Poetry Magazine, Ellen Hinsey, February 2003

Poetry Magazine

Ellen Hinsey

USA/FRANCE

Ellen Hinsey teaches writing and literature at Skidmore College's program abroad and the French graduate school, the Ecole Polytechnique. She is the author of The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) and Cities of Memory, which was awarded the Yale Series Prize in 1995. Among other honors, she has received the Union League Civic and Arts Poetry Prize from POETRY, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin. Her poems, essays and translations have appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker and POETRY. Poems appear with grateful acknowledgement to Wesleyan University Press and POETRY Magazine.

Meditation

On the uncountable nature of things

Thus, not the thing held in memory, but this:
The fruit tree with its scars, thin torqued branches;

The high burnished sheen of morning light
Across its trunk; the knuckle-web of ancient knots,

II.

The swift, laboring insistence of insects—
Within, the pulse of slow growth in sap-dark cores,

And the future waiting latent in fragile cells:
The last, terse verses of curled leaves hanging in air—

And the dry, tender arc of the fruitless branch.

III.

Yes: the tree's spine conditioned by uncountable
Days of rain and drought: all fleeting coordinates set

Against a variable sky—recounting faithfully
The thing as it is—transient, provisional, changing

Constantly in latitude—a refugee not unlike
Us in this realm of exacting, but unpredictable, time.

iv.

And only once a branch laden with perfect
Fruit—only once daybreak weighed out perfectly by

The new bronze of figs, not things in memory,
But as they are here: the roar and plough of daylight,

The perfect, wild cacophony of the present—
Each breath measured and distinct in a universe ruled

By particulars—each moment a universe:
As when under night heat, passion sparks—unique,

New in time, and hands, obedient, divine,
As Desire dilates eye—pulse the blue-veined breast,

Touch driving, forging the hungering flesh:
To the far edge of each moment's uncharted edge—

VI.

For the flesh too is earth, desire storm to the marrow—
Still—the dream of simplicity in the midst of motion:

Recollection demanding a final tallying of accounts,
The mind, loyal clerk, driven each moment to decide—

Even as the tree's wood is split and sweat still graces
The crevices of the body, which moment to weigh in,

For memory's sake, on the mobile scales of becoming.

Fragment

on a short history of chance

It is said that Aristotle did not believe that nature needed chance to begin. And Augustine, freed from such deliberations, was sure God was at the heart of the patent, as well as the obscure, occurrence. To look once into the Divine Face was to have the great map of destiny spread out: complete with the body's tidal currents, the slow lamentation of flowers, the cyclical reign of the seasons, and the soul's knowledge.

But in time, the sure, steady mind clarified: it was the mechanical wheel of the universe that would prevail—its gyroscope of history advancing perfectly as it swallowed time. Thus, freed from sacrifice, the works of labor, not conscience, would fulfil the great collective destiny; all species carefully noted in the mighty encyclopedias of being, entered by a steady but passionless hand.

Yet listening at each daybreak—the unknown still came dropping outside of the bright, clear realms. Invariably returning, as it manifested in sudden apparition or by silent stealth: as still in wonder the senses are caught up when the sea delivers—but once—a wave of pure ivory—or etched in salt is a cathedral of the world.

Or how a face, long lost, appears on a street swimming up out of a crowd, as if from a foreign element. What, if not chance, holds all of these fast in its grip? The moment—great abyss of now: bearing the fruit of all moments before, ripe with disorganized creation.

Commentary

Thirteen Aphorisms on the nature of evil

The unconscious hand of Evil loves its own innocence.

Evil lives for the existence of "the other"; for itself it prefers a familiar, common existence.

Evil always owns its own orchard, and sits there gaily picking cherries.

Evil loves the shape of the human hand, formed like its own; for that sublimely simple tool is capable of carrying out the most monstrously delicate atrocities.

In antiquity, Time begot Chaos. But from Chaos, surely, there arose Evil: for in Chaos there is ambiguity—and Darkness and Night—the home of human regret.

Temptation is made flesh by the love it borrows from the heart.

The will must challenge temptation as memory challenges oblivion.

The brave make a place at their table for Evil. For only first-hand knowledge of evil can transform meditation into action.

Evil is always waiting for opportunity's welcome: thriving as it does on the dark of judgement's eclipse.

10.

Time must tolerate the shape of Evil as it tolerates all other miracles.

11.

Evil loves its house, which it shares with history, which is blind.

12.

One must never forget that history does not exist.

Rather, only consciousness, which makes an imaginary house for time past.

13.

And consciousness is the only sword which makes Evil tremble.

INTERDIcTION

Apagoreuw.

It is said that we can no longer use the old words.

Either, they carry in their script the imprint of our inhumanity:
the memory of the naked bodies burned as the classical strains
played;

Or, contain their own blueprint of destruction: the way a seed
harbors in its cells its final, latent corruption.

We have become afraid of them, the old words, as if at last we
could escape punishment if, once and for all, they were forbidden utterance in the public squares.

As if we could walk out to where the river joins that final deep,
where the tides plow and reap the untouchable air. There beyond boundaries, voices.

Yet even where silence and the river Styx merge, there remain
gestures which must be transcribed.

And I have listened to your voice at sundown, breaking with grief, undone by the bludgeoning tool of the eternal sorrows.

The way that Priam grieved, in the old words, the broken body of his son.

And heads are still brought openly to the market place, carried
as if in triumph.

The old words have blood on them.

But here, under the blackened sun, there are things, in the trammeled, the ruined, the old words, which must still be said.

Update on the last judgment

There will be no deafening noise. No hornblow of thunder.

The small plants of the earth will not tremble on the hillside as grace is prepared.

The sky will neither drown us in its plenty, nor the ground crack and consume feet in its hunger.

No, bodies will not, in their last rags of flesh, creep from under the earth, and with breath once torn from them, choke and expel the old mud of the world.

Adam and Eve, incredulous, will not embrace again in their poverty, not knowing whether to shield themselves, or to emerge shameless from the past's shadow, astonished to again greet Terra Firma.

The book of the world, encrusted with deep-sea pearls and the blood of the lamb, will not open up its pages in which all deeds have been inscribed.

And the totality of history will not roll back together, all events fusing, once and for all, into the great blazing sphere of time.

None will sit on the right hand. There will be no right hand.

And the figure of sorrow and grace, with his staff upright, its purple pennant caught in that final wind, will not be there to greet us, with the mercy of justice in his eyes.

No, never judgment. Just the abyss into which all acts are thrown down, and the terrible white silence in which judgment either endures or burns.