MICHAEL HELLER — SELECTED POEMS
.
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 Giovanni’s
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 m’invitasti.
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.
.
.
.
