M A T T H E W H E N R I K S E N
_______________________________________
The Seventh Avenue traffic sighs Deus. We're living in the kingdom of an idea.
Spit in the sewer. This city sits lower than we know, Cassandra. This city is the forest's burning ghost, the lion's mane, the hushing jowls Vico sundered with his sword while Blake, vigilant, dreamed America out of Saturn, a son swallowing God to call him Father, George Washington throwing the flames back at Hades and wearing as a cape the Brooklyn Bridge, designed by Whitman, destroyed by Hart's short route back to New York down the Winding Stairs of Liberty and out of flame, an enacted Pythagorean axiom: “Don't step over a yoke.” A breath of water for once, Emerson admonished Ford and stuck the fork in his own neck.
Out of the ashes, we fought a war and ate at the end the brains and entrails. There was a cuckoo in the garden and, Holly, how we love entrails. We took a long time sipping tea, while an arm of light seemed this time to reach up to the maple, those fingers, not the squirrel, tickling your nipple when you fell in love with Ralph. I started contemplating suicide and went to the Hudson everyday with a sandwich from Murray's. It was pretty beautiful to be so frail, and I long for it and even more for you to long for it. Silence was like the old music behind the walls, you were glass and your shivering was light, and I was a sound you heard to keep warm. Now I am not real.
So I woke in a bank, washed my hair with leaves, donned surrealism for the confidence, and began to walk among men again. I woke with my face in the dirt and heard sirens in the silence. They were everywhere. I was already destroyed. I saw the rope where I'd had myself strung to the El. The Midwest was a landscape I could not escape. For example, a thousand years ago I ate wild onions here and grew into a cosmos. Then read Whitman. Read Stevens, too. I'm on to Queneau and want to walk across the street to University Chemists Superbuy and drink the same Lysol Vachel Lindsey did. I want to leave a beautiful woman to drown herself in the tub, and I want her husband to kill himself in China. I'm wayward and homely, looking into bonds and Bach. Once I saw a brook in Germany that reminded me of a creek behind the duplex where I lived for three years when I was in grade school. I used to eye the pheasants running convex of the golden marsh. I used to run from the muskrats generated of the golden marsh.
A shimmer in March, I blink out at stars as they were then. I am now not more than the red brick above the bar across the street. From an apartment a bulb glows but looks translucent like a near-in part of sky or a glaze from a fire behind me in a window before me. Last weekend, I went to see Brancusi at the Guggenheim. Now everything's wound around that, the dog, her, loneliness and the trochee, Heidegger and The Rolling Stones. We're living in a time made clear by the idea that muddles all thought and mangles the ages out of the lion's jowls to the dog's bone.
Out of empirical lust the empire fights a war against the fleshless, beating darkness into its holes, then lighting the holes until Rome burns. I live in a studio on West 22nd Street with my wife, Katy, and last night dreamed we were back in Wisconsin while the city was nuked. All we had of Manhattan was an enclosed remote television station on the New Jersey shore.
And that, my friends, is the New Surrealism, and I don't like it. Out of the ashes, we won't rise. There's Katy, reading Alfred Döblin, and let me tell you, it is nice, the silliness we hope to make real, much better than the actualities we tried to make unreal. I used to live in Los Angeles and had the traffic lights speak to me. They said, “Move on,” and “Juked you,” a springtime of anger in my lily sneakers and crossword puzzles. Ezra Pound said Basil Bunting's definition of poetry (“condensed light”) consisted of more than all the man's creative works. I agree. When I was reading Basil Bunting I implored him to stop writing. I lived in my bedroom closet in Gardena, California, and shouted at Basil Bunting to knock it off. The nervous knocking off! It was an age of masturbation. Muskrats lived along the Wolf River where we fished, my father, brother, and I, throwing back the sheephead and eating our bass and walleye. I am not more than light on the brickwork above the D'Agastino and am the turning across that wall. At night I am a blink as blank as the caught fish turning its eye, or the stones turning always within. I'm a hive blinding inward, and I'm fire cast through the eyes. When I look, I see nothing, and when I turn away, I find, for example, the dumpster behind the hospital, the asters on the lawn.
I lived three hundred years in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and learned irony doesn't work but conceives. I found my wife in Arkansas. I don't know what to believe. I have great confidence. I am robust and sing occasionally, love horses and the gold within the walls. There was a Sunday I stood in the doorway of my apartment and saw a large cat running in a tree. That is the old reality. The newer is less violent to the eyes but more to the body. There was a Sunday I was blind drunk and saw the sloshing of myself in the same tree limb, and hated the breath of myself, and loved the hatred of self and all things, and found the rapture of forgiveness in doing violence unto my life, and loving my life, and woke up stepping out of the flames into Katy. She was asleep in a bookstore where we lived a thousand years, when the stars still had names for our lives and God said he wasn't. There would be a Christmas yet and out of the first package came deception, ours to hold, and so we learned it was like any hollow wall. We holidayed in Berlin and slept late. How unbearable for you the tedium of complicity, maybe. The subway rent our days. We lived in a flat with a filmmaker and rolled into bed. There were sounds on the street. For example, the war was over and we were living on many sides of the streets at once. A kid in Prenzlauerberg screamed at us. We said we were Italians. I broke a beer glass in Prague. I'm tired of my personal biography of America. Only in this landscape does the still heart listen. No more stories. The Avenues have shuffled into sleep, and a ceiling fan harries in the window. I'm the blind beggar of Panama, and God continues snoring in the wound round us and will until when to be is as was.
[ page 1 of 1 ]