Books
Films
(for Harold Bloom)
Now in the middle of my life
all things are white.
I walk under the trees,
the frayed leaves,
the wide net of noon,
and the day is white.
And my breath is white,
drifting over the patches
of grass and fields of ice
into the high circles of light.
As I walk, the darkness of
my steps is also white,
and my shadow blazes
under me. In all seasons
the silence where I find myself
and what I make of nothing are white,
the white of sorrow,
the white of death.
Even the night that calls
like a dark wish is white;
and in my sleep as I turn
in the weather of dreams
it is the white of my sheets
and the white shades of the moon
drawn over my floor
that save me for morning.
And out of my waking
the circle of light widens,
it fills with trees, houses,
stretches of ice.
It reaches out. It rings
the eye with white.
All things are one.
All things are joined
even beyond the edge of sight.
(Mark Strand, from The Late Hour.)
(Paris Bordone, David and Bathsheba, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.)
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body’s been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
(Mark Strand, from Sleeping with One Eye Open.)
“— And I hear this and I start thinking, What is my child thinking?; now, for the first time, I need to know what my child is thinking; for what are his or her thoughts if not my own – though purified, and stripped of inessentials; that, for me, had been a reason to have a child: to be able to think again, but anew, afresh, displaced; after all, it is called conception; until now, I haven’t wanted to communicate with my child through anything even approximating language; all through my first months of pregnancy, I was glad to dispense with literal meaning, to free myself from the restrictions of verbal significance; then I could just listen, and hear what my child – my self – was telling me without words; and there was much that I heard; but no longer: now I want to hear what my child would like to say – what he or she would want to say; in an excess of significance I had waited 5 years before agreeing to conceive, following the California Organic Growers’ Association guidelines for reconversion of soil; it was foolish, I knew all along, but I needed it: I needed some objective metric; now, again, I need some objective metric: I want to know what my child is thinking; I can no longer rely on an absence of meaning: I have been betrayed by silence and interpretation; now I want to know what my child is thinking; I am terrified of unmeaning—”
(Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook, p. 419.)
“. . . I suppose, though, it’s just another expression of the inherent sadness of sound, of sound’s defective essence; after all, sound is so perishable: it’s no more than a nudging of air, a fragile sequence of crests and troughs – soft, ripply, rounded like Mallomars, and perilously dependent on its medium; it’s so different than light, which has hardness, and beaminess, and eternality; sound just dissolves, it radiates away into emptiness, resolving its curves into formlessness and passing through the atmosphere into directionless space; and this, too, is a sadness; for so much is lost; so much is lost; in fact, I can practically see the process happening right now, standing where I am – up here, on the roof; for up here, on my roof, looking towards the darkening sky, I can almost see the world’s endless dusts of sound silently dispersing – all of them powerlessly unfurling against the distant clouds, dissolving into the leveling night . . . ; and so, up here, with darkness descending, and with the breeze at my back, I plant my feet against the edges of a few sturdy slates, and get back to work, wondering what new things I’ll be able to pull in, with my antenna, so well anchored:”
(Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook, p. 58.)
(opening sequence of Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969).)
Books
Films
O Oswald, O Spengler, this is very sad to find!
My attic, my children
ignore me for the violet-banded sky.
There are no clean platters in the cupboard
and the milkman’s horse tiptoes by, as though
afraid to wake us.
What! Our culture in its dotage!
Yet this very poem refutes it,
springing up out of the collective unconscious
like a weasel through a grating.
I could point to other extremities, both on land
and at sea, where the waves will gnash your stark theories
like a person eating a peanut. Say, though,
that we are not exceptional,
that, like the curve of a breast above a bodice,
our parabolas seek and find the light, returning
from not too far away. Ditto the hours
we’ve squandered: daisies, coins of light.
In the end he hammered out
what it was not wanted we should know.
For that we should be grateful,
and for that patch of a red ridinghood
caught in brambles against the snow.
His book, I saw it somewhere and I bought it.
I never read it for it seemed too long.
His theory though, I fought it
though it spritzes my song,
and now the skateboard stops
impeccably. We are where we exchanged
positions. O who could taste the crust of this love?
(John Ashbery, from And the Stars Were Shining.)