NOTES ON ERASURE
I always listen for what I can leave out
– Miles Davis
α
skin slough and star slag, the long-drawn, the copper-stained.
β
This is not the reason we have gathered on the back road
of the soon-to-mourn. Rain is the jingle in our pockets,
the penny lost in the seat, the one you see when you close your eyes.
γ
Is there any such thing as a beginning?
δ
The tunnel at the end of the light will be your _____
The day of the remains will be your ______
The light at the end of day will be your _____
The remains of the end will be your ______
ε
Dust on the table, dust on your name, dust
on the spliced sun, dust deep in the lacquer,
dust on the knives, dust on the halo, dust on down.
ζ
That line along the edge of the invisible, that long
ripple of exile. The privacy of history is a pebble
in the sandal of one who refuses to walk. That
margin, that black angel, that crimson corner of doubt.
η
Passes time seeding the ruts, passes time in the
tin winter along back roads, the shank of memory
aswing on a hook, passes the butcher, hand in pocket.
θ
Through the o sorrow’s long season and into
the bleed—arterial, except for the moon on
its gray gurney. The dark dark hallway, the lost letters.
The mouth, the cup. The circle. The oh.
ι
Porcelain, lily, dagger. [So this is time’s triage.] [So this is
the fractal nomad.] Prayer, link, blindfold. [So this the
fire.] [So this is the pock-marked]. Pencil, harrow, skin.
[So this is the star-slough]. [So this is the blue halo].
IN FERLINGHETTI’S GREATEST SCENES WE SEEM TO SEE
In Ferlinghetti’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world in motion,
naturally and even quietly,
like a bird in a sky
made entirely of sky and specifically for birds.
Everything its own manner of soaring.
They lift off the page
in a rage of adversity,
as though being written is some sort
of resurrection into a world
that is real and yet also abstract,
from the Latin to draw away—
yet we are drawn toward
if not into
a voice not ours but that belongs entirely to us,
as though we—
like language— actually exist.
In 150 AD, Cai Lun,
a eunuch in the court of the Han Dynasty,
invented paper
out of tree bark, hemp, rags, and fishing net.
At almost the same moment,
Marcion of Sinope proposed to the Bishop of Rome
the New Testament. 1400 years later,
in a print shop in Venice,
John and Wendelin of Speier were the first humans to use roman type.
On this day,
in this city, I am thinking of the dead, and by that I mean,
the living, and in particular, you—
scanning the shelves in the shop that is this life.
You carry,
somewhere inside you a font designed only for your name,
it is used in the book not about but of you,
imprinted in this very act of living
so that we may all read your work, for in each scene
in each face
there is poetry, in the dirt under your nails, poetry
on the skin of your children,
in the holy music of your daily duties, poetry,
along the boulevards,
poetry, on the billboards, in the bedrooms,
poetry in your voice, poetry, in your broken body &
in your hands,
poetry in your mouth, poetry on the pages of our broken
country it has no idea it deserves.
In Memoriam, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021)
ELEGY IN THE SHAPE OF A LETTER IN THE FORM OF A SONG
For I am about to do something new. See, I have already begun! Isaiah 43:19
Dear Janice,
This afternoon it was over 90 degrees in San Francisco. Do you
remember those days in September when the fog would take off its coat
and lay in the sun like a tourist? If weather is an instrument today is a drum.
The whole world is beating. What of our emancipations? What of mercy?
Absence is not the opposite of presence, which means I have many
things to ask. Where are you? How did you begin your poems? Did they
ever start with questions? Mine do. But today I am lost. I am calling you. I am calling
to you for help. I want to write a poem for you that is a painting.
This is another way of saying that I would like to make a poem that sings
to you. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to write about
one thing? I’ve been thinking about transformation, which is way different
than the holy. Search me O god and know my heart. Janice, I am picturing
the mountains in Lake County and that bridge on the north fork
of the Feather River. Do you know what I’m talking about? When you are
on that bridge, you believe you might be in Colorado and that the mountains just might
be upside down baskets. Listen, you can hear the notes of a guitar somewhere
in the clouds or maybe that’s the river. Try me and know my thoughts. How to place a guitar
in a poem the way Picasso put one in a painting. I am writing a book for you
made entirely of clouds. It will be shaped like a guitar. When you open it,
poems will cascade like a song of water, everywhere an orchestra, everything
changing shapes, switching sounds. I can see you dancing. You are a painting making a wall
made of music. Hey, Janice, who gets to decide what’s beautiful?
I am looking for you in the sky - angels are spread across the blue like a quilt of sun stars,
and all the gods have put on their nighttime skin. Everything is shining,
the birds in their little vessels of feathers, the beams and rays of all our devices, the dust
of wheat rising like recommendations in the soft gloaming, even our voices are shining,
even darkness, even the dead—nothing, Janice, nothing will not glow. Maybe language, like life,
exists only to end. Like rain, like the song, like this poem. But then I think of you,
and I realize that everything is only beginning to begin.
In memoriam, Janice Gould (1949-2019)
DEAN RADER has authored or co-authored twelve books, including Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, named a Barnes & Noble Best Book, and Works & Days, which won the T. S. Eliot Prize. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, appeared in 2023. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
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