from The Ambition of Ghosts: I. Remembering into Sleep
I. Separation Precedes Meeting
The cat so close
to the fire
I smell scorched
breath. Parents,
silent, behind me,
a feeling of
trees that might fall.
Or dogs.
A poem,
like trying
to remember,
is a movement
of the whole body.
You follow the
fog
into more fog.
Maybe the door ahead
divides
the facts
from natural affection. How
can I know. I meet
too many
in every mirror.
2.
When I was little,
was I I?
My sister? A wolf
chained,
smothered in green virtues?
Slower
time
of memory. Once
I’ve got something
I lie
down on it
with my whole body.
Goethe quotations, warm
sand, a smell of hay,
long afternoons.
But it
would take a road
would turn, with space,
in on itself,
would turn
occasion into offer.
3.
For days I hold
a tiny landscape between
thumb
and index:
sand,
heather,
shimmer of blue between pines.
No smell: matchbook.
Sand as schematic as
Falling
into memory,
down,
with my blood,
to the accretions
in the arteries,
to be read with the whole
body, in the chambers
of the heart.
The light: of the match,
struck,
at last.
4.
Concentration: a frown
of the whole body. I can’t
remember. Too many
pasts
recede
in all directions.
Slow movement into
Distant boots.
Black beetles at night. A smell
of sweat.
The restaurant,
yes. You’ve no idea
how much my father used to eat.
Place thick with smoke.
Cards. Beer foaming over
on the table.
And always
some guy said I ought
to get married,
put a pillow behind my eyes
and, with a knowing
sigh, spat
in my lap.
5.
The present.
As difficult as
the past, once a place
curves into
Hips swinging elsewhere.
Castles in sand.
Or Spain. Space
of another language.
Sleep
is a body of water.
You follow your lips
into its softness. Far down
the head finds its level
6. Tropisms
Inward, always. Night
curls the clover leaf
around its sleep.
Tightly.
The bodies of the just
roll,
all night,
through subterranean caves
which turn
in on themselves.
Long
tunnel
of forgetting. Need
of blur. The air,
large, curves
its whole body.
Big hammering waves
flatten my
muscles.
Inward, the distances: male
and female fields,
rigorously equal.
7.
The drunk fell toward me
in the street. I hope
he wasn’t
disappointed. Skinned
his sleep.
November.
And a smell of snow. Quite normal,
says the landlord, the master
of rubbish, smaller
and smaller in my
curved mirror.
I have un-
controllable
good luck: my sleep
always turns dense
and visible. There
are many witches
in Germany. Their songs
descend in steady half-tones
through you.
8.
You’ll die, Novalis says, you’ll die
following endless rows
of sheep into your
even breath.
Precarious,
like Mozart, a living
kind of air,
keeps the dream
spinning
around itself, its
missing core.
Image
after image of pleasure
of the whole body
deepens
my sleep:
fins.
9. Introducing Decimals
A dream, like trying
to remember, breaks open words
for other,
hidden meanings. The grass
pales by degrees, twigs
quaver glassily,
ice
flowers the window.
Intimate equations more complicated
than the coordinates of past
and Germany. The cat
can’t lift its paw,
its leg longer and longer
with effort.
A crying fit
is cancelled. An aria jelled
in the larynx.
Nothing moves in the cotton
coma: only Descartes
pinches himself
an every fraction
must be solved.
Copyright Credit: Rosmarie Waldrop, "The Ambition of Ghosts: 1: Remembering Into Sleep..." from Another Language: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1997 by Rosmarie Waldrop. Reprinted by permission of Rosmarie Waldrop.
Source: Another Language: Selected Poems (Talisman House Publishers, 1997)