates, fashions out of clay, strength out of weakness. Strength to accept death (at such a young age!) and the weakness to love life. Hope.

The tendons of language are bruised.

The sky is grey, the ocean green, girls wear white, boys wear blue and in between, the lover, the lighthouse, fearlessly feels the world through his window, the window of all the lost time of youth that has been emptied into his shining soul.

from page 743:

“For death in a man journeys into the infinite and into nothingness. For no matter how obscure he may be, no matter how limited his intelligence, the thought of death, the coming of death, opens for him a window on the mysteries of eternity.”

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