Unfinished

Titanomachiopolis



A true journey
of the imagination
into the under-
world of the foundry
a drilling music,
a molding music
for those who hear it:
for those who hear it
are changed.

The song: to hear it is
a crossing of the river
at the level of the river:
without the highstrung
bridge, the tunnel
boring obscurity.
There is no tuning out
the river once heard,
crouched over in all
its cold and tumult.
Your attention
Is fallen in the river,
neither will you be permitted
to return.

“What I saw when I arrived
was not protest songs
but the shadows of empty
factories and in those
factories and in their
shadows were a
whole lot of people struggling.”

On the sullen
bulks of islands—
off the shore of time—
what is being made
has pieces larger than you,
rivets longer than your body,
gears wider than your mind.
This is the song of the machine
that coins machines.
It is larger than your ears;
you must hear in parts.

In the subway car, the bodies,
Barely contained,
emenate in flickers like
the stars in space.
An old biddy
looking for the bingo game
is alone in the back of a church:
our lady of unnamed places.
Tell me mother
is there no way
to get from here
to Brooklyn
without the aid of car
or train? Like the human
fly latched on to the vertical
side of a building,
vulnerable, dizzy,
I feel the boundaries of
my animal body:
the muscle span,
the fragile skin,
the world is dark.

The cars on the bridge
drive on metal tracks.
Latched on to the vertical
side of the city, it seems
purchaseless steele,
an impossibly large
mistake: black grease
in person-sized smears
in places a window-washer
cannot reach,
so this is what it must be like
to be a neuron
with no conception of the brain:
the subway cars
drive themselves
down the nightmare tunnels
screaming in pain.

When the Titans gave birth
to Zeus, when his brothers
and sisters were vomited
onto the earth,
I imagine Cronos felt
helpless.
These children had changed
what it meant to be a god.

When it got very bad/they leapt into each other's eyes/and shut them firmly

From Adam Zagajewski’s Introduction to The Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert:

"Every great poet lives between two worlds. One of these is the real, tangible world of history, private for some and public for others. The other world is a dense layer of dreams, imagination, fantasms. . .

These two territories conduct complex negotiations, the result of which are poems. Poets strive for the first world, the real one, conscientiously trying to reach it, to reach the place where the minds of many people meet, but their efforts are hindered by the second world, just as the dreams and hallucinations of certain sick people prevent them from understanding and experiencing events in their waking hours. Except that in great poets these hindrances are rather a symptom of mental health, since the world is by nature dual, and poets pay tribute with their own duality to the true structure of reality, which is composed of day and night, sober intelligence and fleeting fantasies, desire and gratification.

There is no poetry without this duality, though the second, substitute world is different for each outstanding creative artist."

When I read this yesterday it seemed to be speaking to Elizabeth's poem, which derives its power (for me) from its surrealism. The actions unfolding are dignified as signs (because the context is a poem, because of the underlying repetitive structure of the words and sounds) yet the meaning of these signs is baffling. The poem insinuates with its matter-of-fact tone that we should be able to figure out its meaning, but remains elusive, giving the eerie sensation that it is the reader that is strange and out of place; the world of the poem is solid; the two worlds that Zagajewski describes are inverted.

PS: Have any of you read Herbert's poems? This book is blowing me away . . .