A hollow ‘hello’ from Hell! Yes, from Hell.
Where do names come from? This Hell is
a sleepy fishing village and the best
spot that we’ve found on Hollow Head,
a Sleepy Hollows, so to speak.
We are in the ‘Bridegroom’, a little Bed
and Breakfast, run by a Rip Van Winkle
wise enough to know it was Empedocles
who jumped into Mount Etna. Empedocles!
Is my face red! Yet it will glorify
my pronoun to perfection—‘he jumps’. Yes,
both poetry and philosophy ought
to have the same antecedent. They forge
a world that’s capable of consciousness.
The self, per se, remains vestigial—
the voice of the volcano, not its source.
Your pronoun is the antecedent, not
your noun. Problematic resolved. Perhaps
I will go for a walk in Hell, perhaps
I will take the air, take the breezes.
A wonderful day in Hell! Ha-ha!

Another ‘hello’ from Hollow Head Island!
Yesterday we took the ‘Journey to
the Center of the Earth’ tour. Down, down
into a deep crevasse, two miles to see
the Rorschach Sandstones! I shall have
to write to you about panpsychism,
about the ‘antecedents problematic’.
It was like being inside a volcano.
The tremors remain inside of me. How can
I even think at all? Remind me. Was it
Protagoras or Pythagoras who jumped
into the volcano? The antecedents thing
suggests ‘he jumped’ sufficient, precedent
enough, enough to be a god.

An adventurous ‘hello’ from Hollow Head
Island! Apologies about the penmanship.
It seems the postcards shake these days,
not the volcanoes, not the earth.
So far we’ve been to the Stalactite Park,
the Gotterdammerung Grotto, hid in
the Hidden Caves, got lost in the Lost World.
We even walked some of the Infinity Trail.
No one finishes that, I guess. Ha-ha!  
Abandonment in extremis. Ha-ha!

'What they don’t know, of course,
is that you don’t **** with the Hammer.
The Hammer smiles, you smile, you wave the truck
ahead. It’s pretty simple,
for poetry does not make assertions;
philosophy does. When the Hammer speaks,
he speaks of something wild.  You stop your world,
the phony one, the constructed one. It stops
and stops and stops—'

I force open the lock, let in the sun.
The Hammer and I confront synaptic death
each day we live. What’s left is fire now.
‘Welcome to the Republic of the Sane.’
I smile and let the fresh air fill
the cabin, fill their lungs. The Seine is just
a river in France, right? I smile and say,
‘The hard part is over.’—though we all know
it isn’t. I tell them, ‘Wallace Stevens
once lived in this house’—though he didn’t.
Let be be finale of seem, I quote. I speak
with care. This is the current reply: The only
Emperor is the Emperor of ice cream.
We hold our arms heaven-ward, like
we are angels in heaven. Since it’s winter
I have a fire burning in the fireplace.
The kids can have a bedroom to themselves,
upstairs. There is hot water, take a bath…

‘In transit to the blank planet,’ I say.
‘That’s your answer: where we are, a point,
circumference points, vectors maybe,
an asymptotic self-description,
that’s the best answer to your question.’
We sit next to the fire
and listen to music. Tonight it’s Schubert,
Winterreise. I read a little from
The Hour of the Star. We talk about Adorno,
Emil Cioran, Gaston Bachelard, Chaucer.
We talk about poetic thinking. Is
the goal to have
an ultimate clarity or is
the poet’s mind composed of play
and speculation? I prevaricate,
I lie, deceive, evade. We open up
a decent bottle of port. The Hammer
has prepared calamari in a butter sauce.
There’s fresh pasta, fresh bread.
‘My friends, a toast,’ I say. They have to know.
‘Today’s word is vector, a vector like
ticks are for Lyme disease, mosquitoes for
malaria.’ The transmission of disease,
is that what humanity is? ‘Human
intelligence,’ I say, ‘may be the result
of a virus. It would explain a lot.’

Among the things we console ourselves with
I will put other people at the top.
I know, my dear, you tremble at the word
thing. ‘Think to say I and Thou’, you would say
were you here, were you still with me.
That people partake of Being as objects
is only part of the story. Well, perhaps, I err…
perhaps I do. One of the things I read
to the people who come across the line
is this from Clarice Lispector:
'It must be said the girl is not conscious
of my presence. Were it otherwise she would
have someone to pray for and that would mean
salvation. But I am fully conscious
of her presence: through her I utter my cry
of horror to existence. To this
existence I love so dearly.'
It is very beautiful, is it not?

Birds tend to think the ideal morning raga is
             a mathematical formula, an idea
which will describe ancient silk petals, say,
or nascent flowers in deep movement—  
     objects whose proof lies in open comparison to
            sunlight. The birds, when they
listen to this old raga, played by these
old hands, still say that it’s a language which might be
a new language, and not the same old drumming sound
       played next to their gold and silver cages.
                Birds truly are sensate beings.

True thought consists in singing chords that seem
a repetition of this new language
            —even in pain, even at death—
even though this cannot be. Imagine
each bird singing a thousand songs at each
advent of thought. Think about it—
a thousand songs before the sun moves one degree,
a thousand songs before each bird
         can take a breath,  
a thousand songs against that one moment,
against the passing of that moment…
It is impossible. It has to be.
Of course this too is why I play raga.

So morning’s first raga should not just wake
the sleepers, it should first disturb their dreams.
It should with open eyes bend over their
shut eyes, and watch them come to consciousness.
It should pause at the edge of its destruction,
for soon its vast body will fill the air.
The day is now upon the land. The cage-
bell-flute-beauty, this breath,
is now an abstraction and powerful.
For each day the morning raga finds its way
to garden walls, to destroy those walls.
And for the birds that can fly off,
who are at least alive in the wind,
the morning raga plays a thousand times
in that wind. And then the day begins.

(March 28 2001)

Our language can be seen as an ancient
City—pace Wittgenstein—who  
Surely meant a baptized city, for
The names come only with the blessing…

And even though he boards in Muzot, finds
A seat with a window so he can watch
The rain, a pad and pen and swollen eyes—
His naming is no longer for the living,
He knows that. Squatting, old, narrow-gauge trains:
He studies his reflection in the dark tunnels
In the glass: There is swelling, that
Awful puffiness, rust in the throat…
Mimetic passion, not rocket science.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
    I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
    To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
    To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
        While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
                In such an ecstasy!
    Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain -
        To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thus Keats, who, he reminds himself, wrote:
the rude
Wasting of old Time -with a billowy main,
A sun, a shadow of a magnitude.
Yet still it rains; the rails, become archaic
Through the Goddard Pass,
His final way of seeing mountain peaks .
In 1926 as the snow melts…
He stops.
The correspondence…

Tsvetayeva has written:  
Your name is poetry! Exclaims:
Your name is poetry! But she always
Exclaims—
May I hail you like this!
Your baptism was the prologue to
The whole of you!

It even smells of death in this train. Dead mice
Under the seats. Why would Marina think
Of baptism here, his baptism?
Herr
Rilke, may I help you?
For baptism
Read death, read mort, but not for ‘mortal’, for
A mort is only played if some music
Is needed at the blessing. Mort:
A horn will sound announcing death,
A horn to announce a new beginning,
Of a life’s deep death in deep
Snow…wolves abound…and not a perfect trip
Through the Alps…

Marina Leukemia on his
Baptism into the ancient city:
Herr Rilke your very name
Is a poem. You are a phenomenon
Of nature. The poet who comes after you
Is you.

My dear, Rainer; my soul, my Maria,
My blood coagulates and sinks
Into the snow. I take to my heart:
One poet only lives, and now and then
Who bore him, and who bears him now, will meet.


And never meet. (There is one only) in
A lightning field, canaries in a cage—
How could we meet?
The world betrays us,
I know, for a field of fire, for poetry
Is correspondence from a great distance
Made only greater by our love.
Great honor, great poet,
(signed) Not for reading. Marina.

(July, 2009)

It’s not mystical, the winter solstice.
Think of pink fish, red fish, the sun, a pond,
Part water and part reflection, beneath
Fresh ice, so slowly sinking, not frozen, just cold,
About to touch bottom and death, their thoughts—
Of carnival barker and circus clown
And Superman all rolled up tight—about
To be extinguished, with summer so far
Away, you start to think it is death, not
The kids not splashing in the shallows, and
Not the less than dire necessity
Sophisticated poetry, read so
Professionally, so dainty and so
Doily-like, that it seems like ashes scattered,
Lost in some larger lake’s ichthyology—
But still byzantine enough for fish to fathom,
The depths their special province now that ice
Has capped the pond and crested creation.