I don’t know the man you seek

No, I don’t know the man you seek. I’m not him. Someone was speaking with my mouth and moving my limbs. Don’t come near me; I wouldn’t trust you past Sunday. I saw you bite the hand that fed you. I saw you dance to your master’s accordion through the crooked streets. You set traps for me from your own cage as night fell from the sky. Just say one more stupid thing to me and drive the final nail in. You won’t like this: by the dark waters of Babylon my heart was blessed with a terrible song. I panicked to the other shore with other fragments of men. I saw the sun shining on a bare-branched tree clawing at the sky. Where do you prefer to be overthrown, here or back there?

Fall into otherness

Fictitious biography

At first a childhood, boundless, with no aim,
no self-denial. O unconscious bliss.
Then sudden terror, school and rules and shame,
constraint, temptation, fall into otherness.

Defiance. Now the bent becomes the bender,
makes others pay in kind for his defeat.
Loved, feared, a champion, friend, defender,
bully and conqueror, to beat and beat.

Then on his own in the cold, wide, weightless air.
Yet deep within the second self’s redoubt
a taking breath for what at first was there…

When from His ambush God came rushing out.

Rilke (trans. M. Hamburger)

The winter academy

Just another Saturday night in panic town: loneliness stalked the streets, weaving between the drunks. Anxiety danced around like a kingless jester, driving us closer together, further apart. We gorged on each other’s weaknesses. My ugliest face crowded out theirs. Wormfeasts those nights, heaps of wasted time. A wild-haired old woman leered from her attic, scratching the ulcers on her arms muttering: I’ll hang on. I’ll hang on for a long time. All the while wisdom whispered from the other side of passageways we were afraid to enter. (A face appeared in one once and it was like lightning.) Every homeward footprint left a stain. I drew the curtains tight against the dawn, but it was death came in through the window with its air of fate. The spider had fed on its own appetites and woven its web out of its own body. The judge, face to face with himself at last, as usual, sentenced himself to himself in his own court. ‘Here are your flies…’ But later that same day a cleansing storm gathered in livid clouds, and the clouds broke and spilled mercy, and from mercy my heart stole joy like the thief it is. In the precincts of pity the soul was rescued from the violence it had done to itself. Need turned to another Face. Those were the first steps in mercy. Then more clouds came, but thick with unshed snow now, and the snow came down and my ignorance was impeccable in that winter academy, the inner babble muffled by a whiter noise. The sun rose on its great wheel, and I reached a turning: not a fork in the road, but the same road, turning.

*

Carrion comfort

Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Nor untwist - slack they may be - these last strands of man
In me or, most weary, cry, I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
They wring-earth right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruised boned? and fan
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart, lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, cheer.

Cheer whom though? The hero whose heaven-handling flung me, foot trod
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? that night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Out of the thousands

Out of the thousands
who are known,
or who want to be known
as poets,
maybe one or two
are genuine
and the rest are fakes,
hanging around the sacred precincts
trying to look like the real thing.
Needless to say
I am one of the fakes,
and this is my story.

Leonard Cohen

Courting the song

It’s basically like a courting process, like hunting women. Most of the time it’s a hassle. And you feel you’re not really getting as much as you should, and you’re unsatisfied. And from time to time there doesn’t seem to be anything you can do. Of course from time to time you connect. The time you don’t connect, you just kind of scratch.

Leonard Cohen (on songwriting)

The forking paths

I can no longer ignore them, these guides (if that’s what they are). They call me over the hills, pull me into a night I can’t refuse and say, Enter it and swallow it though it confuses you totally - only then might dawn break through from beyond your broken song, from where you are not, and emerge saying, I assent so you can praise; when will you stop trying to impress me with your own music? At times like these there’s nothing but night and dawning. All is seduction and undergoing, the touching of things to life or death, and forking paths in gardens of desperation. No, I can’t woo them, my guides (if that’s what they are), nor master their current, not be one with it, but stay, perhaps, and listening to the roar, feel my way in.

Holy Sonnet

Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, ‘and bend
Your force, to break, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due,
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue,
Yet dearely’I love you, and would be lov’d faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie,
Divorce mee, ‘untie, or break that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

John Donne

Seed

Wisdom crying in the streets! who is nonamed but lives in the heart of naming itself, whom no mind can interpret except your own; lord of worlds destroyed and worlds to come, who fastens flesh to our bones, dresses our souls in skin and gives us the wild solitude through which we may return to you: wash and wring the world, sow these our seeds, let them open like eyelids and climb through the cracks of the earth we’ve seared with selfish industry.