MICHAEL HELLER — SELECTED POEMS

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Heteroglossia on Fifty-Third

 

Streets of a city, I walk and lose the hour.

Today, unsure of what I write, I circumambulate

the new and the ruin, find it

twelve noon amidst museums and gleaming limousines.

A bag lady shouts “I am entitled!”  I also

am entitled to my thoughts at least, yet all day,

dream or nightmare do my talk, undo my walk,

so I let talk pitch self into doze or dream and chat:

man, woman, testicle, dessert.  The language falls,

a chunk of disembodied sound through space.

 

My body sometimes feels like a corpse, but talk hears talk,

and I ‘m entitled in the streets, astride the century’s

fatted calf, the pavement‑glutted bowel.  The talk of

street people is a groaning, each to each;  I have heard

them singing on the trash.  Ghost words, ghost fuckers!

They utter their words right out to do their ravaging

in me, joining my dead lords of speech like animals

granted province over those on whom they prey.

 

 

On a Line from Baudelaire

                                                            at Pere Lachaise

 

“The dead, the poor dead, have their bad hours”

If there are the dead, have they lived in vain?

Things continue, it all says, the stars bulge and quiver,

The neutrino beats, the oxidizing of metals

Heats modernity.  In Paris, over the poor dead,

The tombstones fascinate, the cats hide in

Marble and shrubbery, the walls are like a vise

And enclose.  Once they asked for flowers, too late

For flowers.  Green spring honors the living but who

Begged?  The spring resonates with her silk; even gravel

Sings, the worm has turned me to poetry.  The dead,

The powdered rich: names are taken.  History spirals

Into the center of this conch shell, the air swirls

Over Paris, out of reach, lives on, dies on.

The airs of the universe beat oceanic

On these well set up stones.

 

 

Eschaton

 

I don’t know where spirit is

Outside or in, do I see it or not?

 

Time turned the elegies

To wickerwork and ripped-up phone books.

 

All that worded air

unable to support so much as a feather

 

*

 

If there’s hope for a visitation,

Only the ghosts of non-belonging will attend.

 

And now death is slipping back

into the category of surprise.

 

I sit up at night and pant, fear

half-rhyming prayer—

 

self beshrouding itself

against formlessness.

 

In-breath, out-breath

Aria of the rib cage equaling apse.

Skull, the old relic box.

 

 

Internet Enabled

 

Turns out, Tirso de Molina, 16th century Spanish monk,

born of conversos, dreamed up top trickster Don Juan.

 

150 years later, Emmanuele Conegliano, converted Jew,

a.k.a. Lorenzo da Ponte, penned the libretto for Don Giovanni.

 

Online journal Tablet Magazine claims these origins, despite

the Catholic faith of all characters and composer as well,

 

make this, perhaps Mozart’s greatest work, “a Jewish opera.”

Turns out, according to the internet, Don Giovanni’s ethos runs

 

an electronic river through paranoid URL after URL:

no one truly good can do much to save anyone from evil,

 

not even a loving Christ, whose open arms and forgiveness

are as naught to a sociopath like Don Giovanni, so best to kill,

 

and if needed get what you need to get according to the internet

with its hate sites, ads for AK-47s, designs for IEDs, for gas attacks.

 

But let’s surf back to Mozart.  His opera, beautiful, so lovely in fact

Yiddish poet Glatshteyn writes, instead of God, we should revere

 

Mozart, whose music surpasses in holiness the Sermon on the Mount.

I agree.  Despite my irreligion, I have a deep love for Don Giovannis

 

divine last chorus, the one directors often cut, in which singers sing

of justice triumphant over evil after the villain has been led to the pit.

 

If the Abrahamic god exists, he’s hidden, never graven, his voice

profound in the Commendatore’s implacable, graveled minvitasti.

 

 

She

 

is looking up, and then she is not looking up.

With a lovely uncontrollable quiver, she’s become herself.

 

I can see she is no longer the breasts which offer up

their enticements, nor the dark mysteries of the pubis.

 

She is not even her laugh.  She is she, without residuals.

Bye my love, I think.  And possibly, by my love? And I

 

am happy, happier even then when her mouth is on me

and I gasp at the ceiling.

 

Stanzas without Ozymandias

 

Who finds the pedestal finds the poem.

To know time had its ruins, its knowledge.

The traveler was fortunate.

 

And now sand has its texts, its mica

And feldspahr, its fulgurites and beaded Quartz.

The heart a display case, the eye a catchment.

 

Granules adhere to fire-drawn surfaces,

Mineraled and glassine—acolytes of the grain

Fused to a speech of unwarrantable sermons.

 

Wind and lightning storms roll the high dunes

into long trenches, into tides of erasures, now

smoothed to a nothingness – an abyss for the geometer

 

who mourned the mirror’s lack, who hungered for stars

hidden in the dark behind the day’s brightness.

Hard to remember what tribes wandered with Moses

 

Or even who invoked that sere alchemy when Jesus disappeared

For the numbered days of an older flood, or what tempted

The saints to sit in their aloneness at the ledge?  Unawares,

 

the bush burned, and the mirage shimmered. Solitude of those

who entered, who sought earthly want, though they wandered

in the skull of an angel, in the trepanned and bleached spaces,

 

remembering only the colorless semblances of their desires.

So now to place a word on it, like a bit of mica

winking in the sun.  And now to place time on it,

 

as though time were the handwriting of the object’s moment.

Effacement in the grammar impelling one to be only a shadow.

 

Le Dernier Portrait

 

The matter of no longer having to speak and having no one nor anything to speak

to.  A matter of death masks in the Musée D’Orsay.  Made by one who lays the

gauze over the corpse’s face and pours the clay and sips coffee while it sets.

When what sets is the horror of the world, of the not-you, and what is left is this

object imprinted with your features.  Ars longa–the day’s rictus.  The absurd

cheating because one’s last day is never even a whole day.  And here’s this

hardened object with its painted flesh tones, the pale, lightly brushed reds, beady

fakery of glass eyes.  Here in a museum, though this is hardly the time to suggest

there’s life in the thing, even if it’s keeping august company with robust Maillols

and Rodins.  And with money and with the grand café whose tall windows bring

Paris, gorgeous Paris, close enough to touch.

 

Everything homes toward these frozen visages.  Here’s Pascal, lidded eyes, dour

expression without complacency for his century.  Marat and Napoleon, so popular

in death, they suffered five impressions each.

 

And what of those who leave no artifact but this, who are only this artifact, and

that by chance? La femme inconnu, a sort of Venus of this city.  She threw herself

into the river in a simple dress.  The mask shows her smiling.  Did she sense that

she did not belong to Paris’s well-tended streets? She inhabited that other side

where the unnoticed poor go, arrondissements of ruin and shame.

 

She never belonged, though there must have been moments of half-living, of half-

dying while she mermaided the Seine.  She floated under the famous bridges,

under their blackened barrel vaults.  They were the wreaths of her cortège.  She

offered and was an offering to those lustrous waters, to a silence of enfolding

depths, to the matter of having no one to speak for her.

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