Wheel With a Single Spoke (8 page)

He is unreckoned, unmuscled, unborn.

Stones flap their wings the slowest.

Stones hold inside them the bird king.

Stones fly while still.

Stones think of nothing but pyramids.

The bird king is inside,

inside the bird king

are birds,

inside the birds are viscera and gullets,

in the craws of birds are seeds.

Whoever would sow

must first break stones.

Stones move their wings the slowest

many lives must be knotted

together end to end

to make one sense of sight.

With sight like this, you can see time.

Stones move their wings the slowest –

inside them is the bird king.

The bird king sits on an egg-shaped throne.

It is the same earth on which we live.

The bird king will hatch it.

They kiss, yes, they kiss, they kiss,

the young, on a street, in a bistro, against a railing,

they kiss each other constantly as if they

were nothing but the endpoints

of a kiss.

They kiss, yes, they kiss in heavy traffic,

in subway stations, in movie theaters,

on city buses, they kiss desperately,

violently, as if

once the kiss ended, once the kiss was over, beyond the kiss

there might be nothing but the exile of old age

and death.

They kiss, yes, they kiss, the young so slender

and in love. So slender,

they might not know there is bread in the world.

So in love, they might not,

might not know there is a world.

They kiss, yes, they kiss as if

they're in the dark, the safest dark,

as if no one could see them, as if

the sun would rise again

luminous

only after kissing rips and bloodies their mouths

and they can keep kissing only

with their teeth.

Ill, I visited President Baudelaire,

Saturn had passed through my constellation,

and I was devastated to learn that absinthe was outlawed

and that, generally speaking, no one makes it anymore,

so I lived in a zone of chlorine, where often

slipping from the bridle of existence,

in order to examine the spirits behind my brow-bone,

I let my beautiful skull crack open.

You are losing touch with your obsession, he told me,

and I responded that I'd been connected for a while,

and maintain relations with giants, like

some Mercury who brings only bad news.

The president smiled and laid his skeletal arm

around my shoulder, reminding me of the fact

that death itself is a form,

and just as perishable as any other.

He lamented, like me,

the awful state of albatrosses

and the thinning forests of symbols,

the degradation of the word and blank verse.

The president believed it did not become

the living to experience sadness,

and showed concern, at the same time,

for my hasty unions with the cosmos.

You'll only end up in pieces, he said,

so do your best to preserve

the phantom of some spiritual state

with a transcription into our good, old hendecasyllable.

My face was pressed against a violet flower

wilted by presidential sweat

from the time he took a nap

with his forehead in the plant.

It rains too much, said the president,

it makes the stones suffer

and the legions of monsters we enlist

to serve the syllables of our poetry.

He also noted that the language of poetry

was threatened by certain modishness,

and he lamented, like me,

the exaggerated interest accorded

to poets' physicalities.

President Baudelaire rested the skeleton of his hand

on my shoulder, and asked

whether, come the next election, I would give thought

to voting for him.

I told him I would, and left

him, connected, and I went back to

that exhausted atmosphere of chlorine

in which of late I've led my existence.

I sit on a terrace of loss

at night, under a moon that covers half

the sky.

If not for the sight of constellations

the sky would be a shoulder blade

in red.

The line of the sea. A cannon firing

at who knows what barbarian invasion.

And my book yet unpublished,

and my consolation of being the coauthor

of the great Ptolemy.

Rejoice, unquiet soul, in visits,

in losing at games of chance.

Console your parents, whose son

has left for good a home that teems

with monotonous ghosts and retrograde visions

perpetuum mobile

of bones from ever older men, growing younger

under crosses of ruined stone.

I review the celestial ships arriving, the boats

that see us and shout: UK! UK!

or Vef! Vef!

It means nothing to us

who think in thoughts

and speak in words.

In great halls, illumined by the full rising

of the moon, hu!

How disgusting it can be

drawing, drawing

ticket after ticket

in the shinbone lottery.

And the solitary cannon fires into the night,

and a sweet, reddish light falls on my hands,

and I let my hands be gnawed

by starving dogs,

each finger receiving a ring

made of ashes,

my pain tempered by a song.

Steam flows into buildings

through the gaps under heavy latches.

The line of the sea is straight, monoliths

sink into me, oranges

I crush underfoot, I move forward

against the current of time.

Damp and a smell of citrus,

if I yell loud enough, the heart-bone echoes.

My book still is not printed

but my consolation

is to have the other author – Ptolemy,

the most learned

of the learned.

Ptolemy said to me:

– Two are the ways being may be:

the state of plentiful time at hand,

that is, the state of contemplation,

and the state of time's shortage, that is

the state of crisis.

Then he fell quiet.

I found some paper and wrote:

– Contemplation, that is, static being,

changes on its own, out of boredom;

the crisis of time, that is,

the weary state of being

that keeps wearing its old clothes,

its swaddling blanket.

Contemplative beings love reason.

Reason moved the earth

from the center of existence

and made it turn

around the sun.

Reason proved it with numbers

but not with the manifestations of numbers.

Advice:

contemplation and beings, as they are able,

should find a reason to be,

should mix, should abandon the static.

Advice:

those who made the earth

the slave of the sun

should justify themselves.

Otherwise, it's sad on earth.

Beings outside of time

left the earth in the center of the universe

and that's good,

because it's the truth.

Beings short of time

tried to measure with common sense

even what cannot be seen.

Advice:

To doctors, physiologists, anatomists:

first

one should doubt

the heart

is the center of feeling

and the mind

the place of thought.

I tell them:

soon this will be proven,

it will be proven

that common sense was not wrong, that

the heart

is the center of feeling

and the mind

the place of thought . . .

But it's another kind of heart

and a completely other kind of mind.

We differ from each other in speed.

We share only our aloneness.

The speed of existence of a stone

is slower than the speed of existence

of a horse.

But the stone sees the sun and stars

while the horse sees the fields and grass.

I say:

The pyramids marked the slowest speed,

the longest gaze.

A pharaoh's mummy is a piece of stone.

The fleshly pharaoh saw Egypt.

The stone pharaoh sees the cosmos.

To those made of flesh and bone

I say:

You only see what surrounds you.

Ideas are a kind of stone,

so contemplate.

To those made of wood and other durable materials

I say:

Shatter!

Rot!

If you have seen the whole,

fill yourselves with flesh

so you may see the part.

Bones are interior crutches,

they hold up flesh and nerves

but are better friends and closer to stones.

I say:

Flesh and bone,

I say: common sense and shortage of time.

Ptolemy believed in the straight line.

It exists.

Count its points and, if you can,

tell me the number.

To doubt the straight line

you first have to know how many points

it has.

I detest those who make an arc

from a woman

they do not know and have

never seen.

When Ptolemy was born,

the earth was nothing in particular,

when he died,

the earth was as flat as your palm.

When Ptolemy was born

many had not been, yet.

After he died,

quite a few had not been, yet.

However often I think of the fact that

Ptolemy died

the same despair comes over me

as though he died

yesterday,

today,

or even now, at this moment,

in front of my eyes.

I cannot believe he died,

his scent of a living man

lingers in the air around me.

His gestures still stir

the air

and I hear his voice upon my eardrums

as though the truth had

a human body;

and his way of putting things