The Guardian Angel of Not Feeling
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As where a wind blows.1 I can teach you that. The form of despair we call "the world." A theft, yes, but gossipy, full of fear. In which the "I" is seen merely as a specimen, incomplete as such, overendowed, maneuvering to rid itself of biological precipitates - hypotheses, humilities, propensities.... Do you wish to come with me? You know how in a landscape you see distances? We can blur that. We can dissolve it altogether. You know the previous age? How it lacks shape until it's cut away by love? We gust that lingering, moody, raw affection out, we peck and fret until it's gone, the flimsy courage, the leaky luggage in which you carry round your drafty dreams - of form, of hinged awareness, all interlocking-up - dream on - the chain is rattling that you've cast, yet it is made of air, of less, look, here it mirrors, here it curves in space, here it resembles - quick - for just a nanosecond - happiness - incorruptible whole - how soothing, so real, a ledge above the waterfall - You know, in music, how you hear - you strain to hear - the isolation of the meager, the you alone, an interim bristling with arguments, illusions - they are lesions, they are spreading across a naked skin, a rolling, planetary stretch of human skin, not like the feeling of an unseen presence, not like - oh wave demolishing, we're waiting for the phone to ring, we're busy - no? - we cling - the versions of the desolation we clock-out in lists, in miles - The wave, the wave appears but then withdraws, it ruffles at its rim as whereabouts, moonlight thrashes in its curl, clatters as inventory in its curl, the wave - wake up - the wave I'll give you tiny bits of if you'll still - Postpone the honeycombing day, let the sandbar rise up beneath us here, the bed will do, the splattering of texture, shade - brocaded shirtsleeve on the chair - the corridor of mysteries you call your hair - the masonry of your delays - pen, paper, ink - my friend, look at the ink, dip fingers through its open neck, bring hand to lip - there - do it again, again, blazon the mouth, rub in, exaggerate - the little halo forms, around the teeth, the mirror on that wall shows you the thing, furious, votive - oh look, the tiny heart mouthing and mouthing its crisp inaudible black zeros out.1 Wallace Stevens' Snow Man?
... the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow...
Time and tide
Posted by
guccipiggy
at
2005-02-27 08:12 PM
The entire poem seems to be about setting up different kinds of "breakwaters" against the surging tides of time (bed as sandbar) and the unbounded complexity of experience (looking for the "meager" in music, wanting to dissolve distance (time?) into a comfortable blur). Whereas the first guardian angel creates a "little utopia" for herself defined by solitude and order, this one creates an "interim" where the influences of the past and (especially) the future are not too strongly felt. The image of the halo gained at the end is particularly striking: crisp and black, but also zero and inaudible.
