Blue Hour (3 page)

Perhaps those born after the war are those whose lives the war took.

An abandoned house, after all, will soon give itself back, and its walls become as unreadable as symbols on silk.

With the departed, a sense of time, and sleep even sleep is taken, and the world appears as if it were—

Every spring I return to her, laying my thoughts to rest like a wreath on water.

These are the words no longer. Here are the photographs taken when we were alive.

In the blue silo of dawn, in earth-smoke and birch copse, where the river of hands meets the Elbe.

In the peace of your sleeping face,
Mein Liebchen.

We have our veiled memory of running from police dogs through a blossoming orchard, and another

Of not escaping them. That was—ago—(a lifetime), but now you are invisible in my arms, a soul

Acquiring speech, the body its blind light, whispering
Noli me frangere
even as it is in death shattered.

We were
one in the other.
When the doves rose at once, and our refuge became wing-light—

The black fire of ink on paper took hold of their souls—incorporeal fire.

There was no protection this fire couldn’t touch nor darkness nor a moment.

It lasted as long as a dream it was no dream. Heteroglossia of nervous shortwave, cloud of blown walls.

In the barracks, those who had sketched themselves in coal and smoke became coal and smoke.

And the living remained, linking unknown things to the known: residue, scapular, matchlight, name on a tongue.

Then, for an hour, the war slept, and rain filled the cisterns with silence.

Our windows faced east, and on August evenings, the sky was a blue no longer spoken.

—Beirut, winter 1983

Ash over conifers and birches, over berry thickets. Resembling snow and its synonyms. Silvered fields of millet.

A silence approaching bees of the invisible or the scent of mint.

One need not go further than a white towel hung in an open door.

into a light most unexpected the glass hives
executed labors whose writings in a darkness are lost

meanwhile they exhaust the city’s supplies
and live only in the midst however abundant

inaudible to them the murmur that comes to us
song of abundance psalms of grief

an entire absence of hesitation
whereby they break with the past as though with an enemy

it is not without prescience their summoning
as though nothing is happening will come back

to live as long as the world itself in those who come after

too vast to be seen too alien to be understood
prefers what is not yet visible to that which is

as a society organizes itself and rises so does a shrinkage enter
so crowded does the too prosperous city become

the era of revolutions may close and work become the barricade
suddenly abandoning generations to come
the abode of the future wrapped in a shroud
a door standing not now where once it stood

we are so made that nothing contents us

Begin again among the poorest, moments off, in another time and place.

Belongings gathered in the last hour, visible invisible:

Tin spoon, teacup, tremble of tray, carpet hanging from sorrow’s balcony.

Say goodbye to everything. With a wave of your hand, gesture to all you have known.

Begin with bread torn from bread, beans given to the hungriest, a carcass of flies.

Take the polished stillness from a locked church, prayer notes left between stones.

Answer them and hoist in your net voices from the troubled hours.

Sleep only when the least among them sleeps, and then only until the birds.

Make the flatbed truck your time and place. Make the least daily wage your value.

Language will rise then like language from the mouth of a still river. No one’s mouth.

Bring night to your imaginings. Bring the darkest passage of your holy book.

The recollections of a whole life, the consciousness of spiritual existence, and all which is mightiest and deepest in our nature, become brighter, even in opposition to extreme bodily languor. In the immediate vicinity of death, the mind enters on an unaccustomed order of sensations, a region untrodden before, from which few, very few travelers have returned, and from which those few have brought back but vague remembrances; sometimes accompanied with a kind of homesickness for the higher sphere of which they had then some transient prospect. Here, amidst images, dim images, of solemnity or peace, of glory or of terror, the pilgrim pursues his course alone, and is lost to our eye.

—George Burgess, 1850

“now
appears to us in a mysterious light”

“did this happen? could it have happened?”

“everything ahead of her clear for the rest of her life”

“La terre nous aimait un peu je me souviens.”

“I try to keep from wanting the morphine. I pray with both hands.”

“Lima, Alpha, Uniform, November, Charlie, Hotel, Echo, November, Alpha, Bravo, Lima, Echo. Pap. Lima, Charlie, Alpha, Zero, One. Acknowledge. Out.”

“man and cart disappeared in the blast, but their shadows remained on the bridge”

“these diaries a form of weather”

(a future hinting at itself)

(all of this must remain)

(on illness, after radiation; a mysterious illness)

(something) whispering

(the sadness when a hand—)

—with the resistance of a corpse to the hands of the living—

“open the book of what happened”

a barnloft of horse dreams, with basin and bedclothes

a bit of polished quiet from a locked church

a black coat in smoke

a black map of clouds on a lake

a blackened book-leaf, straw and implements

a blue daybook hidden in my bed with his name

a branch weighted with pears

a brittle crack of dawnlight

a broken clock, a boy wakened by his father’s whip, then the world as if whorled into place —

a broken equation, a partita

a bullet clicking through her hair

a bullet-holed supper plate

a burnt room strewn with toy tanks

a century passing through it

a chaos of microphones

a city a thousand years

a city shaken and snowing

a coin of moonlight on the shattered place

a confusion of birds and fishes

a consciousness not within us

a corpse broken into many countries

a cup of sleep

a desire to live as long as the world itself

a door opening another door

a feather forced through black accordioned paper

a field of birds roasted by the heavens

a goodness that must forget itself

a grave strewn with slipper flowers

a groundskeeper’s knowledge of graves

a hole in light, an entrance

a horse grazing in an imaginary field

a horse of wire, wine-corks and wax

a horse tangled in its tether

a hotel haunted by a wedding dress

a house fallen in

a house fallen into itself

a house in time, years from the others, light-roofed, walls shimmering

a hurried life, a knife on newsprint

a lace of recent snow

a language known only to parrots

a life in which nothing is lived

a light,
n’y voir que du bleu,
blind to something

a litany of broken but remembered events

a little hotel in the city with its windows open

a little invention for sweeping crumbs from the table

a locket’s parted lovers face to face

a man repainting his wooden house in stopped time

a man vanishing while he danced

a man who built cottages for tourists until he went blind

a memory through which one hasn’t lived

a message deflected by other messages

a message from a secret self

a mist of geese rising

a moment of bluesmoke

a moment of sycamores in low mist

a moon caught in the bare hold of firs

a moon haloed in high cirrus

a name which should not be written

a new world, entirely other

a no-longer-beyond

a parcel of copper wire, plastique and a clock

a parrot learning its language from a ghost

a past to come

a phrase shifting epochs

a pinch of salt, a fist of sugar

a plumbago curtain withdrawn from the radiance

a poplar in the sun, a pouch of coins, between layers of sleep where one lives another life beside this, awakening in the grave, brushing mother’s hair in the kitchen

a random life caught in a net of purpose

a record-keeper of human and earthly life

a rifle loaded with moments

a rivulet of sweat on the brow of the one keeping watch

a road erased by light

a road that ends nothing

a salvage yard of burnt office furniture and household goods

a scarf of smoke from a mouth

a schooner sailing in a bottle of light

a scriptorium

a search without hope for hope

a searchlight washing the fields

a secret that stands apart from every secret

a single turn, then years on the same road

a snow of ash risen from winter months

a spiral of being

a spirit gold-breathed, something not made only of

a stairwell spiraling

a stalled ambulance

a steep wooden staircase

a sudden reticence that seizes the heart

a syllable a dove

a taxi and three gunmen

a taxi its four doors open its lights out

a telephone ringing in an empty house

a ticking telex

a traffic jam of refugees on a desert road

a train rounding low sand hills

a veiled window a camera hidden in a loaf of bread

a veiled window where appears a revenant

a walnut box of world and light

a war-eyed woman

a web of survivals

a wind of burnt documents borne by wind

a white rain, then your face becoming another’s

a white road

a white road billowing behind the relief trucks

a white road ending in one’s own life

a whitened eye clouded with gnats

a willow vase, more bedsheets flaring over the furniture

a wind lifting washed linen

a wind-flock of butterflies

a window of grilled hens

a wire fence woven with pine boughs

a woman in a blowing coat on the tarmac

a woman rubbing the mirror until she is gone

a woman sitting on a window ledge as if about to vanish

a word dissolved into the yet-again

a world set in language and deserted

a world thought into being

a wreath on water

a year passing through itself

a yellow mosaic of remains

above a pacific slumber of white houses

above a
salon de thé

absent in a garden of watered roses

acres of blue wind

after having gone all the way to the end

after his internment and before his suicide

again and again

against a sea of recriminations

against a winter pine, eating a sparrow

against this, that

air filled with ash, notebooks with sorrowing ink

airfield to airfield

algebraic music

all night the boats calling out

all of them,
à-dieu

all questioning to myself

allées
of tall trees

alluvial plains

alpha rays of plutonium

although we are a small group on a private tour

America a warship on the horizon at morning

American university T-shirts among the executed

among white birch stands

an ache of such light

an ache of such light fixed in the bone

an anonymous work performed

an authorized death a non-authorized death

an inn for phantoms

an inner tact

an object that disappears from the word

an olive field of ordnance

an ossuary

an oven of birds

ancient light having reached us

and all questions, and all questions about questions

and among the stars, those too distant to be seen

and collective memory a dread of things to come

and for women who desire men

and have left undone

and in the dream
Ce voyage, je voulais le refaire

and in the villages laundry hanging for months

and in their eyes the years taken from them

and it is certain someone will be at that very moment pouring milk

and it is supposed that we are describing the world

and its corresponding moment in the past

and night, a knock at the window

and night, a storehouse