Until Recently I Had Believed In Something Like Lack
Until recently I had believed in something like lack
And even something like lack of lack, all this
Occurring while listening to Willie, age 9, listen to Click
And Clack, the Tappet Brothers, a September Saturday,
Spritzing the windshield for a better view and thinking
Of gommalacca, Italian shellac, that one thousand
Lac bugs make a pound of flakes, and from these
Someone is singing at seventy-eight revolutions per minute,
Grooved and circular and spiraling down, smoke
Rising from the phonograph, an ignis fatuus
Of sound, and O to be inexpensive, nonflammable,
Versatile, and popular, a Bakelite bracelet around
Marina’s wrist, or to crack a window, for all
Empty spaces are always trying to suck in
Something to be filled, now the sound of the whisk
Broom on a lapel, now the zoom lens retracting,
Now vroom, now Ezra Loomis Pound removing
His shoes in the mudroom, and Blaise Pascal falling
Fast into emptiness as emptiness, Baruch de Spinoza with
Lens dust in his lungs, to give us all some breathing
Room on a day of horror vacui, with his laughter and laughter.
Nature abhors a vacuum, a void; right hand rule; Parmenides; boomerang; broadloom; darkroom for developing images taken; continuum; Weltanschauung: German for worldview; Car Talk; leave, abandon, give out, wane, wanton (wonton, Cantonese); residuum; swamp light; cenophobia: fear of the empty, horror vacui, plenism; oompah, oomph; furor poeticus; recovery in the tea room; everything is full, all the tables taken; a as an article of faith, but not the; cloth, loath; behemoth, hippopotamus; egg tooth, virgin birth; Bakelite invented by Leo Hendrik Baekeland, the beginning of the Age of Plastic; vain, vaunt, evanesce
Until Only Last Week I Hadn’t Thought
Until only last week I hadn’t thought
Of myself as seriffed or sans seriffed,
Or whether one should be buried when
One’s time to be buried does come, like
Carlo Scarpa at San Vito d’Altivole, wrapped
In linen and standing up, or would he
Feel as light as an olive, two grams
On a stem, or il succhione we cut off
At the base of the olive tree in August,
That Beppe says is a vulgar word and
Wouldn’t use it, and I think of Shrovetide,
Three days of a season of writing before all
Is ash, and then the good Friday of all of our
Lives, an alert sent to our email inbox,
Or a Contessa who has her written confession
Delivered to her priest, and thinking of John
Donne with his Anne More eclipsing the sun,
But then a large part of death is just showing
Up, whether enslaved or free, whether by chance
Or by plan, whether fancy or plain, weighted
With oil or not, or with anything that might be left over.
Eclipse: to fail to appear, to leave out; ellipsis; delinquent, derelict, relic, relinquish; lebensraum: habitat; Goths and Slavs: famous people, slaves, sclave; Stanislaw; Gothic romance; shrove: written confession and tide, season, time; land east of the Oder/Odra River; Carlo Scarpa exhibit at MAXXI, Rome; he died in Sendai Japan, 1978, falling down steps
Until An Hour Ago I Hadn’t Known the Colophon
Until an hour ago I hadn’t known the colophon
Followed the explicit, in a logopoetical sort of
Way, after “the dance of the intellect among
Words” (Pound), perhaps in a book that
Slipped out of someone’s hands into the Ionian
Sea, washed ashore, imprint of words on
The sand, sand blown into glass, glass
Into which we see ourselves, as Mimnermus
Did in Colophon in 600 B.C., seeing his lover
Through a window, her rosin to his bow, and
The incense the Franks brought back from
The Crusades, the cruces lining our faces, and
The smoke continues to rise, all of us “wearing out
The day” (Pound), or William Shakespeare that day
When he erased his last word, or that we thought
We saw Sextus Propertius that April day in Rome,
Certainly 10 B.C., no later, his praenomen given on
That day of lustration, nine days after being born,
After never the thought of wearing out, whether
If we were a letter in a word, rubbed as if we could be
Rubbed away forever, or where to go next, the next time.
Explicit: to unfold, the final words in a text, followed by the colophon; clear history; to see Hades; wiseacre: Dutch, wijsseggher, soothsayer; wiseass; Mimnermus: Greek poet from Colophon, NW of Ephesus; summit: finishing touch; colophony: Greek pitch, rosin; baseball pitchers and bags of powdered rosin; resin, secretin, frankincense and myrhh; “if she with ivory fingers divine a tune through the lyre,” Pound, “Homage to Sextus Propertius”
