In memory always forgetting
In memory of a first poem I wrote, called “Memory”
In memory of all the memories I never received
or so indirectly they were dismembered.
Why from that event, the railroad way away to Hamburg,
ending in Charleston, then in Cincinnati, he
became a rabbi, “of” the literati,
or why he left Hungary (this was lucky) —
simply sick of “wrapping packages”
in the family hardware and equipment store?
Lurid story, is it plausible?
And a different missing grandfather,
profession pharmacist,
handing his wife Rose a knife and saying — “Finish the Job.”
Anecdote absolute. No before or after.
Then he lived in the attic.
Take this as a “family” memory. Stated once.
Then done.
In memory of not remembering.
Of not playing it out.
Close to erasure of it.
Hidden ghosts of that terrain.
Job was given everything back.
Proving what?
Of the short story, 5th grade, never written
if even imagined. Life just like that.
Her sadism a pedagogic advantage?
or was she exiled to PS 39 Queens,
for prior malfeasances, hypnotic obediences,
forcing the children, what?
“Miss Messer,” her elegant-terror, knife of whatever it was
had brought her to this last-stop school,
Shambled alcoholic colleagues and tweakers of children.
End of the line. Or some other what?
What had been done? Whatever was it?
In memory of memory’s motions,
skittish, bullied, over-approved,
a home-made red plaid skirt worn with pride,
“To a Water Lily,” “To a Wild Rose” — subtle distinction, if that.
For music “appreciation.”
But you knew well how to tell.
You had and did pass many tricky tests.
Secrets inside any house
where was this self, what was that.
Kept to self. Didn’t tell.
That famous poem she forced you to perform.
It said, “Sail on, sail on and on!”
In memory of memory’s memory.
Hardly that. Veils over netting. Set at “rarely.”
Not much visible.
It just was.
* * * * *
Pallaksch
1.
The old people, the new haunters
start practicing. We’re so close, let’s
drop in, so over the threshold they trundle.
Unexpectedly, but fine, hello;
they make themselves quite comfortable
despite they just turned up.
What does this mean “to turn up”?
To fait accompli their volta? Was
that fair to me? Another bit on
the chit pile of their casual mastery.
Give me a buzz? let me know?
no, they just arrive, and I couldn’t
even see them until they were settled
right here as if always at this table
with the rest shadowy, but side-lit
in their warm, dimming light. She stands there,
him sitting, brushing away old crumbs, fixing
a little something from the fridge,
making a nice cup of tea.
Are they going to reuse those same
oysgeshept teabags? Again? Forever?
She: Why waste them? He: You never know.
Complex passagework.
The sound is bad. They’re not talking
very loud. I’m in trouble.
2.
Yes and no and no and yes.
The other! the other!
fallen into reality!
just that way.
A nosherei. A cabaret.
What have I done?
I did it yet again.
Discuss: the That, the This.
So we three three mull
yes and no, considering
endlessly. Then what?
Another question?
They will keep on. And
following after, I will keep on
it, wherever I be R.
Yet sometimes debating it.
Some say the No cuts deeper?
Yet sometimes, what cuts deeper,
that’s the Yes?
Pallaksch! Pallaksch!
Said Frederic Hölderlin.
* * * * *
Copia
“It’s this poem I wrote and calld it My Soul“
— RD, Roots & Branches
“I carried my soul the other night”
— RBD, “Draft 98: Canzone”
I was belated to Duncan without even knowing
his poem, written before mine, though it’s clear I was
every which way come after. Yet long before, I had
probably read the words I seem here to have copied
whose similar intensity about this connection
paralleled his evocating “my soul.”
“’It’s this poem I wrote and I calld it My Soul.’”
An eager girl is speaking. Could I, w/out knowing,
have made something so parallel? Our connection —
intensifying as I write this — was
also made in motion, traveling. We both had
rocking experiences: neither copied.
But why would I even say that I had copied?
Duncan does not meditate my (exact) soul —
How could he? It was Koré the daughter who had
arrived (as he did) adopted, and my not-knowing
many details, the facts obscure, but connection
electric. Later, my poem stated how this was.
Did I copy his line or live a situation that was
parallel? In the realm of poems nothing is copied.
Their true zone is copia, plenitude, connection
to lexicons, to rhetorics, to tones, to souls
via surfaces, to insides as outsides, which makes knowing
through the poem and as the poem produce what I had
made. There is a noble sound in this that I once had
rejected. His claim of meta-historical sources was,
once for me, a suspect, willful mode of knowing.
There was a time I felt bound down by the “copied,”
that inadequate, never-original Female Soul.
I did not register polyphonous claims of connection,
neither general eros nor matrisexual connection.
I underestimated what the soul had
donated to this story. “I carried my soul
the other night.” Unbelievable how this was
the double of his line or story. My poem “copied”
his with no prevision, without my conscious knowing.
There’s neither original of what was, nor belated knowing.
Everything that seems copied is palpable connection.
Has ligatures to Eros, too, and exfoliates soul.
2011, 2023
/ / /
PS-39, Queens, Far Rockaway, 1914