Читать книгу Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire - Brenda Hillman - Страница 8

I. ON THE MIRACLE OF NAMELESS FEELING

I went out to the hazel wood

Because a fire was in my head

W. B. YEATS

“The Song of Wandering Aengus”

Hummingbird darted from his perch and stole a spark of fire.

He tucked it under his throat and flew directly back home.

When he arrived at the coast, Coyote was nowhere to be found,

so Hummingbird stashed the fire in the buckeye tree.

JULES EVENS Transcription of

“Where Fire Comes From,” a Miwok tale

Hoy que en mis ojos brujos hay candelas.

[Today the candles burn in my witch eyes.]

CÉSAR VALLEJO “Los dados eternos”

Brenda, it doesn’t exist. JACK COLLOM

Conversational aside, Naropa

ARGUMENT:

microseasons, vowels, panicles, California grasses, existence, sex, the cosmos, childhood reading, guilt, noons, letters in summer fruit, autumn equinox, the stalk market, stemming the crisis, termites, winter electricity, the sixties, learning the y, solstice, spirits, wars we hate, motives, Candlemas, margins, spring songs, people with birthdays in May, Tesla, memory loss, deserts, Claudia & Don in the desert, summers in the Sierra, crosses in vineyards, the nineties, parents’ old age, codex, loops in consonants, drones, the body’s nerves, spoken bird poetry, candles in the witches’ eyes—these, my love, are made of fire—

TO SPIRITS OF FIRE AFTER HARVEST

Between earth

& its noun, i felt a fire …

—What does it mean by “i,” Mrs?

—It means, (& i quote): one

of the vowels in the brain

& some of the you’s—;

we were interested in the type of thing

humans can’t know,

interested in kinds of think animals think

—a rabbit or a skink! (Eumeces skiltonianus)

when autumn brings a grammar,

wasps circle the dry stalks

& you can totally

see through amber ankles dangling

in dazzle under our lord the sun

of literature—

Between noon & its noun,

there were ridged

& golden runes on pumpkins … bluish

gourds—in the fields …

(their white eyes lined up

inside)—Wait a sec. Please

don’t nail the door shut. The air is friendly

& non-existent as Veronica’s veil— …

Earth, don’t torment your fool,

your ambassador clown. Bring

the x of oxygen & sex, a fox

running sideways, through present noon—

SOME KINDS OF READING IN CHILDHOOD

Do you remember Picture Day?

Then, when the packets came back—

in each child’s eyes:

incomprehensible fire—;

you were ordinary,

in the sense of: the endangered west;—

your mother wiped the windshield

with a shredded Kleenex

(that’s why you deserved your oily treats)—

Inside the school, reading made sparks:

peril, peril, peril-&-awe;

outside the school, acres of signs

in cellophane noon, where

under the school, termites take

the tasty beams into their bodies—

[Incisitermes minor] delicate hairless arms …

Save the volcanoes for later,

flame-folder. You did such a good job

with the maps!

The world has created a sickness

but the sickness is being

reversed … Consonants

can be reasoned with, but vowels

start fires—now! breathing

twice: Now! Here come

the bandit occupiers:

silence & meaning—

THE FUEL OF AN INFINITE LIFE

You argue with someone at work. The chemical change

in your shadow meets the dry grass at the edge

of his shadow like an adolescent planning on

burning a field, or the love you wanted

to have later with another, the memory of what

your energy made before he began to speak.

It is impossible to discuss anything with your boss

because he has consulted the priest & they

will never see you again—; you stored that

in the chamber of geometric symbols, saying

to the wings above the granary, there is the fact

of the barren stalks, the pharaoh’s dream

of hunger, saying to yourself (a prophetic mute),

the hour will come someday for fire until

there are years of storing energy in these postures,

drawing circles with bones from the nine names

& lights that make words into sticks for

winnowing the shadows of falsity or ridicule.

Even the world, wide as it is, cannot exhaust

the fuel of your life when you are one of

the interpreters about to escape from the dream

with your archived & flexible heat, trying

to keep from hating them at the marketplace,

to remember what would transform judgment

into action if only you could abandon the gifts as if

they were nothing, after you & the pharaoh’s

huts are long gone; the dream will not be

idle when it touches the tip of the match

to the willing field after the harvest—

FOR BBH & SM

GRAMMAR OF THIS LIFE AT NOON

The immortals wait in the fields.

& the newt under the laurel (a dragon

whose three heads argued

with themselves—),

the push thistles, Celastrina echo butterfly

with automatic semi-colons

on its wings—(‘twill hide

under the clorox-

cloud—& that’s that! some punctuation

is just too sensitive to

be outside—)

Stubby white

teeth on that baby vole:

smile on its face—screeep! like

gnostic Jesus, its comma-comma-comma

claws. Clause—verbless mosquito-egg

daylight …

Worker, dreamer:

your soul has slept with

countesses so long

his hands still smell like money!

He says to himself:

my lord the sun has thrown

his sexual shadow upon me … (oops!

Where did it go?)

—It’s just fallen behind something.

(What has?)

—Whatever you lost.

GEMINID SHOWERS & HEALTH CARE REFORM

Behind the galaxy, there was a flute:

sound was making love to sound;

time was making sound

to sexual, textual, lexical space—

we worked too hard, we lay

near fields from which they gathered plastics—

mimics & contortionists—under the ping-ping

of meteors, under made-up constellations;

the planet flew through space junk

while the Health Care Bill was being penned

with pens from Chantix, pens from Lidoderm

& Protinix, with pens

from Actos, Lamosil, & Celebrex;

late autumn made a fire in us;

the cosmos waited for a sign;

the soul was waiting for the mind,

fat chickadees waited for sweet fennel

[Foeniculum vulgare] & nameless

asters on side streets where drones

take violins to the Queen—

what kind of drones?

The sounds fly out, for thee—

we slept as many as the anyway

where meaning met material, that is,

inside the personal,

that is, for love of earth—

LATE AUTUMN STORMS AT PIGEON POINT