_from_ flit filters

“… details are made available by mapping the data to colors that humans can perceive.”—NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory News




─
(zinnias in space, ISS)


It’s a fable, really, it’s a cartoon of itself. It’s a lesson in starvation really. 


It’s a fable where I see myself a child planting zinnias but I am planting the idea of childhood.


It’s a fable for the soon-removal, the ruin of the rooted where seeing anything is like seeing a flower without a world, the zinnias’ perfect gears of orange petals controlled enough to live almost anywhere, removed enough to appear in geometric form. It’s a fable where the orbit betrays girlhood zinnia plots and no one ever pokes a finger one inch in the planet to press the seed fleck into the soft. I read a fable a fairy tale a seed packet label called abandonment called post-earth ideation or airless station or round-tipped zinnia petals fixed in pixels. Autonomous gardening spilled into neural petals’ algorithm-seeing. They spoil themselves with lack of soil. They zero out omission. They are not unlike cell-phone screens or golf greens or gated community crests, orange in green and green in orange and orange in green and people forage in their removal… someone eats up their own cloud-cover and calls it survival. 


It’s a satellite-slick night. This platoon of petals calls itself living being
resuscitation bright.






─
(keyhole inside the debris resulting from the birth of a new star, Orionis)


The thought of seeing became debris. The cactus flower, the picture frame. The [is seen] a keyhole inside the unseen debris, a wisp of a keyhole really, every hint of sight a wisp against the quicker vanishment. The fire rims were growing, the ragged maps debris-forming, the color-coded evacuation status, the future/past craggy trail the floral comforters to-do lists anything potentially seen potentially cast into flammable reams. The unseen debris included the receptacle for Scotch tape empty of tape… you put your thumb in it and rummage the spin. Inside the fire, the burnt flower, vanished flower, locked in the mind. 


The eyes look backward for a way. The debris inside the keyhole included colliding debris of disappearance and appearance simultaneously. I want to tape the ash together until the tape has no glue and spin in keyhole trace with you+you+you+ 


The place you wandered among the cactus needles and the bulbous purple cactus grapes that vanished in a day.



_________________


Note: Some diction in this series originated in image descriptions on NASA’s various Instagram accounts. 


zinnias: https://www.instagram.com/nasa/p/CtZxuGjSorR/
keyhole: https://www.instagram.com/p/C59J7n6S5LX/ 

The Hills

One day above Paris
Two big airplanes were fighting
One red the other black
While the sun’s eternal
Plane flashed at the zenith

The one was all my youth
The other the future
This is how furiously
The archangel with shining
Wings fought Lucifer

Calculus to problem
Night to day the way my
Love attacks what I love
The way a hurricane
Roots up trees that cry out

But look everywhere such
Sweetness Paris wakens
Slowly and stretches out
Like a girl shakes her long
Hair and begins her song

Well now where’d my youth go
See the future’s on fire
Listen I’m announcing
The art of prophecy
Is born at last today

Certain people are hills
That rise up in our midst
They can see what’s coming
Better than what’s here clearer
Than what’s already gone

In time’s adornment roads
And seasons go on stay
Don’t stop let serpents hiss
At the south wind in vain
The Psylli and the wave have died

In time’s arrangement if
The machines finally
Learn to think waves of gold
Will break on jeweled shores
Foam be mother again

Eagles are not so high
Flying the human gives
Oceans pleasure vents off
Shade and vertiginous spleen
Till the soul meets its dream

This is the magic time
It’s coming back you wait
Billions of wonders
Still unfabled still
Unimaginable

Deep wells of awareness
Tomorrow we’ll find you out
And who knows what live beings
We’ll lift from the abyss
Along with their universes

Look how the prophets loom
Like blue hills far away
Knowing the exact things
Scientists pretend to
They’ll take us everywhere

To want is to be strong
Let me kiss your forehead
O lithe as a flame you
Suffer all a flame does
All burning all sparkling

In the next age we will
Study our suffering
Not with courage not with
Discipline but knowing
There’s nothing we can do

We’ll find out what’s human
Beyond all we have been
Put both intention and
Strength of will to the test
Without tools or machines

Helpful specters wander
Filtering among us
Since time has caught us up
Nothing ends or begins
See that ring you’re wearing

Time of deserts of crossroads
Time of plazas and hills
I’m here to do some tricks
With a dead talisman
More intricate than life

I’m finally separate
From every natural thing
I can die but I cannot sin
And what no one has touched
I’ve touched it I’ve felt it

And I’ve looked into things
Nobody imagined
I’ve even weighed out life
The unthinkable and
I can die smiling

Often I’ve glided so high so
High goodbye everything
The phantoms the freaks
I can’t admire the boy
Anymore who faked fear

Youth goodbye time’s jasmine
I breathed in your fresh smell
In Rome on flowering carts
Laden with masks garlands
And bells for Carnaval

Goodbye youth white Christmas
When our life was one star
I stared at reflected
In the Mediterranean
Less meteor than pearl

Downy as archangels’
Nests or garlands of clouds
Buffed brighter than halos
Splendors emanations
Single sweet harmonics

I stop to watch a snake
Meandering over
The blazing lawn it’s me
I am the flute I play
Also the whip to flay

A time will come for sorrow
A time too for kindness
Youth goodbye now’s the time
To know the future and
Not die from the knowledge

It’s time for burning grace
By sheer will seven years’
Astonishing trials
Human become divine
More pure more live more wise

Seeking out other worlds
The soul will crinkle up
Like flowers give way to
Lush fruits we’ll see ripen
On hillsides in sunlight

I’m talking about real
Life as only I can
My songs falling as seeds
Be quiet you singers
Don’t mix your chaff with wheat

A vessel came to harbor
A big ship flying flags
There was no one aboard
Except a beautiful vermilion
Woman lying murdered

Once when I asked for alms
All I got was this flame
That burned up to my lips
A torch nothing could snuff
I couldn’t say thank you

Well where are you my friend
Sunk so far in yourself
You left a chasm
So I threw myself in
To the colorless depths

And I can hear my steps
Return down paths no one
Has walked I hear my steps
At all hours there they go
And back now hurrying now slow

Winter you hold the razor
It’s snowing I’m a wreck
I’ve crossed the bright sky life
Is music there the ground
Is too white for my eyes

These wonders I’m announcing
Get used to them like me
To the kindness that rules
To the sorrow I bear
And you’ll know what’s to come

Sorrow and kindness form
The beauty that will be
More perfect than any
Proportion it’s snowing
I’m burning I’m trembling

Now I’m at my table
Writing down what I felt
And what I sang up there
A slender swaying tree
Wind pouring through its hair

A top hat sits there on
A table piled with fruit
Dead gloves near an apple
Madame wrings her own neck
Monsieur swallows himself

Dancers whirl on time’s bedrock
I killed the handsome bandleader
Now I’m peeling an orange
For my friends so they can
Taste amazing fireworks

Everyone’s dead the head
Waiter pours out unreal
Champagne a frothing snail
A poet’s cranium
While a rose is singing

The slave grabs a bare blade
It seems like springs like streams
And every time it falls
It guts a universe
New worlds rush from the wound

The driver holds the wheel
And every time the road
Curves he honks the horn and
There edges into view
A universe untouched

And third number the lady goes
Up in an elevator she
Goes up up forever
The light spreads out she stands
Transfigured in its glow

But these are weak secrets
There are far deeper ones
That soon will be unveiled
Tear you to a hundred
Pieces of single mind

But cry cry and again
We’ll cry to the full moon
Or only crescent cry
Cry and we’ll cry again
Much as we laughed in sun

Arms of gold hold our life
Enter the golden secret
All is nothing but quick flame
The flame unfolds the rose
The rose smells exquisite


                          Translated from the French by Sam Lohmann

The Vessel

Guilty debtor of long-lasting thirst,
Wise procurer of wine and water—
Fruit ripens to the music and goats
Dance in circles along your borders.

Of the troubles on your red-black rim
Shrill flutes swear and whistle and rage—
And there’s no one to get a tight grip
And to set those troubles straight.

March 21, 1937


                          Translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich & John High

_________________


Translator’s note: The poems Osip Mandelstam composed during his three-year exile in the southern Russian city of Voronezh, more than ninety in all, are divided into notebooks corresponding to three distinct periods of poetic production, with the three poems in this issue of Harp & Altar belonging to the third notebook. They are some of the last poems Mandelstam wrote during his exile as part of the book-length work he projected under the working title The Voronezh Notebooks, but would not see published in his lifetime. He died about a year and a half after their composition in a transit camp in the far east of the Soviet Union. 

The spring of 1937 was both a hopeful and desperate time for Mandelstam and his wife, Nadezhda. Their period of exile was coming to a close, and their release was not far off. However, their financial situation was terrible, and Nadezhda was often ill, while Mandelstam himself had been through periods of very poor health exacerbated by his nervous condition. He still harbored the hope of publishing a book of his new poems on his return to Moscow, though his submissions to journals and his letters to the Writers Union went mostly unanswered. He wrote sometimes desperate letters to friends (often including the latest poems in manuscript), begging for monetary support or for intervention on his behalf with the higher-ups at the Writers Union, at times hinting that they should bring his situation to the attention of Stalin himself.

The ekphrastic poem of March 21—often referred to as “The Vessel” (Кувшин [kuvshin]), and sometimes published with that title—riffs on the ancient Mediterranean (Mycenaean or Minoan) pottery Mandelstam saw in the antiquities hall of the Voronezh museum, which he and Nadezhda frequently visited. The protagonist of the poem—the krater or wine jug itself—is cast as both suspect and destined for a tragic end. It is a “guilty debtor” to those who drink from it, and “procurer” (i.e. a pimp of sorts) for the meeting (i.e. mixing) of wine and water, a practice common in antiquity. (The Russian word translated here as “procurer”—сводник [svodnik]—suggests the facilitation of sexual encounters or other unsavory or even illegal activities, but is too archaic to be translated as “pimp.”) The scenes of festivity and fecundity painted on the vessel contrast with its troubled fate. The final lines underscore its helplessness: No one will come to its aid, to avert its inevitable cracking, or to save the civilization it represents. Is the vessel a synecdoche for the inevitable demise of Mycenaean civilization (itself a synecdoche for the “Western” civilization Mandelstam would have termed “world culture”), or—also—for the poet’s uncertain future?

—Matvei Yankelevich

Untitled (I'm part of your therapy now)

I’m part of your therapy now says
the pleasant snap of dog’s jaws on a treat.
I read the article, like it on behalf of others, behavioral economists
making crazy plans for us to wave a crazy wand over pain of payment,
how to get around it and step with
two shoes into a glossy brick house with blue shutters—
how quiet it is there, how white the walls. Here, dish towels
dry on the oven-door handle, the dishwasher never used.
The wound is confusing so making sense of it
may not make it hurt less. There are years between
these types of purchases. Remember our trip to Kansas,
how I started talking about how my brain
has been the same for a while and how
you can see that in other people, that
realization, the same brain
all their lives. A lot more people
think or worry about the same-brain
entire-life problem than we can imagine. You’d
think fewer would. And there’s surely
too many people worrying about it
in one sense and not enough in the other of
knowing how a given brain moves through
a world more populated by other people
than any one of us can imagine, and among them
only a few people you really feel open with
like a diamond mine sometimes
or a coal mine at least that can be blasted back open
whenever a vein falls in on whoever’s down there.
Others are like squirrels in human dwellings,
you can only hear them in the roof or walls.
You talk about whether a part of you hurts and how
you feel about your body in the dark, how you
forget and remember things together
and have friends who you talk about other
friends with and not everyone gets used
to it. Our will to be in the world slips
with others and without each other’s elbows
to hold onto or set on the table. I would
land on my lonely ass and everyone in town
would tell the secrets they have,
ear to ear gossip would string its effect
in dark repetition of the push and pull
of air out of and into lungs until the sound becomes
permanently pressed on the brain, the back
of the neck, the shoulders and jaws and knuckles.
The history of ankles, noses, toes, bellies
barking at your heels, all those terrible haircuts,
the furniture you’ve found on the street or made vs.
the furniture you bought
wounded in some carelessness, reminders of
those moments in life whose particulates
dissipate into the atmosphere in parts per million or
lottery ticket winnings, shavings against hope
of a future of regular paychecks dashed daily
in what the news tells us about statistical likelihoods
one demographic in one zip-code number as opposed to others
which we wish affected how people felt, so they’d feel
differently about themselves as opposed to us or
that they saw what we saw
in them that they didn’t, yet knowing
that in us they maybe see something we may not like,
like the sloppy-armed furniture
given from the farthest ends of the family—I can’t believe
I let you convince me to throw it out. I find
the expression “thin-skinned” so strange, how they say
the strong master their emotions, that wilderness of after-images
working on ours. Rational actors, use of society, use to society—
made to manage ourselves and plan a course through the churn
almost out of a want-to-want way of thinking,
never a wish to give ourselves over
as if on some faraway beach.

At a certain point all the jobs
become worth more or less than their pay. What a person is
called to do, despite the warning of a life without
retirement savings or assets or healthcare, starts to feel tight
from the throat down into the chest and up into the ears.
The person most interesting in a therapist’s day,
the kindest customers and customer service agents.
Maybe there’s a difference, maybe there isn’t
between a call to care and a call to organize.
Facts other us; facts are all we have to hold on to
about as good as a mirror on the other side of the room.
Our view of ourselves and others, presuming
we can identify brain patterns and backtrace
through frames of shared experience that at some point
became almost like a still life of fruits, vegetables, glassware,
a loaf of bread. The way houseplants tell us what they need.
The odd angles of the room in the glass, like the world
our folks raised us in and used to understand themselves in:
such as how it feels differently washing hands in the bathroom or kitchen,
the trusted sites and servers. A virus pings the unique
intersections in our lives, another string bumping up personalizing stories about
how we’re coping, what helped carry us through. I used to want
to be a problem to be given attention or to just be different
and interesting in ways that later made me embarrassed,
ashamed or both. Now I try to hide it because it pays better to be similar
or to only be different in ways that read well. But I still
want to be liked and accepted. I am so uncomfortable
with myself that I sometimes go out of my way
to make others feel comfortable with themselves.
I worry that too could be a want-to-want way of thinking
because in people like that you can tell that they’re for you because
they let you know they care in terms of the cost of loss to
the human community. The scrape
of the car keys gently but often around the lock
eventually leaves its mark.

Sound of an ice cooler being stirred, snow shoveled,
the high tone of a fan versus the low tone of a furnace.
Both seasons affecting the degrees of windows open,
closed and a finger wetted in jest held in the air
to ascertain current path of breeze through apartment
which we see traced in the dog hair that rolls like
tumbleweeds on the hardwood floor where
the things we spill get sticky and the blood we spill
seems so intimate. Mostly from fingers and feet at least.
The nails due for a trim scrape through the wax
and shellac. Vomit mostly from the dog
who will rise and huff when he hears,
before I do, unless asleep, the tone of the engine of
the car you’re still paying off and you let me drive.
I have kept the old spark plugs in a door as part of
one of those symbolic messes that remind me of things I’ve done
that I’m proud of. To have known of the results of
the DNA genealogy before mom said what they were.
To refrain from ever telling you about the asymmetry
of my face for fear that you will never be able
to un-see it. Commit self to well-being. I mistake
the sound of your key in the lock when it’s just a pop in the refrigerator
or the next door neighbors or tags on other dogs’ collars.

Famous People Make Mistakes

I imagined the flower would be entertained
by my mistakes,
then ashamed.
I did not know a mistake
is only a reaction twisted up in sympathies.
The event is a flower.
A flower is a wolf.
Famous people make mistakes.
A flower is a wild dark hole.
The reaction to the event is the human struggle
to interpret a flower.
A flower gestures
the form of the event.
You know the style of a flower by its speed.
It was the accident they say love is.

3/20/21

on the first anniversary of the New York lockdown

history's toe is no marvel
no orchestra darkens its helmet
its hissing city
hisses too

discover this: this
far from sound color
retreats, a poached touch may
throb in dreams and nothing violate
the haywire exterior

well, Mary, better let it,
and elongate like a mushroom
in the rented patch
your own life's dark
for the old speeds still appall
no vicious crystals go
no feeding only talking at the trough

remember kissing
remember just sitting there

now I crack eggs, gas a roach, read, steam
like a horse in slush

11/20/24

I like the milky quality of light in November
I like to think I'm the Roy Orbison of average American gay men
Neo-Nazis are marching in Columbus
I express a second coffee through its shining tin pod and return to the poem

Who does the work gets the work done
Who flees it suffers and is antic and/or morose
Orbison triumphs when my heart heaves to Crying
"I was all right, for a while"
"I could smile, for a while"

Can we see the Sienese painting show
In which long-scattered segments of admired altar pieces
Have been reunited for the first time on our continent
Tambors and timbrels of luscious color
Bent to grave themes

I want to but I can't on Monday
How are the cantons of Switzerland faring
Glacial shrinkage and "rightward drift"?
Does Canton neighbor Columbus?
Is that where he thought he was going?

45 pro-democracy activists have been sentenced to jail in Hong Kong
In Guangzhou a Spaniard in soft thin pants
Sliced me a tomato twelve years ago
In a dark kitchen
Whose window opened onto a thundering ten lane highway
As erotic as it sounds

Continuance

You have worn the form of of

Fingers clasped in a rough weave


Shadow rabbit on the taupe wall

A known pattern on the blue sheets


Strummin on the old banjo


It’s good like this

Stop requiring more

Flood

Masons build houses and measure them
while I just dawdle.
There’s nothing to design anymore because there’s
a flood. I’m crazy from my hair to my toenails
and everything that comes out is gold.
But where will we go?
Imperialism sees imperialism in the mirror.
Even before Troy, people cried
that the land was tired.
For three thousand years we lived in a belly
and angels brushed our hair.
I throw angels like dust, and soundly.
Dante lived in the 17th century
so there are two mistakes and it’s poetic.
But three mistakes are also poetic.
Where will we go?


                          Translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry

“Great with potters, blue Crete, isle of green”

Great with potters, blue Crete, isle of green,
Where they’ve baked their talent, their gift
Into sonorous earth. Can you hear the delphine,
Subterranean blow of their fins?

There’s the sea, speak of the devil,
Where the clay’s found joy in the fire
And the gelid rule of the vessel
Split in two—into sea and desire.

Give me back, bluest isle, wingéd Crete,
What is mine—my work and my labor,
Let the burnt vessel suckle and eat
Of the teat of the surging goddess.

All this was done and sung of yore,
Turning blue, long before the time
Of Odysseus, and even before
Food and drink were called yours and mine.

Star of the ox-eyed firmament,
Go on, get well, heal up in the rays,
And the flying fish, too—but a happenstance,
And these waters that always say yes.

March 1937


                          Translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich & John High

_________________


Translator’s note: This poem about Crete from March 1937 also takes up Mycenaean-Minoan civilization with a focus on its ceramics. The discovery of Mycenaean presence on Crete—and the theorization of its domination over (or hybridization with) Minoan culture—was a fairly recent development, the result of early twentieth-century studies and excavations (beginning with Sir Arthur Evans’s 1900 dig of the Minoan palace at Knossos). Pottery from Mycenaean (or Minoan) cultures in the collection of the Voronezh museum would have likely depicted dolphins, flying fish, and other sea creatures, as well as circular motifs that resemble “ox-eye” sunflowers (heliopsis). One extant variant for the last line of the second stanza yields an image of the vessel “split in two—the sea and the eye.”

Mandelstam imagines this pre-classical era on Crete (“before the time of Odysseus”) as a non-individualistic communal utopia, where “mine” and “yours” do not adhere. (In Russian, both possessives are first-person singular, but with different gender endings in connection to their objects, food [feminine] and drink [neuter].) Scholar Mikhail Gasparov suggests that Mandelstam’s depictions of early civilization in the poems written on the heels of “Verses on the Unknown Soldier”—where he imagines a class war of apocalyptic proportions that might lead to a classless future—coincides with contemporaneous Soviet theorization of pre-classical civilizations as pre-class societies exhibiting a “primitive communism.” The mention of the “surging goddess” suggests that Mandelstam was aware of Evans’s theories about a matriarchal order in Minoan Crete.

The imperative “get well” in the finale may be addressed to Nadezhda, who had been ill for several months and whose health was the subject of many of Mandelstam’s pleading letters to friends and family. (In another poem of this time, he sends Nadezhda to the stars for survival.) Given that the poem also pictures the poet potentially recovering “my work” from the island, it may be a directive to himself. In any case, alogical as it may seem—and there is more alogism in the late Mandelstam than has previously been allowed into English translations—the grammar here reads as a command to the “star of the ox-eyed heaven [sky]” itself (i.e. the sun) to soak up its own rays, which would suggest a desire for the restoration of this ancient culture. Yet, though the poem ends with the Mediterranean’s resounding “yes,” there’s an ambiguity about whether this whole episode of human history was but a “happenstance,” a chance event (случайность [sluchainost’]).

For more on the context in which Mandelstam composed this poem, see the opening note to “The Vessel.”

—Matvei Yankelevich

“The greek flute’s theta and iota — ”

The greek flute’s theta and iota—
As though it lacked rumor and speech—
Unsculpted, reporting to no one,
Languished, ripened, ditch after ditch…

And none can abandon or lose it,
Nor soothe it, gritting one’s teeth,
Nor with the tongue force or push it
Into words. Even lips won’t wrench it apart…

For the flautist, no rest and no quiet:
He thinks he’s in a world of his own,
That from lilac clays he had sculpted,
His native sea long ago…

With the ringing whispers of his lips—
Aspiring lips that remember by whispers—
Miserly, tidy, hoarding sounds in his grip,
He quickens his pace to be thrifty…

Kneading clay to death in our palms,
In his footsteps we cannot repeat him.
When the sea filled me up to the brim—
My meter to me was a murrain…

But to me my own lips are no lovers
And this murder is of the same root—
Toward loss I unwittingly lower
The balancing force of the flute…

April 7, 1937


                          Translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich & John High

_________________


Translator’s note: Dated April 7, 1937, this poem is widely acknowledged to concern Karl Shwab, a flautist in the Voronezh symphony orchestra and an acquaintance of the Mandelstams, who had been arrested a few months earlier, in December 1936, on charges of belonging to an anti-Soviet organization. (It was alleged that he listened to Hitler’s speeches over the radio.) The image of the flautist’s lips echoes Mandelstam’s metaphors for poetic composition (the movement of lips, whispers, breath, etc.) and suggests a synecdoche of musician=poet. As it happens, Shwab died in the same transit camp as Mandelstam—in a neighboring barracks—in January 1939, about a month after the poet.

One scholar argues that the “Greek” flute and the invocation of the Greek alphabet suggest Plato’s dialogue on the exclusion of both poets and flautists (and flute-makers) from the ideal republic as a relevant background to the poem. (Flutes appear elsewhere in the Voronezh poems, as in the design on the wine jug in “The Vessel,” and, most notably, in the very first poem of the series, “Black Earth,” where the plowed earth plays “a rotting flute” and the agricultural cycle gives rise to the poet’s newfound voice.)

The ditches in the first stanza recall the pervasive agricultural references of the Voronezh cycle, as well as recurring images of WWI trench warfare and the war-torn landscapes in “Verses on the Unknown Soldier,” Mandelstam’s longest poem, completed over the first two weeks of the previous month. (That poem, likely begun earlier the same year, was meant as the counterpart of a diptych with “Verses on Stalin,” often referred to as the odious “Ode” to Stalin, and frequently suppressed in Western editions.) The references to clay suggest the flutes of classical Greek antiquity, uniting this poem with the themes of several others composed in March and April of 1937, including the two other poems in the current selection. The “native sea” imagined by the flautist in his revery is the Mediterranean, the cradle of Western civilization, a recurring theme in the late poems of the Voronezh period.

The final line (in the currently favored manuscript source) includes a neologism—равнодействие [ravnodeistvie]—derived from the Russian terminology for the concept (in physics) of a “resultant” or “net” force. The neologism brings to mind (or to the ear) the word for “equinox,” which is just one letter off (равноденствие [ravnodenstvie]) and is itself the title of an early Mandelstam poem, from 1914, in which a “reed flute” is a crucial image. (“Equinox” appears in the last line of some manuscript versions of the poem, and Mandelstam may have tried it in his drafting of the stanza, but ultimately rejected it as a result of his “battle with Acmeism,” his earlier poetic adherence.) We have translated the neologism as “balancing force” to suggest the allusion to physics, but also to retain the “equilibrium” or “level” position of the flute, which allows us to make sense of the image of “lowering” the instrument “toward loss.”

For more on the context in which Mandelstam composed this poem, see the opening note to “The Vessel.”

—Matvei Yankelevich