Absence Sensorium
Absence Sensorium was written in collaboration with the late San Francisco poet, Daniel Davidson.
Like participation, perhaps resistance
has been forced upon us too.
A double imperial eagle, painted
on the synagogue ceiling
at Hodorov in seventeen sixty four,
nods to power. The hare caught
in its talons pictures power's consequence.
Germans burnt down Hodorov's
old synagogue to the ground;
did the hare escape? A hare
draped o'er the hunter's shoulder, yet Esau was
denied his patrimony,
slumped before the fire and died.
Hare and hunting dog alike, eaten by hawks.
Strange instruments have pieced us
together in an arduous, cursory
course absent sensoria
that listen in on an unending escape.
Blood in ears, we hear a sound,
we pause. Bounding through grass, we
perfect our misplaced bounty.
It's been heard so many times, so many
ways... ok we'll say it then
in this way. Its only been a hundred and
fifty years or so ago
a period of time that will in fact pass
again I'm sure, in some manner of speaking.
Somebody will be reading something somewhere
and that's saying something, no?
Here, things continue to slip back together
though in a different configuration.
I want to be like a TV character,
though I haven't given it a lot of thought.
I fall in love in my sleep
with women I know, but know I'll never meet.
With a sound intelligence,
and the right environment
you can survive anything
yeah right, bub... Wanna buy a bridge, between here
and there perhaps? I wonder what the fare is
in probabilities, one's capacity
of survival, in the mind.
I found a paper bag at my door, a gift
to myself, an accident
a movement of my body
picking it up, finding what I'd never lost.
It seems reasonable to wonder about
the speaker, if you ask me
present thought, future hearer
somewhere a thought between them.
We still drink our wine here, and for good reason
or drank it, I can't keep it straight anymore
who is speaking what to whom.
I'm not copping out; I'd really like some mail
from the pulsating gasses of this screen, or
maybe we already are.
"There" was exile; air was cool, but lay outside
the walls, an instant revived
not by, nor in, memory, not certainty
but plain luck that lets us speak.
An aberrant warmth has fooled
the buds, teased them out onto
tree branches; now they must die. Crocus that pushed
through last week's softened ground this week's cold withers.
We too, constant enough to say our goodbyes
without knowing whom we touch
or what future, uprooted and broken, will
calm the greedy arrogance of our gene pool,
we pull tree from ground and put pencil to page.
We crush the arrogant kingdom in our days,
a shopping cart world, beneath a duct tape sky.
Hopelessly in love forever and always
we've never had much resistance to crushing
except in aggregate, already between
the two of them, soft and hard
and then in uninterrupted whispering
displacing the binary, or including
them. We've given our goodbyes.
At some point, the screen goes blank
absence waxing a discussion, the new moon
here, patiently somewhere else, or just waiting.
I take a breath by my own intervention...
and then forget, continue
I didn't know where that was
until, handing it to you,
I decided to tell the simple truth
& instantly fell silent,
a voice swelling in broken regular song.
Do you think "something went wrong"
or right? Just one way to write,
in ink powdered of pounded or borrowed bones.
::
Dan and I began Absence Sensorium in the Fall of 1993 and finished it about 18 months later. It was published in 1996 by Potes & Poets Press. Dan died by his own hand while the book was in production.
Absence Sensorium is a book-length poem — 526 seven-line stanzas. Each line is made up of either 7 or 11 syllables. The form is Spanish, called a silva, and was used by Luis Góngora, among others. The selection above comprises the last 13 stanzas of the book.
Absence Sensorium is available from Small Press Distribution or Amazon.