| Mark Halperin USA
The poems that follow are all from TIME AS DISTANCE, by Mark Halperin, New Issues (Western Michigan University), 2001 MILLENNIUM Maybe a change of number can transform
a life: aren’t the resolutions we make
at the start of each new year, new birthday,
decade, century, millennium, marks
of that wild hope, more frayed each time?
Do our tracks narrow like eyes
converging toward our vanishing beliefs?
Say we didn’t count and lived as we imagine
animals do, in the continuous present,
no more conditioned by past than future.
Would that be less odd than invisible
crevasses cutting off this week from that—
our rounding temporal corners?
Did Zeno get it wrong? Is it lack of motion
that confutes time, not shifts in speed and/or
direction? Does the mind seek height
the way the body fears falling and earthquake
fissures that close with us inside? When
some sold their possessions and waited for
the end a thousand years ago,
others bought it up and spun their wheels
as the earth continued too. Then families
that wandered out beyond city gates
came drifting back, for work and food, for
the sorry lives they’d thought to shed
like gravity, forced to resurrect old habits,
calendars, a useless innocence.
Howls must have rattled the steeple clocks.
HOME When Eve awoke, there was a man beside her, sleeping—this was before fear and danger—like and unlike her, lying on his side. She began to hum and primp. Out of the blue a breeze rose and fell in time with the swing of his breathing, everything new and yet, somehow, familiar. She stretched her arm. He seemed to shudder then, roll over, start as his eyes opened. She was quiet. Maybe they watched each other and there were no words as their were no memories. Their lips brushed accidentally as a cloud-burst sends water down an empty channel, and he rose and she rose, separately. As they started walking off, he waited or she did, until they were in step, side by side, alone. They approached the trees, saw between them a path to follow and started home. MURMURS I sit where the guest sits when language turns suddenly opaque. It’s me in the uncoupled car left in the station as the train fades, me adrift on voluble liquids, hushes—me at sea. When distractions like meaning vanish, maybe you hear murmurs the way doctors hear valves rattle in the rush of heart’s blood, the octaves masked off or lying below speech and tears: Tanya’s unhappiness with Sergei, the extended complaint that's replaced a life, places to dream about and the despair that wears through then wears out feeling. Without a segue, I’m in role, in accent. Back on track, I’m in the harboring circle of friends, pulling shoes on, doing a button, ready for the long walk to the metro. When will you be back? they ask. Don’t forget to call. SPINOZA There was only one work, one picture the parts of which needed to fit each other, to cohere, and only that mutual dependence interested him given the tightness of a web in which the failure of even one strand, letting it sag too far in one direction and then drag and droop or start to cave in, would seem to require full knowledge at the start, omniscience, since, if the pattern that links the parts is to hold through time it must escape even temporal boundaries, a notion fatally like the knowledge that it will precede its being. And from that Spinoza shied. There, amid the numbers that organize his geometrical exposition, intuition and the love of God, exotic as winter fruit, hearten those for whom too much reason stifles and suffocates, like a speaker intruding that Spinoza lacked a way to describe something further because here vision exceeded the language in which it could be embodied. I do not know. Some hold the truth is something in the world words try to describe and others, the fit of words to the world. Only a few would say it is the sound of certain words when they have found each other after long searching. Calling something "predestined" only dresses one mystery in another when we appear to each other ill educated salespersons offering our services, stumblers, liars, trying to get right what we have not heard said before. IN CHEKHOV In Chekhov, everyone’s unhappy— this one loves that one who loves someone else. The doctor, a fixture of the plays, is always old as Chekhov, who died young, must have felt himself to be. And the aging writer, who also resembles Chekhov, chases a girl he will abandon soon and is stuck with the habit of drawing out small note-books every so often, wanting the youth he traded for fame. Moscow, say the sisters, is where we could be happy, knowing they will never get there, too beautiful for happiness, with feelings too keen, dreams, like their upswept hair, too outdated— their long dresses part of history. Work, says one hero, love says another. No one can tell you if happiness is anything but the opposite of irony or being unprotected.
© All Copyright, Mark Halperin. |
