Lost Attic Nights

Last Night by Night

All the minds thinking thoughts are young,

The physical copies of texts

Rarely more than centuries old,

Beyond two thousand years, fragments—

Past Egyptian, Sumerian,

Nothing, unless it’s still hidden.

I wake up locked in the attic

Of a house I’ve never noticed,

Surrounded by spiders and dust.

This is a metaphor, of course.

Every word is a metaphor,

Mostly undead and still twitching.

The attic has a small window,

Just enough to show me the moon

And let me know that this is night,

And, the luxury of a moon

Considered, it must be last night.

Why do I wake up in the past?

I fall asleep in the present.

Afternoon light makes me drowsy.

Ah, let’s open this dusty box.

Well. Folders of old poetry,

A mix of scripts and languages,

What’s this, Harrapan? Linear A?

What’re we looking at here?

Ciphers of the death of language?

Something lost? Or just invented?

The question about poetry,

Once someone has recorded it,

Amounts to whether it amounts

To so much glossolalia

Or genuine xenoglossy.

This looks like the latter to me.

~

Ten Words and Ten More

Belts of dimmed cliffs singed

Crows smoke felled. Fire years

Drowned in tea-black tears

Burned for us our sins.

~

Time Traveler

You can only go forward.

The future is bored with you.

The future is privileged,

And richer than you, and rude.

You can snap to attention,

Quit your philosophizing,

And slap a witty rebuke

In the future’s fat, blank face

As if it were your student.

Don’t be stupid. This yawning

Insolence of your future

Is your opportunity.

Jump into that opening,

Fool, let yourself be made small.

Look into that arrogant,

Gaping maw and do not pause.

There’s only one way this works.

You can only go forward.

~

The Historian and the Pine, Cut Down

“There’s a hidden world of spin,

To which the table remains

Totally oblivious.

In that hidden world, the fate

Of the coin is decided.”

A table just stops the fall.

Probability in art

Has a table of its own,

Nicknamed loss or destruction.

When the surface interrupts

The tumbling of the ideas,

Possibilities collapse,

But not, as with coin flips, half

Or half—maybe everything

Of the subtlest art ever,

While some mediocre lines

End up in the museum

Of fine civilization.

And we don’t usually know

That a toss occurred, that loss

Struck out any of the work.

Or we only know the loss—

Which libraries were destroyed,

Which temples were vandalized,

Whose graves were robbed, whose cave walls

Defaced, whose museums bombed.

Is it possible, before

The near-inevitable

Interruption of great loss,

The work’s fate was decided

In the spinning of the toss?

Nearly chaotic, random

Puffs of airy happenstance

Decided which songs, which texts,

Which richly painted figures

Wound up pointed in harm’s way,

All of Y but none of X,

Book eight gone, the others safe.

Every event breaks a fall,

And then we read the results.

It’s all tasseomancy—

Alexandria, quanta.

We interpret the tumbled

Remains of the past to scry

What’s next from what we have left.

But yes, Herodotus, pines

Cut down can send up new shoots,

Like other trees. You were wrong.

~

Skies Stand Up from Dust

Reader, if you’re ever there,

This poem is in part for you

But not for readers only.

It’s time we addressed ourselves

As well, having arrived here

Downstream from thousands of years

Of older phrases, glowing,

Broadcast, printed, written, signed,

And spoken. Those speakers then,

Bones and flesh, didn’t intend

To address unimagined

Flesh and bones that speak today.

They had no idea we were

Going so far beyond them.

Nor can you possibly know.

Language was never only

For language’s producers,

But how meanings learned ourselves

And murmured through the bodies

Redirecting us. We’ve carved

Throaty channels to the sea.

We have no idea what sea,

But we have been gathering

Momentum now for ages.

We are tumbling in a rush,

Waves reflecting lights in us,

Carrying, dropping your dust.

~

Love Arising from Friendship

“Clouds, mountains, plants, and trees,”

Are frivolous subjects

Suggested Li Jue.

Poor, ignorant poets,

What can we gain from these

With factions to appease?

The emperor did not

Agree, but he was weak.

Who, on the other sides

Of the world at the time

Would have even thought poems

Would more than embellish

The memories of reigns?

But we still have Li Jue,

Everywhere and always—

What do clouds and mountains

Have in common with trees?

They’re not human beings.

Resources, scenery—

Keep an eye on them, fine.

But the only subject

Of any importance

Concerns what humans do.

Poems should apostrophize

Tyrants, martyrs, heroes,

Revolutionaries,

If poets want to be

Taken seriously.

The weird ways that language

Can get away from us,

From our moral toolkits,

Can slide from alliance

With our alliances,

Praise poems for noble deeds

Moving on to friendship,

Then to love arising

From friendship, then to love

For no worthy reason,

And then to admiring

Anything words can name—

Clouds, mountains, plants, and trees,

Words themselves, poetry—

These should be monitored,

Castigated, advised,

Never loved and admired.

~

Memory and Total Loss

Who or what within us,

Who or what within this

Does the remembering?

Whoever, whatever

Answers the question, I

Guess, which doesn’t answer

The question, since language

Moves in all directions,

Inventing the present,

Inventing the fiction

Of something permanent

As words for permanence.

What are the oldest words

Within the rushing streams

Of terms as they’re spoken,

Passed on as consciously

As the oldest patterns

Still found in genetics,

Terms older than any

Form of written language

Or, if not words, pieces,

Fragments, morphemes, phrases

That created meanings

Still being created?

No one remembers them,

But they’re our memories.

And who are they talking

To now out of new mouths,

If not to each other

About who or what’s next?

~

Created in Translation

Every beast with language is a psychopomp

Ferrying words and phrases between the shores

Of meanings past and present, lights in our chests,

Flames in our eyes from their lamps inside our skulls,

Flicking out in small sparks from our speaking mouths—

The souls of the dead are the words of the dead

That never belonged to the dead, not to them

Or their ancestors, no more than in the myth

The souls belonged to the ferryman they gave

Only a single, gold coin from each of them—

Each time a human breathes a word, pens a line,

Copies a document, deciphers a script,

More ghostly souls pass over the black river

To vanish through the woods on its farther shore,

The only known magic in this universe,

Given that what arrived for us to ferry

Was neither dead nor alive but dealt with us,

Got in our shallow boat, grew more numerous

As we poled and sweated and hauled on our ropes,

And then, translated when with us, escaped us.

~

Speechless

We can’t function without comparisons.

Who could write in the certainty no one

Would ever read and compare that writing

To other things written, other things read?

Let’s try. Say the wreckage will continue.

Every line in this sequence will be lost

And not after a long time, not after

Any consideration first. Unread,

Never perused or evaluated,

An accidental mandala of words.

What then is our value or our function?

In a world that seems to save everything,

Meanings make for wonderful defiance.

We’re miracles in that we’re forgotten.

~

Questions of Conceit

Of all the fine occasions

For extravagant language,

Humans wasted most of them,

Instead parading these gifts

Of flesh and society—

Hazy phrases, gilded wisps—

Often as not for praising

The pitiful achievements

Of locally noted men.

Has there ever been a form

Of poetry more silly

Than the grand panegyric

For the momentary man?

Tuned phrases flew through the air—

The izibongos, the odes,

The coronation verses—

And maybe we carried whiffs

Of the celebrated life

With us to other lives, less

Noted, after the great life

Was long gone and otherwise

Wholly forgotten. But why

Not use us as well to play

With occasional displays

Of how knowing enough words

Arranged in gauzy questions

For yourself—not in service

Of someone else no greater

Than your anonymous soul—

Can rarefy hopelessness?

Great hazy questions of life!

Oh, timid, trivial minds,

You could be grand as your kings,

Could appear almost awesome

And bordering on wisdom,

If you wrapped yourselves in us.

We’re going on anyway,

The magic you made of us,

The losses you hid in us,

Past chiefs and commoners,

The grief-stricken and the proud,

Why not have this dance with us?

~

Not All Loss Is Waste—Not All Waste Is Lost

Men tell tales. Dead men tell more.

Should we save all dead men’s tales?

In one, the wife of the sage

Pours a piss pot on his head,

But the sage stays calm and jokes.

The joke will be on the wives

In the days to come of men

Who will love to tell that joke.

In a lost tale, the same wife

Was said to want to eat well,

But the sage, who was quite tight

With coin, made a joke once more.

It’s good we don’t have that joke.

That it’s wives who tell the tales

And it’s the sage who is wise,

Is a tale men love to tell,

Which is why we are still plagued

With more tales than we can tell.

So a few of the tales die.

Men and sage wives die as well.

~

Almost All Early Literature

Had earlier origins,

Which had earlier themselves.

Fragile continuities

Of manuscripts left us hints

More tantalizing than wholes,

But the wholes had to exist

And before them the others,

And others before others.

Frankly, we were always whole

And always a little gone

On the way to becoming

Something else, but not like you,

Matter waltzing in the arms

Of your hot twin, energy.

When we become something else,

The else is really something,

Leaving us nothing at all—

Well, plerique omnes. Almost.

~

 

However, the Sense of the Word Remains Obscure

Where was the poem’s origin?

Why would a poem want to know?

Cupped in the uncertain hills,

Perhaps of North Africa,

Perhaps of Greece, or why not

Also China, which also

Suffered occasional loss

Of libraries of ancients,

Not enough to lose the thread

Of continuous culture

Despite the grave disruptions,

But enough that there’s a veil

Behind the medieval world

Beyond which poetry blurs

Like the mountains where signs hid

Under centuries of mist.

There were civilizations

So much older than any

Of this, and most without texts,

And only architecture

And elaborate design

Persist to bear them witness.

Words lost for two thousand years

Were already hunting down

Ancestral words lost to them.

We should expect this began

Before beginnings of texts,

This search or something like it,

Torches and lamps back of caves,

Cupsones, in the mountains,

Carvings, swirls of ochre paint.

As soon as a word for birth

Was born, the search for places

Of birth emerged, forever

Frustrating language haunted

By its original myth.

~

 

Derivative Deathlessness

Of all forms of immortality,

The only one more than fantasy

Is the dream of living on in fame,

Memory, cultural legacy,

Achievements that are still only stays,

Sand dunes heaped against the winds of change.

Such names! Publius Nigidius,

Naevius, Favorinus float off,

The last grains of whole lives lived and lost.

Names are no more concerned to stay put

And stay whole than silica atoms,

Proper nouns no more than the common.

Publius Nigidius the man

Would probably have loved to have known

The derivation of lox is lox,

More or less unchanged thousands of years,

In pronunciation and meaning,

Already by the time he was born

And named himself. Something enduring

Reminds us there was once a person,

Name of Publius Nigidius,

And that he was fond of deriving

The meanings of words. Words tell us this

And nothing more about Publius.

~

 

From the Books of Heraclides of Pontus

Now, you’ve seen loss

Haunt the green sedge

Of marsh names cross.

Now, you’re the bridge.