Minimenta 2: Wind, Cloud, Drilling

1.
How often have we watched trees
move against dark cloud, their frail
armature part collapsed, part thrust
against the wind, the leaf-sail
of each bud billowing to squeeze
light from dark, energy from dust?

2.
Unrest. The un-ness of things. Twig
like a broken No. Concrete steps.
A drill. A bulldozer. The cold lips
of November pursed for a kiss
that is more like a blow and all this
far too late, too troubled and too big.

3.
Everywhere the human voice. How can
we help but hear it in grass and air?
Even a wall is only a tall noise with brick
syntax. High clouds whisper human
non-sequiturs that turn to rain. Where
can we hide? Why this sense of panic?

4.
A man and woman in a field. The rain
starts and they take shelter. The grass
runs all one way. They embrace. They hold
each other as if they could not do so ever again.
Above them leaves fold and unfold
in the downpour that will quickly pass.

5.
The construction site constructing.
The square empty but for machinery.
The cafeteria with its litter of trays.

Everywhere institutions. The lost days.
All this will be broken up, everything.
There will be no drama, only scenery.

6.
And then he turned to her and ran
the back of his hand against her cheek
very lightly. It was as if wind had stroked any
surface whatsoever. He was an old man
or a young man, and she could not speak
or find words because there were too many.

Canzone: The Man in the Doorway

It was already late when I passed the doorway,
the time when everyone moves for the exit
and thinks about home. I stopped in the doorway
and looked in. Beyond the open doorway
lay a corridor from which spilled the men
from the office, each one caught in the doorway
for an instant. Was I blocking the doorway?
They did not say so, did not complain. Their gaze
was fixed on the street outside as any gaze
might be. The whole point of a doorway
is to let you through and not to frame a face
you might remember as clear as your own face,

that’s in so far as you can know your face,
especially when it appears in a doorway
or in glass, as though it were someone else’s face -
and right now it was another person’s face.
Perhaps a face must always be in exit,
becoming itself in leaving what is face
behind, as was this office-worker’s face.
He had a face, just like the other men
and the look he wore said: See those other men?
They are like me, yet this is my own face,
so here I am, drink your fill of it, gaze
at me steadily and meet my own gaze

if only for a second. This is what it is to gaze
at another. This exploring of the other’s face
is what we mean when we describe a gaze.

It drains you yet it gives itself. To gaze

is both to drink and be drunk. It is the doorway
to a place you cannot know except as gaze,
the hollow darkness that reflects your gaze
as if it were a voice about to exit
the body, a voice always seeking an exit.
It is your responsibility to gaze
at me, to pick me out among the men
and recognize me, since we are both men.

And indeed we were, the both of us, just men
in a place, though what I gave was not gaze,
not exactly, simply the look that men
give one another, a space where men
meet as men then move on in order to face
responsibilities, the business of being men
as defined by offices, the business of working men:
factory floors, boardrooms, the wide doorway
that gives on to rooms, another room or doorway,
right down to that most basic of rooms marked: MEN
which you will find next to the door marked EXIT.
It is a comedy: half entrance and half exit.

But his face held me. I couldn’t simply exit
his gaze as I might that of other men.
It seemed to brood, turn inward, leave no exit
except into itself which is no exit.
The street outside was moving. One might gaze
down it for ever as down some final exit.
I owed him something though, without an exit,
a kind of recognition that his face
had registered, had entered my own face
and would remain there. Exit! Exit! Exit!
cried the workers pressing through the doorway.
It seemed that we were really blocking the doorway.

It was our exit. It was our common doorway
into and out of the world we had to face.
He let me go. We disengaged. The gaze
was only itself and we were only men

and everything was sweeping past the exit.

The Translators

1.
Sometimes you see clouds drifting past the city,
inventions of the sky,
within which images appear then petrify
and remain there in perpetuity.

Otherwise things shift with a certain insouciance
but keep moving. Meaning vanishes
into night, into the vacant parishes
of the imagination, into a non-presence

that is positively terrifying. But there,
the clouds still loom like statues
with faces, as if one could choose
to see them suspended in imagined air.

2.
I have jumped to conclusions in my time.
What else would you jump to otherwise?
Look hard into the eyes
of language and you see nothing. Only rhyme

and punctuation. I have talked to ghosts
in ghost language, the solemn dead
at their jabber, hearing the implied instead,
the sigh of the wind at its last post.

I once had a mother who used at times to speak
but now I only conjure her. We carve
images into clouds so we should not starve
for lack of company. We break

the silence into pieces, syllables of space.
We are translated into ourselves. The sky
rushes at us. We observe it insouciantly,
watching clouds move, looking for a face.

3.
We have seen mirrors in darkened rooms
hunger for us. We have seen the dead
in our streets. We have felt the dread
of  our faces and the shapes a face assumes

in its own mirror. We owe them a shape,
all those faceless one, you and I.
We should feed them before they petrify,
before their clouds pack up or else escape.

4.
How do I know myself before I have created
my simulacrum? How are the hungry
to be fed? Listen, the sky is angry.
The gods are demanding to be translated.