"I become cold, no longer inhabitable."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
A quick list to poets featured in this issue:
A Narrow Porthole
That morning, when the lie of your look
Clinically unsteadied to scavenge
Nights, endless without angry words—
Of Yankee towns and English games
To everyone but me. There, I saw,
Of electricity boring into my wrist
I could not visit your imprisoned world
Held my body pilloried— all my nerves
For you a winter thinned into uneven
Only now lighter than parsley seeds.
Inventive and Sanskritic, you invited me
To your high bed for a viewing
In monochromes. They tell a happy tale
Before trailing my hand to arrange
A disheveled vase of daisies:
Without all those blue locks
To jar a spitful out of me,
Even for a dawn, or recite for you
Words of fracture.
_______________________________________________________________ Upward Mobility, Musically
Like Hadrian I caught myself speaking
To witness or to forgive. The presence
Care for the instrument: quinined hand,
Took me on a winter trip, always far
Next to silver-nerved quickness. I am in
My heart with no unstrung longing knows
I will make a conservatory room out
I become cold, no longer inhabitable.
Not five pounds, and my fingers unsinewed.
_______________________________________________________________
NOTES ON THE POEM
Upward Mobility, Musically. Compare the title with “young, upwardly
mobile.”
L1. Like Hadrian… In Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien
L7. winter trip. Cf. Wilhelm Müller’s Die Winterreise (“The Winter
Trip”),
known mostly via Franz Schubert’s lieder cycle of the same name. The
speaker of Müller’s poem, after losing his lover to her mother’s
pragmatic sensibility, embarks on a journey that leads further and
further into desolation and despair.
L10. hellebore. In antiquity, hellebore, deadly in large quantities,
served as medicine for a variety of illnesses. Stoics used this term as
a
L12. Necessity. For the Greeks, the abstract concept of unalterable
necessity personified is the goddess Anankê, literally “Necessity,” who
holds all mortals and immortals in bonds.
16-17. Item. I leave all my debts, the whole/ Not five pounds.
L18. red thread. A Zen koan formulated by a Chinese monk named Songyuan:
“Why is it that even the most clear-eyed monk cannot sever the red
thread
of passion between his legs?”
_______________________________________________________________
In the formula of death, without the Senate
Of practiced will will be my last audition.
All veneer and use, middle-classed passion—
North. I still know the shrouded strain
Need of measures. Uncharmed by hellebore,
The Necessity of this pussy-footed cure.
Of a hotel suite. In Chicago
Item. I leave all my debts, the whole
Item. No red thread will be there.
(“Memoirs of Hadrian”), the Roman emperor, anticipating death, is
imagined to misuse a particular grammatical tense to refer to himself
as if speaking of a deceased person, when addressing the Senate. Hadrianic
lore has it that his teenage lover, Antinous, drowned himself in the Nile in
October, 132 AD, when he observed the very first sign
of decline in his beauty at
the age of eighteen.
metaphor for therapy of desire.
From Thomas Chatteron’s will written on April 14th, 1770, at the age
of
eighteen. He needed to be released from his employment so he could
embark
on a literary career. His employer reluctantly agreed to his
request, as
he threatened suicide— an act he was to commit sometime later when his
longed-for literary career failed miserably.