(Herr Stimmung's Interludes)

In the outer border of the arch there are angels: angels holding harps, holding lutes, holding other stringed instruments.

And other instruments perhaps stringed, vague instruments.

Instruments not always identifiable, the stone being chipped and badly pitted.

*

He is aware that the solar vortex reaches to Saturn's orbit, that Time and the Ocean are brothers.

*

Astra animata.

In their keeping, the harmony of the spheres.

*

Once this corner is turned...

He shares to some extent that itch which Augustine deplored, not to delight in his body merely, but to use the flesh for exercise. For experiment.

*

Time, to him, is something, not sweet, but sticky. His moments cling.

They cling together.

They stick to his fingers.

If he manages to separate them--these moments--they seek each other out, build themselves into substantial bodies.

They walk the earth.

*

But here is his question, a problem he has set himself to solve:

Why do we search--why this passion, this obsession-- for permanence, for certainty? What strange turn of mind could make us, jumping sights along the way, prefer the unchangeable?

*

What do we see in the invisible?

*

He supposes our structure must limit our experience: how could we receive what we have no receptors for?

He would like, nevertheless, to understand various theories (or even any one) that take things into account-- "things in their thinginess," as the old critic had it.

*

A fog is gathering.

Or, as he describes it, "a cloud on the ground."

*

His words--spoken and unspoken--are hatchings, crosshatchings, background in progress.

*

Space expands.

I do not mean the universe. I refer merely to the widening prospect as he walks.

*

And time?

No.

Time uncoils.

*

He feels caught between via dolorosa andvia negativa.

And finds meditation, here in the fast lane, unsatisfying.

*

His mourning is disordered, his grief resembles suspense.

Sickness coming, he is sure, not from the unspeakable, but from wrong words, exalted.

*

He wishes he could figure out how memory acts.

Or how an act remembers.

Struck by the intelligence of his hands, he would like to disguise us as animals.

*

Some angels sit.

Some angels stand.

Some dance.

And some are seated, but with their legs in a position suggesting dance.

*

"Wisdom..." he thinks.

And halts, appalled at how his thoughts wander.

*

Mortal thoughts they are. Why should they not stray?--slow etymological drift.

*

And a local phantasm, confused and contradictory--must it be rejected out of hand?

Why would we prefer the clarity of unrealizable lines?

For his part, he watches by preference how sun speckles the sidewalk.

*

How houses stand and pages turn.

*

How leaves fall into memory and the memory is forgotten.

*

...time's tears in a sea of lead.

*

He hopes for an unfinished epitaph and directs that, before he is buried, his name be removed from his clothing.

*

A great cathedral, newly washed, seen from the Left Bank:

"Ah," he murmurs, admiring. "Leur Dame."

*

He searches out apocalypses hidden in the light from street-lamps, lost under sloping roofs, rising sometimes in a vapor from the cellar, suggested by speckles of sun on cement.

He thrives below Saturn and considers himself star-tissue.

Even if God alone--as he has heard it argued--knows the true names of the angels; still, we can rename them, as we did with the animals.

*

Reference to cosmic strings brings to mind a blood red carpet and, as if soliloquizing, he walks on.

*

His eye, in this fog, on the fog-eye.

*

He considers that pass to the opposite which is 'genesis.'

Not Genesis, but some sort of revelation.

*

Scintilla animae.

And motions of the air, on which the sweetness of the voice depends...

*

Death, a house he never hoped for...

*

Somehow, as in so many of his attachments, he loses the thread.

*

Sappho asking, "...with what eyes?"

(The rest of her poem lost.)

*

...this corner turned.

*

Unattended ground.

lingo 4

Books in print by Keith Waldrop

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