Untitled (Eliot Cardinaux)

Untitled


Perhaps they are not for sitting,
nor for even glancing at,
those worn-down chairs,
or noticing perceptible movement;
the entire character of their lives
a pure abstraction; things
that if they could, would lay 
exhausted in their yellow folds.

Haiku (Eliot Cardinaux)

Haiku


A boat in shallow
water - look; a gull
has taken white from its wing.

the 99th poetry post - some old poems by Eliot

Fallen

I have traveled
on a thousand roads
and on one road
I have traveled,
to hear the voices’ calling,
wound like bits of string
and stones and the soul’s desire.

I have watched the birds
and was told
that rain is consequence.
May it fall softly
on the children’s game.
And I have known
the roaring waves
that brought Agamemnon
to weep for the end of glory.
And I have known
a mother’s care
that sweeps a suicide
with aging hands.

I have traveled
on a thousand roads
and on one road
I have traveled,
to hear the voices’ calling,
wound like heaven from exile
and to a soul’s satisfaction
fallen from the wings of desire.


Vengeful Gift

I should have seen this vision:
The silent church of the blood
And the gust of dull, circling variations
Whining in cataclysmic harmony.

Silent lover, beautiful and damned,
Harvesting kindness in red thickets –
Each brush with hungry time reels
Into the honeyed darkness of ecstatic pain.

How to move away from these solemn chants,
From the dark chord rising in your bones
That plummets with a leaping heart
Deep into the waiting earth.

Everything that follows is a bleak caress;
Empty crosses span the hillside, bright with sunlight.
The unknown lover, distant, laughing, withholds
The last embrace, bestows the vengeful gift of life.


(Ex)colere, exercere, studere

Cast in a glimpse,

bronze angles,

cry for us –

what was tempered

from the dust;

we were not,

our eyes were not,

all that did not belong to us.

Gathered, they gathered

the wheat, the moonlight,

the word spoke,

primaevus,

the young, was a drab shawl

and marked the man, Abel’s brother

for what crime he didst commit.

And Hesse, in doubt,

called to an older friend,

and called not.

And was no sermon

and Pilate was not there,

the students

and Pound’s beard,

but a stubble.

And envy spoke not,

silent, Academicus,

and spoke of it all,

and was not of shame.

And I awoke, seeing the birds around me,

burdenless, and the mountain was not,

and was not survival,

and the beholder stared upon the perceived

like a child with his mouth open,

and the birds around me,

turned not their eyes.

And drank, they drank coffee

in the room, furnished with old oak,

and the book, covered with dust,

and on the shelf,

a bust of Caesar,

soggy with whining.

On a Night Like This

On a night like this,

when the stars are alight,

and the moment’s blissful kiss

expands the languor of sight,

and devils sleep

in the surrounding air,

in the folds of the deep,

extinguishing care,

a tiny voice

like a bleeding heart

will remember a choice

that will rend you apart.

Reality warps,

beauty tears at the eyes

like a rotting corpse,

buzzing with flies,

for gone are the days

of the ambivalent sun,

we are walking the blaze,

living it out, one by one.

 

Elegy

 

For Osip Mandelstam

Children peer at me

Around the corners of your city,

In fear of wolves,

Sleep in your widening footprints.

There are no orbits

In your flowering streets,

You who let Rome sleep,

Biting the thread of cool voices,

Cherry trees blooming from your eyes.

You who watched hordes

Leave the sun in the street

To be carried away

By someone important;

You who were terrified

of the blinded sky –

Which way did he turn

In the spotted fields,

Hung with weary moisture,

When no masters called out

To his tired heart?

To you I say nothing,

Like a tree hanging over a cliff,

My ancient sorrow not retreating.

The paper eater –

When he comes around

Nobody cares

For the hungry ground.

Glory wasted

but you still have songs

and I have suspicions

that go mad, (and I won’t tell)

because I’m still hungry

and the world is sharp.

I’ve heard applause

there in the hollow word

and I don’t care.

And what does that mean to you?

And I have moments

to paint you with,

broken roads

that I won’t travel

and the grave is beginning to speak.

Every time!

I’ll cut it down for you –

your laughter cuts it then in two.

I’m in need of your song, Osip Mandelstam!,

My ancient sorrow not retreating.

And children laugh and shout

Down the lanes of your city,

dull sounds,

Asleep in your widening footprints.

There are no orbits

In these flowering streets,

You who let Rome sleep,

Biting the thread of cool voices,

Cherry trees blooming in your heart.

Usury’s Kiss
 I will leave my life by the heart of the sea
        for the shoulders of thieves,
        for an extinguishing star,
        for my soul’s loose skin.
I will find it again in the soul of wine
        for America’s sleep,
        for a soldier’s happiness,
        for a fugitive justice.

We were scattered here
like magnolia petals,
from a garden of movement
to a prison of stars.
Our rivers have been poisoned
with usury’s kiss.
A discarded rose
lays in the road
like a dead dove,
like an apple in a broken wrist.

We may abandon this place
where chains hang loose
from the mouths of gutted cars,
abandon it to a dream of brown and blue,
but rust will fall
from a butterfly’s wings
and another wasteland
will open in our lives,
for our rivers have been poisoned
with usury’s kiss.

We were scattered here
like abandoned children
on empty trains.
A discarded greeting
lays in the road,
like a dead animal,
like a rusted face
from another wasteland,
for our rivers have been poisoned
with usury’s kiss.

And I will leave my life by the heart of the sea
            for a wolfhound’s feast
            for a soul’s madness
            for a lonely woman
on abandoned train tracks
           for a memory that haunts the echo of today.

Rainbows and Lye

               Dedicated to the victims of September 11^th

Snake dreams dancing

in and out of ears,

spat out in the dawn,

carrying on from the day that hate was born.

Angels are hanging on this blackened day,

suspended in garments of silk

above the gaping tomb;

shadows walk forth down the ancient way

to greet with burning blackness honeyed milk,

in the folds of memory’s womb.

And virtue spreads its poison wings

across the yellow sky –

rainbows and lye,

rainbows and lye,

streaming down from the Sun’s bloodshot eye.

And I’m begging, begging

for roses to die,

I’m praying, praying

to the wallowing sky,

for I am as wretched

as the innocent,

swallowing a bestial cry.

Break the Violin

Time swallows these days like black tar.
I’ll sit in my room
and watch a single leaf fall
but it won’t be worth talking about.
I’m hollowing out.
I could drink the black sun,
one last time, but it’s the same old thing,
out of the wretched river’s debris.

It’s easy to get used to something
and you can stop listening. The wheel starts to turn
and you’ll wake up on some distant shore –
I’ll push thunder from below me, I’ll scream like an eagle.
What happened yesterday was just a trick –
trickling down from a loop,
a pickling frown on the stoop
of a dead man’s tenement.

Maybe they’re rustling documents,
preparing numbers for their judgement day,
but out in the thicket,
someone’s thick and getting rid of it.
The violin, the violin!
Someone will have to break it down the middle.

The Morning

The morning’s pasted on a telephone pole;
Notices for time’s beginning:
Passion drowns in the cardboard sea.
Just another delicacy
Drunk up like the asphalt’s caviar.

Where were we when the sky decayed,
Where devils slept and children played?
What morning is this, bathed in strange light,
Drinking the dregs of the stumbling night?
The rising cacophony of guilty innocence,
The muddled coherence of mangled dissonance –
The piano is eating the dust off the floor,
Angels are prancing outside the corner store.

And the morning’s pasted on a telephone pole;
Notices for time’s end:
Languishing in the anguished light,
Just another forgotten night
Drunk up from an old brass samovar.

When you are working - Eliot Cardinaux

When you are working

Like a child counting hairs upon his father’s chin,

you forget that moment

the losing of the dirt-specked floor

to the round bell of a clock’s pendulum.

The guard that lays his lower lip upon arriving trains

taps your shoulder, looking you over,

passing into darkness.

My soul staggers, the train rambles on,

the mountain wind chasing it through and its concealed shadow

is as loud as wood

when I knock it with my hands.

If we are held by time (EC)

If we are held by time

If we are held by time,

we are held in humor,

or contempt.

The rocks

are emitting a silent amen.

If we are held by time, and most of us are,

in ravishment, when things are fast

and we are moving,

rapture perhaps, or perhaps, who cares?

Today, I will learn things.

Not by diving long

into them, or by feeling them about my ears

like a warm blush on a late, coming autumn, summer evening,

but by feeling their weight

like stones about me,

and their impenetrable substance

that makes my lack of substance obstinate, and grows later

into things we pass by

on most days, when things are fast

and we are moving.

The Gift - Eliot Cardinaux

The Gift

Dried corn husks on a summer table,

shown in yellow sunlight

in an echo out of autumn,

the distant pulse of the city throbs,

my headache, longing,

wiling ecstasy of some stranger, pause

to think of it:

Here in my room, the walls laugh.

There in his room,

he laughs at his walls stained with dirt,

and you are filled with some story

about the cause and effect of bodies against each other.

They can soothe that one to sleep

while a whine escapes your lips.

the sunlight fading lightly,

sunrise on your empty pockets, stubborn joy,

and as days pass on to weeks span out like names

drifting out of themselves, forever constant in their vagueness

like dreams, that cannot share themselves.

A Letter - Eliot Cardinaux

A Letter

Wide, short, narrow,

            closed, long.

You said you were close

to that other dimension.

I need a cave with substance

narrow and obtuse –

the Deerfield flooding

captures thieves, apathetic glances.

Is this really a letter about true stories,

Or is it a letter about misconceptions, treatises, lies?

No, it is a letter about one thing.

I need a sun that delegates the mischief from misfortune,

And is it laughter that will hold it up – well,

they call it a drop in the bucket.

If it’s that glad to swallow it, what is your pride in calling them to roost?

The Hilton (EPC)

The Hilton

Two years ago, I was standing outside a nightclub,

across the street from the town square in Northampton,

MA, and an old drunk told me about the Hilton hotel

they were going to build, right there in the middle of

the square.  Two years later, I remembered the story,

sitting on a town square bench, and thought of the

twelve-ton brick of metal squatting there.  I still don’t

know if it was true. 

It is to be large and white

with tourists milling all around it, fallow

decadance. And oh such soft and whiter sheets

as it grows old and dirt

from summer’s lack of shoes

for walking sticks – call it

Metropolitan. (The buses will grow dense).

And old Brigadier General

Pulaski won’t have known,

he’s too tied up in new

revolutionary thinking

as a stone

that sits, a monument –

first waking in the fields there in Elysium

to know his country’s made!

To be swallowed up, and people still are

talking.) Earnesty prides itself too much

on its own man’s thinking.

The square, peopled with benches

is a turning point, to pivot all this

weight, and people trying to make their

turns of it

find themselves turned,

wide-eyed, deer in the headlights, drunk.

But the Hilton will be large and white,

though it is no great metal moth

that spins its silk in loss.

            The tawny brick wing-walls about it

            are tarnished,

                                   not yet fall’n on.

The Dance - Eliot Cardinaux

The Dance

A view of my shoelace,
widened and clear like a flaxen sun,

bent in the bridge of cool summer.

I have been here,

the rock is rough,

I hear dancing,

smile of another.

I went in the children’s chatter

to where the air feels warm

and waits in pockets

for the dancers’ push.

There my eye widened

on another journey;

I will follow, join the dance,

these fingerprints are mine.

Your invitation

passes like a shadow

whose wings are wide.

Strophes (II) (Eliot Cardinaux)

Strophes (II)

Out in the garden

tramps the sodden hero,

without his way;

the ruddy dawn,

like a drunk,

encompasses him.

Clocks and desks,

white fluorescent light

he tumbles under,

with a slight weight.

No one follows,

but there are dreams,

and a heavy nostalgia,

and a cracked mask.

4/4  '11

The Deep Skies (Eliot Cardinaux)

The Deep Skies

There is coming to be

a land, that stretches

out with hope.

But space, I think,

the quiet living room,

the couch,

the slow days,

all I feel is somehow

not a part of it,

as if tomorrow

were the reason to live.

The stillness is aware of you,

down the window, the rain softly drips.

Past the broken lights, do you see,

the brown eyes of the mare, and past that, oblivion?

We were not charged with the building of walls,

the wide eyed terror, our gentle son,

falls over those who sleep with a gentle hum,

we sow in the deep skies our poplars of darkness.

The First Rose (Eliot Cardinaux)

The First Rose


When they carry you,
learning, all is newness
and you go to be

caught up in it,
the tumbling, whirling bells,
o, the bells

caught me
in waking where it was,
seeing the small sea.

I had always thought:
this so-small sea,
and in it were my hope

and chance to find,
reasons,
where spring water

moves away
like honey,
to the land.

I see now, your eyes
bearing down.
If there never was

a first rose,
sweet bells, o say
goodbye.



3/5  '11

Strophes (eliot cardinaux)

  Strophes

Where questions

  sit between

the ear

  and flecks of snow

the stream,

  time, falling,

catching

  the crying of kings.

Snow (Eliot Cardinaux)

Snow

As a desert does not know,

as oceans I find,

As I wake up,

    the heavy snow

    drifts over footfalls

    laying it

    bare on the hill;

bones and features –

stone’s memory,

a seashell;

but I looked

    and they were gone

just as the one

who moved her head

and laughed

had gone inside her season,

I went like snow into the ocean;

this is how it ends and begins.

2/21  ’11

The Insects (Eliot Cardinaux)

The Insects

Over the land

you hear them tossing

across millennia of space,

the rabbit comes out

to show them

springs mouth

stuffed with white gauze,

the first side of death

making the sun bloom

in the night.  

Our effervescence

charmed those hunters

until all that was left

was a whole

emptiness

from which our yearning sprung;

delighted

in the malleable sound

(for tender resolve

warped our history,

made of it our

stone-ancestry)

and would weeks

span out, we could

have seen our standing

at the sun-close day.

Bare Trees (Eliot Cardinaux)

 

Bare Trees

Is it you that I search for

as you watch me

(and will I ever find)

but questions

Bare trees

purple in the snow

And there are some

that will go

into the deep halls

without expecting

and some silence

others still

will hold forever in their hands

But you who will

spite the echo

have far fewer hands

and left them there,

like water

through water,

both sides;

it stands.

The Elk (Eliot Cardinaux)

 

The Elk

Naked I step out among you

but the land is only land.

Whistlers in the thicket

the traveler sets his bags

down

has turned into the

night

and stammered.

They wear on their backs

as fleas.

Like death to watch

were the storm infinite

and how the houses cold

the sun new,

the elk

live long, remember;

 

like summer, 

taking off the hats.

The Beekeeper (Eliot Cardinaux)

  The Beekeeper


For an accepted (norm),
  I might add color
 to the color that already was

  facing south, and wind-west,
   where summer is,
 all the year, ’round and ’round.

Sound about the body-curve,
  Sound about the olive,
 in so wrecking

what fort I have made,

  or may, or may have, counting stars,
   all this year, ’round and ’round
 who are, yet near.

                        And counted, all the stones
          I have,
   come in droves
             
      the bees that have gone,
      the bees that have, as they must,
      a feeling of home, or home lost,

   and beating out their wings,
  furiously, at whose command?


2/11  ’11

Shell for a spectator (Eliot Cardinaux)

  Shell for a spectator

               Sky, pure sky,

               empty with the words

                 of protest

               splashing against

                        its dome

            I will growl,

               into the

                        night

              music, with its

                           orange

                     calliope of smoke

                 a dance,

                        for beauty,

                 you are a woman,

                         freely moving,

                the shells at his feet,

                  where is he gone?

                  into the black and white

 

                           leaves
                a scarcity on trees,

scarcely moving,

                  twirling, spinning,

                        no one

                               is empty
                                               at all.

 

2/10  ’11