vertigo

Bakraç Sokak, Beyoğlu, Istanbul, 2012

Of the people who lived there not a sign was to be seen. They were all having lunch, clattering the cutlery and plates. A dog leapt at a green-painted iron gate, quite beside itself, as if it had taken leave of its senses. It was a large black Newfoundland, its natural gentleness broken by ill-treatment, long confinement or even the crystal clarity of the autumn day. In the villa behind the iron fence nothing stirred. Nobody came to the window, not even a curtain moved. Again and again the animal ran up and hurled itself at the gate, only occasionally pausing to eye us where we stood as if transfixed. As we walked on I could feel the chill of terror in my limbs. Ernst turned to look back once more at the black dog, which had now stopped barking and was standing motionless in the midday sun. Perhaps we should have let it out. It would probably have ambled along beside us, like a good beast, while its evil spirit might have stalked among the people of Kritzendorf in search of another host, and indeed might have entered them all simultaneously, so not one of them would have been able to lift a spoon or fork again.

from W.G. Sebald's Vertigo

time is always time / And place is always and only place

Portrait of Anton Peschka; Egon Schiele

I

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again
The infirm glory of the positive hour
Because I do not think
Because I know I shall not know
The one veritable transitory power
Because I cannot drink
There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

is it no sin thus to pray?

- Pray that there come to them or man or god…

- A judge? Or an avenger? Speak thy prayer.

- Plain be thy word: one who shall slay the slayer.

- But dare I? Is it no sin thus to pray?

- How else? With hate thine hater to repay.

Aeschylus; Choëphoroe (The Libation Bearers)

juicy fruits

Here are some handpainted fruits from a little free-floating fruit shop in Istanbul, run by a soft, honest-faced man with bright white teeth who sold freshly squeezed pomegranate juice. My mother and I went there every morning and on our final day, took my father, who is also a soft, honest-faced man. They both called each other sir and smiled.

The warp and woof of the working day. He slid between its thatches. Sick wind.

Twentieth century modernist wallscapes, whose facades, like cancers, were slowly eating and staining themselves. In some distant future, their collapsed remains, running through consolidating veins Corbusier and van der Rohe progeny, powderblue and cornflowergiallo, will make a fit marble for the inconceivable palaces of shrimp and uranium barons. Basileus. The compacted rock containing plastic fossils, industrial remnants, kettles, vulcanized rubber dolls, air-conditioners, and refrigerators. Mosaics to match the pagan treasures of ancient Greece. What will be prized; a child’s dummy? A copper pot? A wastrel stem of plastic flowers unwittingly preserved in an unidentifiable oil. Palm. Deep-fried former lives from a shlocky Chinese restaurant. Mysterious Solidified God. Manufactured to be so sure. If not natural, we would have invented it. Mono Sodium. Lonely salt. Lonely sailor. But right now they stood, gangs of feral pimply kids, whooping and whooting through the not-yet-compacted crevices. Blood in the building veins.

I’ll smash you! Can’t smash me, I’aint made’a glass. Sung-song arcs, wildly coasting thither and yon, contorting otherwise dour mouths. Yer-can’t-smaassh-mee-ah’aint-made-ah-glaarrss. Impish rhythms, demiurgic satyrs, filling bodies for all time. In their crushed marble skulls, perhaps a whipping tail will be felt by the chosen son of a bluetime Basileus, chancing upon an eye-socket, Pompeii-staring out of delirious marble. The corner, near the floor. Something tingles in his spine, tail bone feels a’whippin’. Archetypal inhabitants surfacing anew. Strange to think we believe in personal reincarnation. More eternal recurrence of the same. Satyr is faun, is pickpocket, chimney sweep; nymph and naiad, urchin and ASBO. Recognise in a look. Simpler than a mason. Eyes aren’t feigned. Can’t learn. No handshake. Fiercer in the girlies. In packs, more. Whatcha lookin’ at? Huh? Huh? Ah har har. Hey, hey. Orr. I ain’t gonna rob ya. Where ya goin? Home. You been dancin’? No, working. Dancing, why dancing? Want to touch those little imps. Give them tea. Impossible. They will not look into your eyes. Only their kind. Dancing.

The warp and woof of the working day.

He slid between its thatches. Sick wind.

The inner world is so sacred.

You slice a tomato for lunch.

Glacial swaying tones in an aeroplane

Whispers and snatches of speech.

Inside voices inside the head. A fabricated highlife of glazed celluloid, sucking gelled vortices of suspension chaos. He was not at its centre, but the cooling plate of glass that licks at the passing world without losing any of itself. Scenes of avuncular and then leering boymen, wild Calibans, most soft and most pitiable. No bow and arrow. No standard initiation rites. Trapped in permanent packs, unable to take the test, though, what test? A quick fuck with whichsoever chubby minge that’ll take you behind the toilet blocks. Did you fuck her? Crude akimbo elbows, ploughing hips. I wonder if he brushed his teeth? That lecherous mouth, gaping open. How I’d like to stick my dick in there and make those eyeballs gag. Yeah, I fucked’er. HHHHAAAWWWWW! Guffaws. She's a minga! Did you make her groan? Shez prolly just hungry. Hoots. Guffaws. No bow and arrow. Not the kind of meat I can bring home. Not the kind of home I could bring back to. Where are my elders? Our child-parents, not their burden to bear. Sad Atlas. Drunk Atlas. “Mama, mama.” Hold back her hair. Too many sad pills. Too much gin. Mother’s mothers' burden. Why orange? Quite beautiful really, on the milky porcelain bowl. Cheetos? Twisties? Recognition in her leached eyes. Boiled, peeled moons. Could something have been born in there? Were you planning a grand life? Candied, flossy girl smile. Watery happiness. “Jacob.” She raises a floppy hand to his cheek, smiling with teeth a toothless smile, all slack-lip and gummy hollow.

So

slow

words, soslow hand on cheek, 
soslow face slackening around cold porcelain.

“Look at

my boy

so handsome

my

boy.”

Vomit from her hand on my cheek. The burdens of our forefathers. Where is mine? “Come on. Let’s get you to bed.” Looking at me with her secretive fairground smile. Her each drunk a child anew. Beaming looseygoosey proud. Your stillsoft hand on my face. “Jacob…” He wanted to take her hand and cry into it. Mama, why did I do it? To wrap himself in the curve of her stomach and lap. But then, where were you? When I was… when I needed… loose-legged slipping in the hall with some brutal uncooked ape. Akimbo elbows, ploughing hips. What teeth I could kick in. Or better yet. No. One child’s slip and it would all be over. “Let’s get you cleaned up.” Opening her blouse like several other men before him, and mostly not much more of her hazing from within, though different intentions. Naked, she looked like the little girl of her smile. Small, vulnerable, sleepy. He bundled her damp humid into a towel and carried her to her bedroom. He sat at the foot of her bed listening to her light slack snoring and thinking about Daisy. Daisy. She knew. I saw it in her eyes. Didn’t I, Daisy? Such tender humiliation. Willing me to. I know what you are doing. She knew. Stoic caryatid bearing the weight of her drunk. Fuming in her eyes. You did this to me. Those eyes. Looking at you. She knew that you knew that she loves you. A sickened desperate kind of love. Daisy. A cow’s name. Those eyes. No bow and arrow. What could I bring home to him? A pat on the shoulder, calm fingers older and more experienced than your own. “Well done, son”-fingers. How soft to share in what was once hidden. This is your right. The mountain man does not need. The wind moves through me. I own nothing of myself. Chewing: feathers; plucking: a single note; letting: it fade away.

Excerpt from Michael Waser's Small Chronos

old days at Sheep Camp...

The wordlessness of the slow-moving stream

told her something of her father,

his silence, not stony, but slow-moving.

Wood that lay splintered in more or less 

arm-length blocks and the excess, 

innumerably-sharded next to the pile.

Neat, like her father.  He sometimes 

held the wood,  or shaped it for pleasure, 

because not everything  is useful. 

His rougher hands in steady,  

lulling rhythm, like the neighbour boy 

she had caught by the river.  

That wordless river, and her, wordless.

marmoreal days... opened into the hill a spacious wound, and digged out ribs of gold

Mammon...

                           ...his looks and thoughts
Were always downward bent, admiring more
The riches of heaven’s pavement, trodden gold,
Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed
In vision beatific. By him first
Men also, and by his suggestion taught,
Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands
Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth
For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew
Opened into the hill a spacious wound,
And digged out ribs of gold…

- Paradise Lost, Book i, 678-690

Paris; 2013

you slam it to me with farms that you dark on and off numb hideous strong friend... les amants du pont neuf & the powerline incarnation

When I ran to snatch the wires off our roof
hands bloomed teeth shouted I was almost seized
held back from this life
                                       O flumes     O chariot reins
you cover me with lurids deck me with gaudies feed
my coronal    a scream sings in the air
above our dance    you slam it to me with farms
that you dark on and off numb hideous strong friend
Tooma and Geehi freak and burr through me
rocks fire-trails damwalls mountain-ash trees slew
to darkness threw me    I zap them underfoot
with the swords of my shoes
                                               I am receiving mountains
piloting around me Crackenback    Anembo
the Fiery Walls    I make a hit in towns
I’ve never visited: smoke curls lightbulbs pop grey
discs hitch and slow    I plough the face of Mozart
and Johnny Cash    I bury and smooth their song
I crack it for copper links and fusebox spiders
I call my Friend from the circuitry of mixers
whipping cream for a birthday    I distract the immortal
Inhuman from hospitals
                                       to sustain my jazz
and here is Rigel in a glove of flesh
my starry hand discloses smoke, cold Angel.

Vehicles that run on death come howling into
our street with lights a thousandth of my blue
arms keep my wife from my beauty    from my species
the jewels in my tips
                                  I would accept her in
blind white remarriage    cover her with wealth
to arrest the heart    we’d share Apache leaps
crying out Disyzygy!
                                  shield her from me, humans
from this happiness I burn to share    this touch
sheet car    live ladder    wildfire garden shrub—
away off I hear the bombshell breakers thrown
diminishing me    a meaninglessness coming
over the circuits
                           the god’s deserting me
but I have dived in the mainstream    jumped the graphs
I have transited the dreams of crew-cut boys named Buzz
and the hardening music
                                         to the big bare place
where the strapped-down seekers, staining white clothes, come

to be shown the Zeitgeist
                                          passion and death my skin
my heart all logic    I am starring there
and must soon flame out
                                         having seen the present god
It who feels nothing    It who answers prayers.

that thin layer about the wet hot heat is godsland

Corporeal Friends are Spiritual Enemies by Deborah Birch on Mixcloud

Oh, Mickey you're so fine you're so fine you blow my mind hey mickey, hey hey mickey. White out. Blue light, dark out. Spears of accentuated mad flicker silver slap the jittery eyes, bugging bodies. Who moves you? smell of wet hot heat. wet hot inner under inner arms. inside groin. loins, clothed, modesty flaps in the armmade wind. heat ascends. rubber soled shoes, hermes winged messenger stripes of colour slap and push the solid world away. melts. Who knows you? un peu d'air sur terre. very clever campaign. But does it float? Caché. Were Jesus' loins holy? Were they ever touched, rubbed, loved? Did lips murmur over them? Stiff linen of the dead. White wash it. Near out. Light blue. Dark light. Did it rain that day? Back though, they are touching you there, face ascended to God's face. Those three used to be joined by sugared words, deadly laced strychnine arcs. How many dependents do you have? Dependence wha? Dependents, you know, spouse, kids? Ain't got none. No, two, gently laced arcs. Tell your intimates your intimates. Particles from the masticated cud, gentle arcs of the elect, Mani est vivant! Did St. Augustine eat the fig as well? Did he burp God? Mani could never have won, we know that now. We need God to grow in the hollows of ourselves, the vacuoles of man. He is the autophagy of our misfoldings, misdoings, miswiringhardgivings. He can not be in the fig. He can not be in the breath of those Ancient Greek gods. Inspiration, they breathed into Penelope, the other Sisyphus, weaver of Fatum woven by Moira, roller of Peter. Moons of Jupiter. Too many wives, too much jealousy. No, God in human hollows. Begins in not out. Much better. Perspiration. 99% sure to win in the end. Inspiration. We reserve the right to hope have faith in 1%. Sneakers dally with the floor. I… I can't touch… I can't touch you… Faces are wondering upward. Fingers in the warmth of caché spaces. Nothing so maddeningly moist as fig finger particles of God. Faces wondering upward. It is coming out of me. Upward. That's her friend. They were joined not two hours before and since they were 7. Slow arcs so slow the world seems real without them. Watched her cry, held her hand. Who would say such a thing to their own daughter. Wished she had never been born. More for other things. Silent imprecations against the whoreful mother of her friend. Should she die? Who have you disposed of in your thoughts? Fingered a hot wet tear, held her hand. One slow arc. Was it completed then or in the shopping mall, where three stole silently separately, emboldened by bright lights and identical rows. How to. Take it to the oversized women's section, for some reason there are never guards there, too self conscious already to steal. Trash taken for treasure. Treasures of time, bright lights, mad silver flicker in six eyes, and others too, countless, across lands. Give it away, moments mad lit moments are treasured, not matter. Don't fetishise thinginess, she said. Points in focus, slow directrix. Equidistant, but she was her, the maitresse. The directrix. The rest are fools along the arc, but it slowly traced from one to the other to the other to the one hot wet tear to the fingering finger. Was she Adam? They drunk old bottles of wine in the downstairs bathroom. Laughter bigger than bottles. Nux vomica. Arcs of amity. But there, switchblade eyes on her maitresse, whose wet hot fig fingered bright silver flicker, mad switchblade eyes on him, who wonders wanders down to groaning loins. Faces wondering skyward. Is she tasting God, wide pupils larger than saucers. Mad mad mad jealousy the slowest jitter, infinitesimally slowed, might miss it in armmade sneakermade slapping floating wind. But don't. It is there. Caché in shimmering slow boiling surface, perspiring sheen, melted glow. Lanced reality, that thin layer above the wet hot heat is godsland.

15.01.13

these plastic roses

hot milk

these pink roses
    some plastic shrine
       @ music's feet
                               unbroken divinity of eye / ear - 
       a prophecy     deep from within the skull's roots
                                     controlled miles of flexible oratory
    bouquets of plasticity stretching the petals of the bell
                   this sun     this bursting gaffaw
                                                 parked here at the edge of godsland     any jackson knows
       any queen whoever-shed-her-face-of-water knows
                               any revolutionary zookeeper knows
           any weaver of lace knows

any gone logic device knows
any virgin in search of the mystery knows
these unwaving toxic neo-industrial sad unscented roses
enshrined @ the feet of music know
those at the helm of the ship know
that which guides the rudder knows
uncontrollability in an inflexible space
madmen know
scientists know
the spirits
know
the married know
the sick
the lame
the intolerant know
somewhere in their inflexibly religious souls
the long gones know it
deep within their long gone elegant
tombs
           an unfathomable unity between forest & trees
           first & last hucksters
    even the hucksters know
           the soft walls know
           the high walls know
           the low walls know
           the hard walls know

      "I kill Bad aMericans"     -     a harder groove / the gloss of pearls


this holy heliocent
                               world of round holidays

even the humans know
the war/mongers know
the survivors beneath our soles     they know
twice octoped ghosts know
a sound-tale coming closer to inflexible plastic
the face of water
the quint of power
the laying on of long dawns

           prio priopas achordin
                   prio priopas     acru

   loosen confusion & broaden forms
    loosen confusion     & bro a     den       forms

there's that second before the petals melt
that moment before the shrines collapse
when we realize we are all prophets
& fortune tellers
when we all see what the future holds
speaks
tastes
touches
smells

the wise ones know
the idiots know
the rootless know
the innocent know
           the innocent know the innocent know..

steve dalachinsky nyc


do! listen to John Tchicai's free strings & Dalachinksy's words, hither>>
Tchicai's voice is hot coal and violets

I am gong and cotton and snowy song... Michaux & Carracci

I have really become hard only by thin layers;
If anyone knew how marrowy I am at bottom.
I am gong and cotton and snowy song,
I say so and am sure of it.

Henri Michaux - I am Gong

details; Annibal Carrache (Annibale Carracci) (Bologna 1560 - Rome 1609); Pietà avec saint François et sainte Marie-Madeline. Vers 1602-1607; Louvre, Paris (originally in the Mattei chapel in the Church of San Francesco a Ripa, Rome).

Annibale Carracci, an exemplary Baroque painter, along with his brother Agostino and cousin Ludovico, combined Florentine draughtsmanship with Venetian use of colour and texture to create an emotionally charged colourful core. Baroque painting - coinciding with the Council of Trent and its reformulation of the Catholic Church's representational style - emphasised exaggerated emotion, theatricality, expressive lighting, and clear intention; painting, and art in general, should become the literature of the illiterate, conveying story and moral in their stylistic vernacular - simple, direct, powerful. The restraint apparent in the Renaissance's sculptural and architectural influences gives way to dynamism and even sensationalism. Competing contracts and wealthy patronage saw ever more fabul-ist/ous works being produced inside a similarly aggrandising architecture. The modern pejorative use of the term Baroque, as anything with excessive ornamentation and sensationalist dynamism, derives from this development, as well as the Baroque's transition into Rococo.

you have crouched too long in the bruising darkness...

A Conceit

Give me your hand

Make room for me
to lead and follow
you
beyond this rage of poetry.

Let others have
the privacy of
touching words
and love of loss
of love.

For me
Give me your hand.


On the Pulse of Morning

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon,
The dinosaur, who left dried tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow,
I will give you no hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness
Have lain too long
Facedown in ignorance,
Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.

The Rock cries out to us today,
You may stand upon me,
But do not hide your face.

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

The free bird leaps

on the back of the wind

and floats downstream

till the current ends

and dips his wings

in the orange sun rays

and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks

down his narrow cage

can seldom see through

his bars of rage

his wings are clipped and

his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings

with fearful trill

of the things unknown

but longed for still

and is tune is heard

on the distant hillfor the caged bird

sings of freedom

The free bird thinks of another breeze

an the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn

and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams

his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing

The caged bird sings

with a fearful trill

of things unknown

but longed for still

and his tune is heard

on the distant hill

for the caged bird

sings of freedom. 

Passing Time

Your skin like dawn

Mine like musk

One paints the beginning

of a certain end.

The other, the end of a

sure beginning. 

The Vale of Rest - John Everett Millais // poems - Maya Angelou

tambourines in the dark ditch of the night...

Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly

The Storm


Les princes n'ont point d'yeux pour voir ces grands merveilles,
Leurs mains ne servent plus qu' à nous persécuter . . .†                                                    
(Agrippa D' Aubigné: À Dieu) 

The storm that trickles its long March
thunderclaps, its hail, onto the stiff
leaves of the magnolia tree;
(sounds of shaking crystal which startle you
in your nest of sleep; and the gold
snuffed on the mahogany, on the backs
of the bound books, flares again
like a grain of sugar in the shell
of your eyelids)
the lightning that blanches
the trees and walls, freezing them,
like images on a negative (a benediction and destruction you
carry carved within you, a condemnation that binds you
stronger to me than any love, my strange sister);
and then the tearing crash, the jangling sistrums, the rustle
of tambourines in the dark ditch of the night,
the tramp, scrape, jump of the fandango. . .and overhead
some gesture that blindly is groping. . .
                                                           as when
turning around, and, sweeping clear your forehead
of its cloud of hair,
you waved to me—and entered the dark.

                                                                 
// Eugenio Montale, trans. Charles Wright
† (The princes have not eyes to see these great wonders,
Their hands do not serve but to persecute us)

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child,
I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

// 1 Corinthians 13

Does the infinite space we dissolve into, taste of us then?

Pasolini's Teorema

The Second Elegy, trans. Stephen Mitchell


Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I invoke you,

almost deadly birds of the soul, knowing about you.
Where are the days of Tobias, when one of you, veiling his radiance, 

stood at the front door, slightly disguised for the journey, no longer appalling;

(a young man like the one who curiously peeked through the window).
But if the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars took even one step down toward us:

our own heart, beating higher and higher, would beat us to death.
Who are you?

Early successes, Creation's pampered favorites,

mountain-ranges, peaks growing red in the dawn of all beginning,--

pollen of the flowering godhead, joints of pure light, 

corridors, stairways, thrones, space formed from essence,

shields made of ecstasy, storms of emotion whirled into rapture, and suddenly alone:

mirrors, which scoop up the beauty that has streamed from their face

and gather it back, into themselves, entire.

But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we breathe ourselves out and away; 

from moment to moment our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume.
Though someone may tell us: "Yes, you've entered my bloodstream, the room,

the whole springtime is filled with you . . . "--what does it matter? he can't contain us, 

we vanish inside him and around him.
And those who are beautiful, oh who can retain them?
Appearance ceaselessly rises in their face, and is gone.
Like dew from the morning grass, what is ours floats into the air, like steam from a dish of hot food.
O smile, where are you going?
O upturned glance: new warm receding wave on the sea of the heart . . .

alas, but that is what we are.
Does the infinite space we dissolve into, taste of us then?
Do the angels really reabsorb only the radiance that streamed out from themselves,

or sometimes, as if by an oversight, is there a trace of our essence in it as well?
Are we mixed in with their features even as slightly as that vague look

in the faces of pregnant women?
They do not notice it (how could they notice) in their swirling return to themselves.Lovers, if they knew how, might utter strange, marvelous words in the night air.
For it seems that everything hides us.
Look: trees do exist; the houses that we live in still stand.
We alone fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind.
And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.

Lovers, gratified in each other, I am asking you about us.
You hold each other. Where is your proof?
Look, sometimes I find that my hands have become aware of each other,

or that my time-worn face shelters itself inside them.
That gives me a slight sensation.
But who would dare to exist, just for that?
You, though, who in the other's passion grow until, overwhelmed, he begs you:
"No more . . . "; you who beneath his hands swell with abundance,

like autumn grapes; you who may disappear because the other has wholly emerged:
I am asking you about us.
I know, you touch so blissfully because the caress preserves, 

because the place you so tenderly cover does not vanish;

because underneath it you feel pure duration.
So you promise eternity, almost, from the embrace.
And yet, when you have survived the terror of the first glances, 

the longing at the window, and the first walk together, once only, through the garden:

lovers, are you the same?
When you lift yourselves up to each other's mouth and your lips join,

drink against drink: oh how strangely each drinker seeps away from his action.

Weren't you astonished by the caution of human gestures on Attic gravestones?
Wasn't love and departure placed so gently on shoulders 

that it seemed to be made of a different substance than in our world?
Remember the hands, how weightlessly they rest, though there is power in the torsos.
These self-mastered figures know: "We can go this far,

this is ours, to touch one another this lightly; the gods can press down harder upon us.
But that is the gods' affair."

If only we too could discover a pure, contained, human place,

our own strip of fruit-bearing soil between river and rock.
For our own heart always exceeds us, as theirs did.
And we can no longer follow it, 

gazing into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies where,

measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.

to render, say, out of sight out of mind as invisible lunatic

excerpt from Employment for the Castes in Abeyance

I was a translator at the Institute:
fair pay, clean work, and a bowerbird's delight
of theory and fact to keep the forebrain supple.

I was Western Europe. Beiträge, reviste,
dissertaties, rapports turned English under my
one-fingered touch. Teacup-and-Remington days.

//

The trade was uneasy about computers, back then:
if they could be taught not to render, say, out of sight
out of mind as invisible lunatic

they might supersede us - not
because they'd be better. More on principle.
Not that our researchers were unkindly folk:

one man on exchange from Akademgorod
told me about Earth's crustal plates, their ponderous
inevitable motion, collisions that raised mountain chains,

the continents rode on these Marxian turtles, it seemed;
another had brought slow death to a billion rabbits,
a third team had bottled the essence of rain on dry ground.

They were translators, too, our scientists:
they were translating the universe into science,
believing that otherwise it had no meaning.

//

Les Murray's Employment for the Castes in Abeyance and Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, featuring a Piero della Francesca in the chapel where the Italian cult of the Virgin is ritualised; miraculous birds fly out of the Madonna as a woman prays for a child. The Madonna is a protector of women and symbol of childbirth, and although she doesn't feature heavily in the bible, over time, especially over the late middle ages and early Renaissance, she has become an equal figure to Christ himself, and most prominently in Italy. The film is about a writer who is as unsure about the modern age as the poet in Employment; he befriends a mad man convinced that 1 + 1 does not equal 2 but a more comprehensive 1, and that he must wade through a steam pool with a lit candle in order to save the world. Gorchakov begins to dissolve into a transferred madness, exacerbating his alienation from the modern world; fusing his wife, the Madonna, and his interpretor; and attempting to fulfil the madman's vital task.