Issue 23: G C Waldrep
Pre-amphitheater
*
sun-lichen radiant
draws the dew from the very stone
I am not asleep I
expect some spectacle
dew-harrier, (I)
in my spangled inks
do not anneal the moss neither
splice nor peel this birchbark
from its fallen pencil
we are not ‘native’
we who have come a long way
*
I apply silence to the body
as a lotion, egg-probe of un-face,
the refugees asleep in the village
camouflage the blizzard-door,
the so-quietly-
departing
not a song, this fever-plane
(radix-importunate)
these honey-blond
fields nude wavelength
wrens bolt through
*
dictated, glacial erratic
queries the absolute
(we could write on it)
life gathers even here
away from the lion-pediment,
the despatch-principle
no, not native we are born into
a different citizenship
the lung, the haulm
brother me as if among kingdoms
purity’s other shelf
*
caught up in pollen-stance-enclosure
all that is not lift,
abandon-fermata
of the wind’s origin I enclave
as captain-residual
the star’s rood-cusp pierces
the night-
body liminal exception-to-praise
corposant/elm/flicker
stooped
as any old orchard into reign
*
barrow-hasp I apprentice my old self
matter-over-theft
you may take anything from this,
clock-of-my-protection
I no longer speak the language
of brindle, spawn, milk
or stereoscope
of the night-monument
I planish your silk vesicles (ashes
splay &
we walk there, particulate)
*
vertical blood of terror-prime-flight
—rescue me (O)
from this contest
of crude lilies I enter myself
at breath’s convenience, upper
limit of bread (you can calculate)
the healing egg’s
shy nectar against its day-fence
veiled in eminence,
the tongue-machines
everything now living may run back
*
your blue sum enthrones me,
capture this flag-of-
molten oak-candle
astride the geologic’s
crude speculum I can’t history
your endless feather-
thief-architect
the bees’ bells glozen
as if tending some higher flock
or tenebrous equation
let me treasure [ ] in eye-braise
*
electric hum of
blandished velvet-alms
merciform from time’s well-throat
lichen’s heraldry
covenanting
probe-mission-egg
(-tongue) —(my marriage-lamp)
the child-snow’s dry vector anoints
a soft absence
what a man can say throne-
filament-throne in sullage-shadow
*
death’s secret density enflowers
the spring hollow’s wrist
ravens can be tongue-tested
your touch (less blood than name)
skin: either must or, beautiful
I measure
clef against clef music’s
battle-orchid exists, recuse
my lewd paraphrase
stung with balm (no I will not
mourn a fracture)
*
I (tongue-spancelled) ignite
this ley-festival in velate plumage
my plosive glands
my fricative pyre-in-mouth
the uncial forest
admits all comers, except
the sky’s peril-vein-
wavelength-pass
a planet-nation banquets its bruise
fine stomach-dust
(binds the body and its single tongue)
*
vaccinal sphere of
your-money’s-no-good- (here)
I hold your wound-purse
cicatrix-anthem of the understory’s
imprecise melisma
wand- ruth - calvarium
w/out portfolio
the warbler’s pew-satisfaction-eye
tilting at odds with its signature claim
blazon this love-vantage,
lacustrine twilight (undercladding)
*
is not fallen is not suspended
the mind’s ghost aspirates, bees feel it
laid as silver
among the evergreens
memory forgot to correct for this
ambrosial font
seep-clot, breath-clot
the hands’ difficult master (imagine)
I press between
the chambers of my deciduous
body-parlour unmastering, a blood
*
dull foam of the land speech-cession
adjudicates this
compound tracery
(nothing is original) I am a student
of interpenetration
I like its oxygen
spooring my unlungs
the replicas cast
no shadow, I talk to them softly
vehicular, wool
from some burnt lamb
*
cravat- ungulant
my body’s spring-loaded rifle
resists; I call you
by your cue-name
this bling-tide
in the were-forest
you lap up all my sleep-tonnage
in the lane I spy your miracle-
hoof, someone
thrust you rudely
into the material vector/outcome (I)
*
ply-vector, syntax is intent’s rosary
spray its beads
across the oak-
floor’s clerestory
hear them warble in psalmlight
rood of the stile-tongue
I can’t be held
responsible for what brinks
the mind’s persimmon net
the decomposing
sign death’s independence, if—
*
strafe this pediment
w/antler, matrimony, bright contagion
admit, as evidence
the pelican’s heraldric
significance, what draws upon
its own life for others’
blood without blemish humus
indicts its history of small improve-
ments; a body rises
into the carrier wave almost-
child, almost what we were proposing
*
Miłosz at Studley Royal
I stepped into the shade of the forest I let its electricity approach & reduce me like
taking a child’s toy knotting it into a leather lash & using that to punish
yourself.
Which is (almost) necessarily a solitary occupation, you might say. In sight of the
absolute.
I stepped into the forest because it was green & shielded me from rain I was no
partisan.
So much is transparent here but the forest (as a forest) is not one of those things.
Milosz standing very still behind a reasonably-sized tree in a forest on his flight
south from the capital ‘reasonably-sized’ but not wide enough to hide him.
What might Milosz hide inside a poem behind the entasis of a poem well his faith
his various relationships with women not necessarily in that order.
Is it broken my grandmother asked of a particular toy then throw it out marking
her Christian Science lesson in soft blue pencil.
Threads of water needles of water watch now as water threads itself (to sew
water’s garment why not).
For all my education I do not understand the optics of flash I mean beyond the
basics sudden increase & then decrease of light surely there is more to it.
Lapse of Milosz’s presence in the extant photographic record can we call this brittle
charge of fundament towards which plant life builds its milky aqueducts.
What is surcease a creature a bitter bait binding the angles.
All the angles cluster about the non-existent wound yes they are helpful their
name is Legion.
And we ask them to drink we command them to drink Drink we say.
Aislabie sculpting the grounds of his estate so that God could flow around rather than
through Milosz hurrying down a country lane at dusk.
The archive is fragmentary we do apologize sorry very sorry we have replaced all
your correspondence with photographs of trees.
The canalization of God for both aesthetic & industrial purposes long history
special preoccupation of the 18th century though ironically Aislabie was
building on a Cistercian foundation.
Because one can view God from however many directions at any given moment
just as one can view a drawing or a photograph of a surgical operation an
amputation say or else a glass of milk.
Milosz as Elijah taking lodging with a woman who noticed his passage Milosz as
the waiting woman or as some other figure it hardly matters void void read
Milosz’s poems from this difficult period.
My life among the animals was destitute of most recognized forms of interest or
excitement beyond the shedding of blood God’s contaminated watercourse
in each of us.
Watching from a high place as a couple walking together join hands & then a few
moments later relinquish them.
Milosz sleeping his way through farmyards sweating Isaiah from his pores as he
sleeps.
Flash of oxygen in the nave flash of lycopodium powder in the antique photo
-grapher’s studio all the graves clustered about the ears nose & throat.
I quit writing to-do lists on the backs of my hands after a brother admonished me
that the flesh is not a palimpsest (thus indicating his ignorance of the
language of scars revolving in their own secret constellations).
This is not a parable though I count myself a student of parables which I number
among the animals by their signatures. A parable is a story waiting for a
story but there is no waiting here.
Perhaps Milosz it would have been better if you tried it as a play.
A forest waiting for a forest inside a forest could be a play enter ELECTRICITY on
its bier of branches its corbel of thicket.
ELECTRICITY’s monologue consists of all the animals staring in the same direction
at the same time only the audience misses this because of all the clutter in
the understory.
A woman passing from Point A to Point B with friends is struck by lightning she
remains officially unidentified perhaps the lightning cleansed her of name at
least.
Whether Milosz ever saw another human being die is a question not answerable
from his poems much less whether or to what extent he may have been
complicit in any such death(s).
Instead let’s stand very still behind this tree in this forest & imagine Milosz doing
the same.
Drink is what we want to say to Milosz we hold out the flagon filled with angles
which he will not lift to his lips because he is dead.
Tests of grammar come up against the inner pale of the spirit & halt there for a
little while we call some of these poems.
You may pick up your Isaiah action figure & perform an action for instance melt it
praise it drop it in a well.
Surcease the tongue’s periphrastic like a slit running in two directions at once a slit
in what well in anything.
The abraded bouquet driven into the mesh of the chainlink a public act like all
public acts trying to hold very still in plain view as if for a photographer.
Milosz in Paris thinking about justice while lying on a bed whose mattress’s many
lumps make him think for some reason of Nietzsche he sighs he turns off the
bedside lamp is this then Nation.
Pure Nation which has twelve sets of jointed limbs extending from its five eyes &
no mouth.
The forest shatters the globe Nation left in its care & later blames this on an ice
storm which is the worst possible disaster the forest can imagine short of
fire.
When you say translation I think the forest on fire even wanting to be on fire Milosz
sleepwalking through long Berkeley afternoons.
But Milosz is not in Berkeley yet he is in Paris then Washington he is a hive of
justices all buzzing around an absent female figure which in some cultures is
deemed a sacrifice.
God is watching God is interested some idea about God at least because you know
God.
When & why the Cistercians lost their explicit prohibition against bell towers worth
further study not losing their faith in water neither their confidence in the
movements of water what then.
I step into the movements of water as directed by dead Cistercians speak my lines
then wait while the chorus makes tiny weeping sounds which is how we wind
up with God again only this time on our faces in our eyes.
I’m sorry I have some God in my eye I say to the forest which I am persuaded is
sympathetic.
The forest has been reading ahead in the script is waiting for Milosz to appear in
the next scene which is written in Polish cordite & gold.
My grandmother sitting on a plane next to Milosz easy enough to imagine maybe
they compared toys.
A toy is anything you want to bathe in water without really cleaning it or
addressing its soul or for that matter soullessness (also one possible
definition of God).
That Aislabie left the ruins of Fountains more or less as he found them is a
distractor on the test he devised for God i.e. an attractive even logical
response but ultimately an incorrect one.
True attention is possible as long as we keep seeking Milosz lost in the forest’s
vertical surges & yet perhaps he is happiest there who knows.
The play is over the animals have removed their jewelled vestments of
proprioception God runs through His house like a hook through the lip of a
fish.
Flames streaming from the sacrifice to almost cinematic effect allowing for the
anachronism (production values etc.).
Yes & what then shall we feed love shall we feed it pain asks something/someone
loitering in the vicinity what a remarkable succession of planes if only we
could view them in the dark.
Milosz feeling under yet another hotel room bed in another city for the cap of a
pen he’s dropped perfectly aware once again he is reaching into darkness
also quite suddenly that the frame of the bed is made of wood. For a
moment he pauses stops moving quits searching for a moment he holds
himself very still.
G. C. Waldrep’s most recent books are feast gently (Tupelo, 2018), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the long poem Testament (BOA Editions, 2015). Newer work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, Paris Review, PN Review, New England Review, Yale Review, New American Writing, Conjunctions, and other journals. Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University and edits the journal West Branch.
Copyright © 2019 by G.C. Waldrep, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
