» interactive "the waste land" reader (work in progress)
Baudelaire in Shimmering Armor
“‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”
— T. S. ELIOT, THE WASTE LAND
The end of the world is what they're calling it
And I'll say, it's a befitting name,
Incomparably light and deft.
No holocaust nor genocide, these trivial concerns
I've read in countless memorandums
Thrice, or perhaps four times, before.
Your poetry too, economically brutal with words,
A form I can understand at least, and make my own.
From the supplication of effortless ordinance
Its droppings ink vast tomes.
You who listened for the birds,
You who needed silence first–
Now every quiet hour is requisition
Every blank page a kind of conscription
The silence you required has been spoken.
“Oh, do not ask me to write poetry that is not political.
It is my duty, my burden.
The bombs have written my verses for me
and I am merely the scribe, the faithful courier
of what the rubble has to say.”
(So the pages pass from hand to hand,
from Palestine, from Cuba, from Sudan—
yet seldom have I seen the lines of blood
that certify the spirit's food
and anoint the meaning of a hurried stroke
into something savage and good.)
The cats slither between familiar alleys
in sand-swept sacred cities,
press their bellies against the bank and
writhe in the cold agony
that pours into the windows,
that fills the lungs with smoke,
and grips the bones within the earth
and brings you too, to them—
though handsome and tall are you,
how handsome and tall are you.
“By the river I pulled my body, limping, crawling, weeping.
Broken upon the wheel, muscles simmer sweat,
And leap! And fall. Running again, left,
Right, left, right, right... right. The arrow of my knee,
Mind-betrayer, surrendered points skyward,
A bad step, and before the burning scrape
The cobblestones fill my eye and caress my cheek…
Anemone and poppy retched up between parted lips,
Overflowing onto the mortar trellis, leaking to the old canal:
I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
born here of parents born here from parents the same,
and their parents the same…”
Hoping to cease not till death.
The poet is reached for, a human move. Not unwise.
Disembodied ecstasy with flowers lapping broken arms,
seen, unseen, some cubist misadventure.
So the crowds gather, discussing Braque,
draping the body in glamor and gifts:
apples, grapes and violins,
charcoal dust, turpentine, and a door held shut.
(The soul leaves the body torn and bruised.
The mind deserts the body it has used.)
So I sit here sketching,
At the nude reclined, elaborate composition,
my fellow, my brother's wreck.
A frown withholds
Male beauty in bruises purple and gold…
Unrendered, the mind of this wretch
Would breathe, like the Angel, on the foe;
Would rise—but the chest will not, the arm will not, the hand
Lifts a half-inch and falls back into form—
Yet breathed, breathed, only breathed, in the face of the foe as he passed.
(And there lay the rider distorted and pale
With the dew on his brow and the rust on his mail)
“…from Goya to Guernica the bodies turned”.
A modern composition in a pale room,
An “image from the heart” in a pale room,
Conjunctiva to brushstroke in a pale room,
Blood to blood from what he must have really seen.
It will be recounted as such in history books.
Notes
“The supplication of Yankee UXO” and the following passage is a
satirization and criticism of the poet Marwan Makhoul, recounting his poem
“In Order for Me to Write Poetry That Isn't Political”.
“yet seldom have I seen the lines of blood” and the following three
stanzas are an adaptation of Yukio Mishima's “The F-104”, the
infamous and ecstatic final chapter of “Sun and Steel”.
“I dote on myself,” is a direct quotation to Whitman's
“Song of Myself”, which is a poem about nature, liberation, and
the finding of the American identity.
“though handsome and tall are you,” is a reference to T. S. Eliot's
“Death by Water”, recounting the ominous death of Phlebas the
Phoenician, a death that prophesizes the destruction of the world.
“The soul leaves the body torn and bruised.” is adapted from
T. S. Eliot's “La Figlia Che Piange”, an unusual poem depicting a
parting scene from multiple perspectives.
“my fellow, my brother's wreck.” is a fusion of Eliot's fatalistic
lines from “What the Thunder Said” recounting the Fisher-King
“Musing upon the king my brother's wreck” and Baudelaire's
invocation to “Les Fleurs du Mal”.
“In the face of the foe as he passed.” and the preceding couplet
are a direct quotation from Byron's “The Destruction of Sennacherib”.
A sing-songy, beautiful, anapestic rendering of the destruction of the Assyrian army
by the Angel of Death, a war scene depicted in detail in the Book of Isaiah.
“image from the heart” is my attempt at the most cliche kind of
TikTok faux-poetry I could think of.
Sunburn
I think we are in for a long winter.
He has a sense of these things, the mating bird
Who took to windward when the summer fled.
We paid it little credence then, it was
So unbearable, that vacant silence.
We gave our faces to the soil, joined the tubers
To speak kind words with them, coiled, nourished
Firm in shallow dirt like a fetus' grave.
I am learning, learning to distrust this kind,
Learning the ways of the earth, her particular thaw
And of her insincerity. I am mated
Among the potatoes and fertile dahlias.
I am learning their patience, their ether
Bestial reassurances of my coldly lying worth.
But before all these, I am learning of my will,
Pressed between the languid clutch of this breast
And the dull thaw that reaches
The cracks of my fraying cheek: warm at noon,
Refrozen by dawn. And the gaps
Let a clean light leak; so I,
For the first time, lean limp to her warmth.
The sun is still there. I wasn't certain.
There is a violation in its rays;
Not the incest of the branches, groping
For iron and air among my veins. Deeper
Within the curdled core, the sky beats.
And the cold does not come down,
The cold does not come down. Instead, the light,
Light which I had spent so much of myself to keep at bay,
Arrives, it was already here, and yawns.
It must set so dully before this race,
Before whom it was utterly empty and invisible,
A little bead drawing to the summit of the sky.
Some stalk, blind and unwise, twitching upward,
Heavy with its own weight.
Ringed with the circumambulations
Of the eye, stretching to the canopy of its arrival.
It will rise again, this harvest. So wild, so swollen
And so rich in a sudden and blistering absence.
Six Little Meditations
0.
An aesthete, a bullfighter, a darter
Walked into a bar to play smart,
And in starting a rout
They floundered about,
But the world had been mad from the start.
1.
The darted crowed, “Hear how they cheer it for me!
I toe up the oche and win gracefully.”
The aesthete just sighed
At his vainglorious pride–
(But you won't be seeing him on TV!)
2.
“You're blimey, you're plastered, your life is mislaid!”
So the matador scolded; but soon, in the shade
The aesthete said dry
“You're the first one to die.
This drunk will outlive you, you bull-baiting blade.”
3.
“And who'se you to say? You weak, sneering fop!
You waited and sat, but above all, you watched!
Go lecture the academy
To leave the ‘blood sports’ to me!
I never once voted to let your kind cop.”
4.
“And why think yourself so refined?”
The darter cut in with a whine.
“In clinching the kill
Do you empower your will?
Sounds more like the cruelty our scholar maligns.”
5.
“Do not mistake me–his cruelty is true,
But I need no reinforcements from you.
In his perilous dance
There's a singular chance
For the finest forms of men to pour through.”
6.
“Your platform is dizzying and fraught–
You really are nothing but thought!
You crave the bull's grace
From a safe, distant place
Where your ‘finest of men’ linger not.”
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