Andrew Mossin
from THE CHRONICLES
The fish in the cave is blind; such is the eternal relation between power & use.
Emerson, The Journals
What began
was wailing.
What began to
become sound
was wailing. And
water, a bridge over
earthly sea.
*
Like a disturbance
of matter underground,
a cloaked distance
from this place to that.
Each substance drawn through
our hands like paper from a vigil
cut from Libyan balsa placed on a beam
of tri-colored wood.
*
The world can’t
become what it was
but exists as this
otherness, this trans-
parent language
that insists on
dissolution & darkness
like a vent slit open
in the body
its blood flowing freely
onto the wet earth.
*
Who dreams now of Battus
stammering in his vision
of earthly paradise?
Libya came back to him
in that solstice of dark winged
night, a round of voices calling out
Battos
forming a cycle
within
a circle of black doves
flying west toward Thebes.
*
‘King you came for a voice.’
As if the voice were turned against
that man who was not king
but his embodiment.
Was one hurt and another
left behind to tend to his flock
alone throughout his days?
Does the voice return
as amulet or seal inside a glass-blown
lute?
*
Each impression
is their last when they
embark on their
journey back to Libya.
There is the tale
retold, the beginning
of their wandering
so that they
were returned
to Libyan shores
only after
sustaining their days
on Aziris.
*
And if after there was another
route, another sky, there was only
this one sky, framed by the hole inside
earth’s hinge through which light
first came, untroubled grey beams that
fell on Aziris, then on Irasa.
And they were told, ‘This is a good
place for you Greeks to live, because a hole
has been made in the sky.’
*
And what came before and what comes after when Egypt
is a dead city in the mind of its children, when it rises inside
a lake cut into four squares and the water rises equally in
each quadrant, birth light and lunar light, like a pilgrimage
over water that won’t end. And the first visitor waits to
be heard when his voice is joined by the shepherd’s. And the second
visitor presents the child from his village and gives him bread
and when he says, ‘bekos,’ he’s told that it is the Phrygian
word for bread. And the first child sits among the stars
with his hands outdrawn and accepts what he is given.
And the king, hearing of the two children speaking of bekos
gave them to live with the women of Memphis and their
tongues were cut out so that they would never speak again.
*
‘But Heliopolis is south
where the mountains run
from north to south
and continue inland toward
the Red Sea.’ And to seize
sight again, to implore
the gods to return us
to the river’s currents, gentle
sway of our bodies in the
Memphis sun, to rest
outside pyramid rock
and raise our eyes to see
the mountains
descend into the sea…
It is without them we
come back, raise
our eyes, resist the
beginnings of Libya
offering ourselves
the black cobalt sun of
coastline.
*
And the world came to be
seen as divided into three parts
Asia Europe Libya
And where Egypt lies
is the border between them
And one takes the mouth
of the other, so that the south
is drawn across the hand
of a priestess from Memphis
and her days are like those of
the Nile that divide Egypt in two
from the Cataracts and the Elephantine
And the river rises in the Sebennytic mouth
And two other mouths are broken from it
And their names are the Saïtic mouth and the Mendesian mouth
And their waters moves inside the canals that follow from them
Bolbotine and Bucolic
And those who drink from the Nile are Egyptian
And the sun that sets to the west of them is taken from the river
each day, knotted like flames above a bridge one crosses
from this world to the next.
*
‘I was drawing lots
when the rope broke I
was drawn from each
hand in a play of hands
on my body that tore
my left hand from my
right and gave them
back to me
like pieces of bekos
I couldn’t eat.
Why do I
starve in Egypt
I asked why
do I live without
nourishment
deprived of
my city?’
*
To count back
our days to Memphis.
To hear what they once said
was light in Memphis, when
the river was still
and our boats travelled
forty days to Meroë.
21 May 2017
THE WARSAW POEMS
….Nobody knows who died
On the roads of that time, of the fact of roads.
George Oppen
At an angle from where the building stood, this morning
to say it was years ago—twenty? thirty?—starting out
with some few things, borderlands inside the hasty
beginnings of narrative. Reading Jabès out loud
for the first time in years, to be overcome by what
comes to pass, one’s death is like that image of the poplar
ripped from the ground by its roots. One says
‘I will die,’ looks up, the tree not yet fallen, the days
resistant to revisiting. What is it looks back on this, us,
says earth, sky, water, the boundaries replete, incommensurate
voices torn from the world, ‘to speak of death….to say
mother and father are dead, likewise my brother and sister’
when we had no mother no father no brother no sister
only the circumference of their absence, this resurgent fall
of these consonants on clay.
*
Traffic stars
along Krolewska….
Was a traveler
calling back, was a
stranger called
from the outside
to come back
wait for light to
complete its tracing
on tile roofs.
Was a traveler
called back, was a
foreigner
from the Homeland.
‘How do you come
here, from where do you
come here?’
There is a hole
inside, water when
it finds its place
to hide.
*
And at the Vistula’s edge their names are like discs
thrown across the tide, watery discs that float out to
sea, that return from where they have been awaiting
recovery, as if there were rope
to bring each one back. Warsaw is a river
inside one’s mind, like a beginner working his
way back to the ferry, waiting for the ferry to
take him, at night when the dead commence return.
And one is a voice waiting, a seed miracle
inside a red jacket, and the other is a common
map, partitioned, broken into quadrants
of sky & air, the words breaking apart on the page.
Trolley goes black inside a sun’s crossing, avenue
goes under avenue, answers the fragile metallic of its host.
Czy jesteś tutaj, aby ponownie określić, co to znaczy umrzeć?
Are you here to redefine what it means to die?
Czy wiesz, co to znaczy żyć ze śmiercią?
Do you know what it means to live with death?
Ta woda jest niekompletna.
This water is incomplete.
Where water and earth meet inside the cemetery gates.
A prayer shawl burning in April light.
*
‘Did you locate
my locust tree?
Did you bring its
limbs back
from water?
I am living near
a locust tree
& wait for the morning
doves to arrive
so dark & cool
on the river’s surface.’
*
The route is water, was landscape without the river to signal
where the border of Getto began, black pavement where sun
was cordoned shed light, woda where the land shifts, stone
by stone, the way water is shifting underneath
their bodies, movement’s systolic clip, earth time and
heaven time, the early debt of their common, rays of strangeness
on earth As one goes, one is a grandson, one is an image of his head
moving underneath the sun, the white penumbra of horizon
when he moves without a map, the avenue like a broad-leafed
plateau, his face inside a globe, the distance of one hand
to another, the lighthouse build at the ghetto’s edge, he was saying
to no one Gdzie jest woda, the avenue was sunlit, shops open along
the route where the sun blazed Gdzie jest woda in his speaking voice
found along the way, to ask no one the direction, where the river
blackened, his eyes that saw where poplar had stood, now standing
in place of poplar, and still in time of the common hour
before noon. And what was himself saw himself
go away, saw the line between wound and healing
a branch of poplar extended across.
*
And one is Sofia held to the Sabbath flame.
One is a woman named Sofia at the edge of a wood.
Jedna to kobieta o imieniu Sofia.
And her fingers are adjusting the white
pages of the Zohar, laid out, each a space without words.
Triadic exhumation of spirit. To accord
each season its mark, Sofia inside the cutout
of time within no time. One is walking toward
the river, she is saying it is necessary to go from
here to there, to walk past the river, to bend
down where the river widens, a mouth bled from its
cataracts. ‘To speak of the language of others, but in the interrogative
mode.’ Candlewax on darkened thumbs, the realism of thirst
within another’s mouth. This surface left untouched, this unclosing of
historic time, morphed into a messenger who resists naming, comes back
at sundown, rests next to the dead without answer, a query that was part
bird, part flint, stain underneath stain, ‘a door, a roof, the wall where they
hid apart from each other.’
*
And if the dead
renew their dying--
troubled by what
enters, seizes up
on loose notes
said to one & no
other.
*
Water when you are thirsty, I heard her say, water
when the river is white & you are ready to swim
inside its currents, as though the mouth were
stolen away from its mother, as if the hand
were given depth by what shaped it, shared
its silence, this ludic entreaty passed
over stone heads. Water when you
are thirsty, dry land when you have learned
to accept passage.
*
‘In the middle of the sea
there lies a land….a wasteland
known as Crete. Under its
king the world was innocent.
A mountain rises there, once glad
with leaves and streams, called Ida.’
W środku morza
Leży ziemia ... pustkowia
Znany jako Kreta.
And to dream of the woman
near the locust tree again…
where their land is edged
with leaves and streams
called Ida.
*
Warsaw leads back.
Warsaw where the dead recover
without mercy.
‘We move, we move…are they
trying to escape? to enter?’
The subject of their time the
subject of this time.
So that: the story returns from Herodotus: of the shepherd’s
son killed by Astyages, who dismembered the child
baked his flesh and served the son to his father.
And when the father had eaten from his
son’s flesh, Haspargus was brought the head
hands and feet of his son under a silver dish
and opened it before everyone to see
what had been eaten…And he
gathered his son’s remains and brought them
home to bury them near the river banks
overflowing in spring.
*
Yes, you are right
to dream of their presence
without you. The dead
are like that, without
fear of what will come.
You are right to share
your dream over
their bodies, to stare
back into their
faces that are black
stones in the earth.
The pillar is visible at a distance and behind
it the row of markers, one after the other
piled high with leaves and tree limbs.
*
And what will consume your days?
Nic nie zużywają dni.
And what will their laughter sound like?
Ich śmiech będzie niczym nic.
Nothing will consume your days.
Their laughter will consume nothing.
20 May 2017
The fish in the cave is blind; such is the eternal relation between power & use.
Emerson, The Journals
What began
was wailing.
What began to
become sound
was wailing. And
water, a bridge over
earthly sea.
*
Like a disturbance
of matter underground,
a cloaked distance
from this place to that.
Each substance drawn through
our hands like paper from a vigil
cut from Libyan balsa placed on a beam
of tri-colored wood.
*
The world can’t
become what it was
but exists as this
otherness, this trans-
parent language
that insists on
dissolution & darkness
like a vent slit open
in the body
its blood flowing freely
onto the wet earth.
*
Who dreams now of Battus
stammering in his vision
of earthly paradise?
Libya came back to him
in that solstice of dark winged
night, a round of voices calling out
Battos
forming a cycle
within
a circle of black doves
flying west toward Thebes.
*
‘King you came for a voice.’
As if the voice were turned against
that man who was not king
but his embodiment.
Was one hurt and another
left behind to tend to his flock
alone throughout his days?
Does the voice return
as amulet or seal inside a glass-blown
lute?
*
Each impression
is their last when they
embark on their
journey back to Libya.
There is the tale
retold, the beginning
of their wandering
so that they
were returned
to Libyan shores
only after
sustaining their days
on Aziris.
*
And if after there was another
route, another sky, there was only
this one sky, framed by the hole inside
earth’s hinge through which light
first came, untroubled grey beams that
fell on Aziris, then on Irasa.
And they were told, ‘This is a good
place for you Greeks to live, because a hole
has been made in the sky.’
*
And what came before and what comes after when Egypt
is a dead city in the mind of its children, when it rises inside
a lake cut into four squares and the water rises equally in
each quadrant, birth light and lunar light, like a pilgrimage
over water that won’t end. And the first visitor waits to
be heard when his voice is joined by the shepherd’s. And the second
visitor presents the child from his village and gives him bread
and when he says, ‘bekos,’ he’s told that it is the Phrygian
word for bread. And the first child sits among the stars
with his hands outdrawn and accepts what he is given.
And the king, hearing of the two children speaking of bekos
gave them to live with the women of Memphis and their
tongues were cut out so that they would never speak again.
*
‘But Heliopolis is south
where the mountains run
from north to south
and continue inland toward
the Red Sea.’ And to seize
sight again, to implore
the gods to return us
to the river’s currents, gentle
sway of our bodies in the
Memphis sun, to rest
outside pyramid rock
and raise our eyes to see
the mountains
descend into the sea…
It is without them we
come back, raise
our eyes, resist the
beginnings of Libya
offering ourselves
the black cobalt sun of
coastline.
*
And the world came to be
seen as divided into three parts
Asia Europe Libya
And where Egypt lies
is the border between them
And one takes the mouth
of the other, so that the south
is drawn across the hand
of a priestess from Memphis
and her days are like those of
the Nile that divide Egypt in two
from the Cataracts and the Elephantine
And the river rises in the Sebennytic mouth
And two other mouths are broken from it
And their names are the Saïtic mouth and the Mendesian mouth
And their waters moves inside the canals that follow from them
Bolbotine and Bucolic
And those who drink from the Nile are Egyptian
And the sun that sets to the west of them is taken from the river
each day, knotted like flames above a bridge one crosses
from this world to the next.
*
‘I was drawing lots
when the rope broke I
was drawn from each
hand in a play of hands
on my body that tore
my left hand from my
right and gave them
back to me
like pieces of bekos
I couldn’t eat.
Why do I
starve in Egypt
I asked why
do I live without
nourishment
deprived of
my city?’
*
To count back
our days to Memphis.
To hear what they once said
was light in Memphis, when
the river was still
and our boats travelled
forty days to Meroë.
21 May 2017
THE WARSAW POEMS
….Nobody knows who died
On the roads of that time, of the fact of roads.
George Oppen
At an angle from where the building stood, this morning
to say it was years ago—twenty? thirty?—starting out
with some few things, borderlands inside the hasty
beginnings of narrative. Reading Jabès out loud
for the first time in years, to be overcome by what
comes to pass, one’s death is like that image of the poplar
ripped from the ground by its roots. One says
‘I will die,’ looks up, the tree not yet fallen, the days
resistant to revisiting. What is it looks back on this, us,
says earth, sky, water, the boundaries replete, incommensurate
voices torn from the world, ‘to speak of death….to say
mother and father are dead, likewise my brother and sister’
when we had no mother no father no brother no sister
only the circumference of their absence, this resurgent fall
of these consonants on clay.
*
Traffic stars
along Krolewska….
Was a traveler
calling back, was a
stranger called
from the outside
to come back
wait for light to
complete its tracing
on tile roofs.
Was a traveler
called back, was a
foreigner
from the Homeland.
‘How do you come
here, from where do you
come here?’
There is a hole
inside, water when
it finds its place
to hide.
*
And at the Vistula’s edge their names are like discs
thrown across the tide, watery discs that float out to
sea, that return from where they have been awaiting
recovery, as if there were rope
to bring each one back. Warsaw is a river
inside one’s mind, like a beginner working his
way back to the ferry, waiting for the ferry to
take him, at night when the dead commence return.
And one is a voice waiting, a seed miracle
inside a red jacket, and the other is a common
map, partitioned, broken into quadrants
of sky & air, the words breaking apart on the page.
Trolley goes black inside a sun’s crossing, avenue
goes under avenue, answers the fragile metallic of its host.
Czy jesteś tutaj, aby ponownie określić, co to znaczy umrzeć?
Are you here to redefine what it means to die?
Czy wiesz, co to znaczy żyć ze śmiercią?
Do you know what it means to live with death?
Ta woda jest niekompletna.
This water is incomplete.
Where water and earth meet inside the cemetery gates.
A prayer shawl burning in April light.
*
‘Did you locate
my locust tree?
Did you bring its
limbs back
from water?
I am living near
a locust tree
& wait for the morning
doves to arrive
so dark & cool
on the river’s surface.’
*
The route is water, was landscape without the river to signal
where the border of Getto began, black pavement where sun
was cordoned shed light, woda where the land shifts, stone
by stone, the way water is shifting underneath
their bodies, movement’s systolic clip, earth time and
heaven time, the early debt of their common, rays of strangeness
on earth As one goes, one is a grandson, one is an image of his head
moving underneath the sun, the white penumbra of horizon
when he moves without a map, the avenue like a broad-leafed
plateau, his face inside a globe, the distance of one hand
to another, the lighthouse build at the ghetto’s edge, he was saying
to no one Gdzie jest woda, the avenue was sunlit, shops open along
the route where the sun blazed Gdzie jest woda in his speaking voice
found along the way, to ask no one the direction, where the river
blackened, his eyes that saw where poplar had stood, now standing
in place of poplar, and still in time of the common hour
before noon. And what was himself saw himself
go away, saw the line between wound and healing
a branch of poplar extended across.
*
And one is Sofia held to the Sabbath flame.
One is a woman named Sofia at the edge of a wood.
Jedna to kobieta o imieniu Sofia.
And her fingers are adjusting the white
pages of the Zohar, laid out, each a space without words.
Triadic exhumation of spirit. To accord
each season its mark, Sofia inside the cutout
of time within no time. One is walking toward
the river, she is saying it is necessary to go from
here to there, to walk past the river, to bend
down where the river widens, a mouth bled from its
cataracts. ‘To speak of the language of others, but in the interrogative
mode.’ Candlewax on darkened thumbs, the realism of thirst
within another’s mouth. This surface left untouched, this unclosing of
historic time, morphed into a messenger who resists naming, comes back
at sundown, rests next to the dead without answer, a query that was part
bird, part flint, stain underneath stain, ‘a door, a roof, the wall where they
hid apart from each other.’
*
And if the dead
renew their dying--
troubled by what
enters, seizes up
on loose notes
said to one & no
other.
*
Water when you are thirsty, I heard her say, water
when the river is white & you are ready to swim
inside its currents, as though the mouth were
stolen away from its mother, as if the hand
were given depth by what shaped it, shared
its silence, this ludic entreaty passed
over stone heads. Water when you
are thirsty, dry land when you have learned
to accept passage.
*
‘In the middle of the sea
there lies a land….a wasteland
known as Crete. Under its
king the world was innocent.
A mountain rises there, once glad
with leaves and streams, called Ida.’
W środku morza
Leży ziemia ... pustkowia
Znany jako Kreta.
And to dream of the woman
near the locust tree again…
where their land is edged
with leaves and streams
called Ida.
*
Warsaw leads back.
Warsaw where the dead recover
without mercy.
‘We move, we move…are they
trying to escape? to enter?’
The subject of their time the
subject of this time.
So that: the story returns from Herodotus: of the shepherd’s
son killed by Astyages, who dismembered the child
baked his flesh and served the son to his father.
And when the father had eaten from his
son’s flesh, Haspargus was brought the head
hands and feet of his son under a silver dish
and opened it before everyone to see
what had been eaten…And he
gathered his son’s remains and brought them
home to bury them near the river banks
overflowing in spring.
*
Yes, you are right
to dream of their presence
without you. The dead
are like that, without
fear of what will come.
You are right to share
your dream over
their bodies, to stare
back into their
faces that are black
stones in the earth.
The pillar is visible at a distance and behind
it the row of markers, one after the other
piled high with leaves and tree limbs.
*
And what will consume your days?
Nic nie zużywają dni.
And what will their laughter sound like?
Ich śmiech będzie niczym nic.
Nothing will consume your days.
Their laughter will consume nothing.
20 May 2017
