Blue Hour Read online

  something broken and personal, a memory

  something holding back the pouring, a turn of the kaleidoscope, a turn again, radiant, beautiful, meaningless so it is easier to choose stones from the ground, a sack of words, pieces of language from something larger, and if a single event caused this ruin, what was that event? what made night a country of terror?

  something within me is no longer with him

  snow catching on razor wire, searchlit fields

  snow through open windows

  soul on its way toward earth

  sparks of holiness

  spoken in unknown words of a known language

  stepping back into an earlier life

  strands of hair, blood, corpuscled light

  streets iced with shop-glass, a flock of stones

  stripped trees against winter fields

  take no words by mouth

  tangled lilacs, peeling walls, darkening lindens

  tedium taught me an imaginary world

  tendril, torpor, tributary

  that even this refuge might be taken:

  that ing-ing of verbs in an eternal present

  that light traveled from the eye to the world

  that nothingness might not be there

  that you might become one among others

  the after-touching memory of relief

  the air around the ringing bells filled with ash

  the being that lies half open

  the birds became smoke

  the blue whorling that once spoke

  the blue-stoned streets of river rock

  the boiling, sudden clouds of August

  the border. anywhere. but the war zone. mattresses roped to the roof

  the boundless etcetera of indifference

  the breath of the invisible

  the bridge that doesn’t touch the other bank

  the buildings of the center city no longer

  the candlelit stairwells in blackout

  the cedared hills, smoking orchards, and the rivers of ill luck

  the cemetery workman’s wheelbarrow

  the chandelier of water against stone

  the chorus of mules and roosters, goat bells, little cries

  the cinema, trip-wired, the small-arms fire

  the click, night

  the click, night, pages turned by a wind and taken

  the confessions written in gunpowder and spit

  the danger of premature good conscience

  the dawn sky at morning pearl and smoke, the trees stripped

  the day has not yet come

  the day will of all days be ordinary, its weather various

  the dead were left among the living—there were no questions

  the dead were washed and dressed and touched

  the densissimus imber of the rain

  the dreams are a coffin with an open window

  the dreams of a mind in the grave

  the early summer’s green plums

  the empty wet shirts on the line waving

  the endless, unbroken lines

  the evacuation of ghosts

  the flautist’s breath in a stairwell

  the flumes of white phosphorus marking the city

  the for and for

  the forbidden world hidden behind it

  the four-a.m. bombing of a newspaper office

  the fragility of social orders

  the furthest edge

  the future destroying us

  the ganglia of a train map, metastasizing cities

  the going-forth, the as-yet-cannot-be-heard

  the greater and lesser wings the ground luminosity

  the hand moving of its own accord across the page

  the happy life life itself

  the hidden world and its inhabitants

  the hole of my mouth

  the hole where my ancestor stands burning

  the house, a white portrait of our having fled

  the hushed chill of such a wind

  the I’s time, in which things happen

  the ice of reminiscence submerged in time

  the immigrant disappearing into a new language

  the informant’s diary of his whereabouts

  the ivory of ice on the rivers

  the japonica’s shadow on a telegraph pole

  the life that would have ended then goes on

  the light in these old photographs is a palm of rice

  the light of a pocket mirror moving through trees

  the little notebook of poems in the pocket of a corpse

  the Lumière camera

  the man tipping his hat sadly

  the man tipping his hat sadly as if to say goodbye to his own mind

  the mirror in her eyes giving himself back

  the moon a bone-cap of ice or ivory

  the moon in its clearing

  the morning’s cold light on the blankets

  the mortar smoke mistaken for an orchard of flowering pears

  the name I am becoming

  the nine lights of thought

  the open well ending in its moon of water

  the opening of time

  the past is white near the sea

  the past, which is our present

  the peace of a black-windowed warehouse

  the peace of the hay

  the pleroma which she did not desire for herself

  the plummet of a star from its darkness

  the question speaks the very language of lack

  the rain falls lightly now

  the rescuers lift from the wreckage a child no longer a child

  the revenant whispers: forgive me if I am wrong but I could not sleep

  the roads issuing mist

  the roads rivered with sewage and tea-colored rain

  the roofs have fallen, field flowers grow in the rooms. nevermind

  the same clicking of bare limbs in wind

  the same rose sold to every mourner

  the secret police having risen to the stature of petty thieves

  the sedimentary years

  the shacks of le quartier de la guerre

  the silence of a new language

  the soft houses of heaven

  the soldiers’ moonlit helmets

  the soul cannot leave the body of a suicide until she comes

  the soul weighs twenty-six grams and is migratory like the birds

  the soul, enamored of greatness

  the soul with its sense of destination, the soul exiled, a stranger to earth

  the space between events infinite

  the stench of soap boiling at the edge of a village

  the sting of bleached linen

  the stony space where all of this happens

  the stories nested, each opening to the next

  the story of empty rice sacks

  the street’s memory of abandoned shoes

  the streets running with a sweet gray stench

  the sun a monstrance

  the sun moving toward Lambda Herculis

  the sun will turn into a red giant, and then into a white dwarf

  the sweet stench of gangrene, a cloud of flies, in its hand a child’s necropolis

  the temptation of temptation

  the three hidden lights beyond the grasp of thought

  the tomb into which we escape

  the trains. sometimes a silent coupling

  the trees: almond, annatto, sweetsop, banana, monkey-bread, bay rum, sandal bead, breadfruit, yellowsilk, camphor, candle

  the trees mortared into flower

  the trembling of river stones, the ignition of spirit, the firing of human thought

  the trip wire in white grass at one with the footfall, the latch

  the truck-rutted fields the burnt sorrow

  the twenty-two bones of the skull

  the uncertain hand of a lost spirit

  the vanished present visible on earth

  the wall of white sand and poisonous mill w
astes

  the way one could bathe while still covered by a square of cloth

  the wet paper of flesh draped on brittle bone

  the what is? gives the wrong answer

  the what is? has ruined thought

  the white train

  the white-boned noon

  the window covered with a wool blanket

  the woman in the flowered robe mad with fear

  the woman in your arms a lighted bedcloth

  the world an accident

  the world as it emerges

  the world’s ensouling in a gallery of sadness

  their bedclothes soaked in music

  their bruises, aubergine

  their refusal to accompany us further

  their souls exist as their body

  their souls shuttered against hope

  then at dawn through the cedars

  then for an hour we slip photographs from their frames, strip the walls, toss what had been our life into shipping crates

  then phosphorus fell silver on the city and rained on the lettuce fields

  there is a reason you have lost him. for the rest of your life you could search for it

  there is no absence that cannot be replaced

  there is no reason for the world

  there was black corn in the fields, crib smoke, and bones enough to fill the sack

  there was no when there

  there was nothing that wasn’t for sale

  these are my contents

  these paving stones this hymnal

  these ruins are to the future what the past is to us

  they bind them in rags

  they climb out of the river and blacken its banks

  they died along with anyone who knew who they were

  they fell from heaven to earth

  they go on past grief and give me a sack of beans

  they lived in the carcass of the sports coliseum

  they looked into the camera, into the future

  they will gladly go to the precipice, but where is the precipice?

  thinking against the world

  this end and the beginning within it

  this is a musée hypothétique:

  this is a transit camp, a squatters’ camp

  this is how things were for us then

  this is the city. this is a photograph of the city

  this is the city. this was the city

  this only death can write

  this open-air asylum

  this ossuary of world, what is the phrase for it?

  this reversal

  this shattering of indifference

  this sudden incipience of event—

  those things are obvious which are invisible

  those who have entered and have left unharmed

  thoughts turned back into ink and paper

  throwing light upon light

  time—“a severe border guard”—becomes imaginary

  time lapsed in one country is only beginning in another

  time, to which we are exiled

  to abandon yearning for the body

  to be unquiet

  to be visible to oneself

  to become endlessly what one has been

  to cross the field without breaking the snow

  to enter into itself and to stay awake

  to expose ourselves to whatever may happen

  to forget once having known it

  to hide, safeguard, entrust to a protected place

  to know not only what is, but the other of what is

  to know that the great bell is the great bell

  to remain haunted

  to rescue the future

  to say nothing without confining ourselves to silence

  to search like a sheep for salt

  to see or to perish

  to see other than from without

  to see the world as it actually is

  to walk the quays among the executed

  to where a drawn lamb is hanging beheaded

  today the world is stiff and locked in place, pines still, skies droning, snow mounded, and everyone has gone “to work”

  together into the blue but unbroken perishing

  too many bones in too small a soul

  torn curtain, shutters in wind

  toward what end? what uniformity?

  tunneling between worlds

  twirling organdy dresses waving goodbye

  two children in his arms

  two discontinuous realms

  un enfant qui meurt, wrapped in a trouser leg

  under the blind sky’s surveillance

  under the whip, invisible, in the not-there

  under what conditions can we speak of

  une enfant qui meurt wrapped in a trouser leg

  unspeakable in language

  unspoken thoughts, leaving us in their proximity, alone

  until dawn in the fire tower

  until this, that

  vesture, vigil light, votive

  visible only to God

  walking the streets, tented in bedclothes

  war-eyed in the warehouse of history

  war no longer declared but only continued

  warning us of its nature and our own

  washing its windows until they vanish

  was this not to know me?

  watch them appear to recede: what are we seeing?

  water calm to the wind line

  water rosy with iron

  waters filled with human belief

  watery cathedral, a gold wash of light, a trembling—

  we are as paper against the walls of the passage

  we caused each other

  we drove through disappearing villages

  we hid among tangerine peels, lamb bones and blue figs

  we lived in tents of fog

  we returned to the border and walked toward the checkpoint

  we take our citron pressé, your hand mine, and the clocks spin in reverse until you are floating in a flat green boat

  we take our worldly goods, your hand, mine, and the clocks spin

  we were spoken into being

  were we not?

  wet bouquets at the kiosk

  wet paper of our flesh

  what crawled out of the autumn wood was dementia

  what did we retrieve? empty spectacles?

  what do these questions ask?

  what do we have to forget?

  what end? what uniformity?

  what fragmentary light?

  what God does or does not forgive

  what is closest to us

  what is it? must be answered who is it?

  what sees us without being seen

  what waking life is to the dream

  what was before, imperfectly erased

  what were we doing as far away as this?

  what you see is the beginning of life after death

  what you see you shall become

  when did we know?

  when I opened the door

  when it was possible to walk across the river

  when one could hear, behind the curtain, the whole thing

  when the thing had gone beyond the limits of a room

  when this sunlight reaches the future

  when time seems to us a queer thing

  when we wake from our deaths

  when you know the worst, you can return to cut stalks of iris in April

  where at least one loveliness wanders

  where else would they have fallen?

  where everything destroyed was left intact

  where he looked

  where the helicopters landed, lifting trees from the ground

  where the ore is crushed into yellowcake

  where the sickness knew us

  where there is some message to convey

  where they go without sleep

  where thinking takes place we have a right to say

  while I lived in that other world, years we
nt by in this one

  while out on the cobalt sea the ship turns toward us

  while we watched transfixed the repetitive novelty of death

  who cries for the jasmin as he digs them up, and carries with him a can of black tobacco and a yellow finch in a cage

  who if rope were writing would have hung himself

  who in mirrors saw a strange woman

  who no longer realized I was there

  who returns from the journey with her eyes ruined

  who wanted only to retrieve a few invisible souvenirs:

  who wrote on the window in lipstick I will never forget you

  whose white hands lift from this river the sudden flight of cranes

  why do I seem no longer alive?

  wide-planed wind of the sea

  wild doves in a warehouse

  willow, windthrow, winter, wisteria

  wind etching the walls

  wind singing in the chimney

  windows X’d against fire

  windshield wipers clearing a wedge of water

  wisteria floating along the fence

  with a camera hidden in a loaf of bread

  with empty suitcases, pretending to be refugees

  with how much uncertainty they told it

  with revolutionary hope we searched, believing

  with the flurry of a dovecote

  without passing through thought

  without personal history or desire for selfhood

  without so much as a biscuit tin of water

  without wandering too far into the past

  woman in black holding daisies in paper

  woman in mourning black with baskets of lemons and eggs

  wood crates of cognac and ordnance

  wooden crosses in snow

  words burning in the windows

  words carried by countless mouths

  work shoes, soda cans, holy braided palm

  world without having been

  world without origin

  would return to the point of departure

  would reveal itself as other than chance

  writing, an anguished wind

  written over an open grave

  x does not equal

  yet the women dancing with white scarves

  yet the women veiled in cirrus

  you are the ghost through whom we see the wall

  you come to earth in your sorrows

  you, leaping tall fields, cornflower and milk

  you might be the revenant of the earliest years, you might be within

  you must leave, you cannot remain here, you must leave at once

  you spit out your teeth, give it up

  you will see the generation into which you should have been born

  your churches will warehouse weapons and wheat

  your freedom is an abyss

  your hand awkward between us in the absence of love

  your heart in the guise of mysterious words