Dark Room

Eliot Cardinaux

Poems,

2009 - ’10

The Stranger’s Song

In your night of the rosemary of yesterday

The dewdrop that dries up at noontime

glistens in your night of the rosemary of yesterday,

and a longing that weeps for everything past

and the absence of your image brings forth a stranger’s faith.

My body of sticks and leaves calls to the hunter

and a bird who carries no stones in your night,

and the sky tells a dreamer nothing about the last winter

or a pair of lovers’ rhododendrons in my name or your eyes.

And the sun will be carried away, like a stone

in my old friend’s palm. And violas will cry low

for a beast and its absence in the blood of your night,

your night of the rosemary of yesterday.

I dream of your waiting

Persephone's last teardrop has fallen
and I dream of your waiting.

The echo is in the silver of her flute,

and the palm’s ascent without a moon,

a bronze guitar that weeps,

weeps to the river and waits for no one.

My exile watches the east sun and the west
and falls in love with her faith and her two doves,

and I dream, I dream of your waiting.

With you the road is endless

With you the road is endless.

Winter has not yet come to the slopes

of your beauty and my tired feet

are a chrysanthemum’s sun.

Love is hiding, just as a dream is there

in front of my eyes and the last song

is a stone that torments an ideal.

with you the road is endless.

The more I ask

The more I ask about love and the stranger’s song –

the butterfly migrates with the wind,

a rose’s blood frightens a soldier

and the tears of the stranger’s field of poppies slow.

That my yesterday has split in my body

keeps my tomorrow close to my freedom,

and the river asks, “how many wars before Damascus,

how many years of peace before the flood?”

What of your ears

The sun on the wings of the blackbird,

here and then gone, and the salt of identity

that wounds the present – what of your ears

and of yesterday’s pain has flown to my song?

You have returned to me as a dove’s image

and an olive tree where Rilke, like a myth,

suffered the world. And the void’s evocation

of faraway thunder in you…

And I have loved you

The answer, like a clock’s heart

still beats in rhythm with the wings of doves,

but the evening sky does not relinquish its blood

to my language, here or there.

And I have loved you.

The sky’s green

and the sun on the river

are not a crocus, white on orange!

While I was waiting for you

While I was waiting for you

the blossoms of the Lenten rose

cooed in the shade of metaphor

to my blood’s longing behind poetry

and I made room for a thought of you

in my soul’s width and asked,

“the relentless passing of the cloud

in what I see of you – is it my earth

that asks, “who am I but the water

that floods my language, stranger,” ”

for I am no longer myself, and this unknown land

is the only place known to me.

When I ask how much of sleeplessness

When I ask how much of sleeplessness

has found me, I let the salt in the dream

pay homage to the wind’s direction

and say,

follow my sparrow hawk

on another road so that what passes

finds its flutes and its alcohol,

and when the fox burns like a butterfly,

close to my breast, of two swallows

and meaning beyond winter…

I am becoming

the poem’s water as a mandolin

keeps its sorrow on the banks,

even as it plays its song…

In the Ruins of Myth

The life of a crowd

A phonograph,

lining the faces of public deities

with a gleam of old snow,

sitting in plain view,

blows like sacrificial smoke

through the moment’s causeway.

A forest flaps its bird wings,

surrounding itself,

someone searching for notation –

a blue sun shouting at empty grain

finds desertion. O open road,

the life of a crowd passes

like an idea that was safe at first,

I have a name still,

my life is laid out

on a sheet of iron in the sun.

Here, at midday

the leaves’ dance continues

without stopping, my horizon

parting from me

like a gold cloud in the heat.

Here, at midday

the sky eclipses the street,

the weeds grow up through cracks,

thirty feet high,

tumble like clouds of white dust.

Here, at midday

I push with my shadow

into the sun’s wheat,

a landscape opens,

from the mountains comes an echo.

Maybe death lets out a sigh

from the other side of this painting,

a Cassiopeia in the day sky,

the abyss of a rose petal,

sink with time into a thought of night.

Summer smoke

Summer thoughts,

a thin tone in the dark,

these places breathe like

passages.

I have no shadow,

this shadow holds me.

In a world hissing,

lights on in the house

from the woods;

it’s never just a house.

Night a transparent stone

clenched in the reality of stone,

like winter’s voice,

echoing long.

Summer thoughts,

language is a cluster of axes

in a portrait of air without moonlight.

I am not without them,

lizards on a stone next to me

carry the blaze of the sun fasting through night.

If identity is a lantern

it has turned to smoke.

If summer finds pause,

it is because we have returned home

with broad feelings,

thoughts laid flat,

the candle in the haze.

Darkness is thick

in the story’s many trees,

cut down to grow.

Friendship leaves us,

that stranger sitting upright,

alone with an axe in the world.

Sunlight gasping for song

when it lights the green,

the world clamors:

“don’t touch me.”

Darkness is the song

but it is the page on which notation waits.

I leave my work without hurry,

summer ferments the catalogue of dreams.

He wanders past the old brook

The water is clear,

iron coats the rocks,

trees stand like guards,

their souls stretched skyward.

Immensity.

The spectral moves,

maps, consequences

in three dimensions,

specks of the historical –

climbing atop the fog.

All that’s inside him,

a body, a face

draws nearer to you.

But eyes that come out of dreams

find things where they have left them.

No sunlight has mended the ruins,

and one man holds all the wealth.

Someone has kidnapped the mother of the river.

Someone’s imagination has run wild.

Memory sprays toward the sea, in the east

and a woman heads south, bearing long her load.

He has collapsed by the old brook.

Trees stand like marble

and the sun pours through the leaves.

This land remembers,

loved ones who speak from a corner

don’t remember the dead

with candles on the shoreline.

Out on the sea, someone weeps alone

in a little black boat, the sea is so vast, so vast.

The Hospital

Trauma shift.

The hospital is empty.

He gazes at his bare feet,

naked, like a man

communicating with animals.

Torn clothes.

It’s been two years.

Streets move

in tender discourse

between psychology and history.

The hospital is full

of objects. Trees and power lines

from the window

shimmer with light

and breeze.

Under the earth,

a rumbling;

the miner on the streets

draws cries

and strange wedding bells,

the story’s never finished.

Power lines,

gutters, the wind,

all resound in him,

each like a well,

the hole is sealed

like an old wound.

He watches it pass

through his field of vision,

singing.

I have seen myself

I have seen myself

between the old man my neighbor

and my rusted mirror.

History is a constantly rising rate,

that hole in the door,

you find how many years’

refuse has leaked in.

A complaint is a school of fish

flashing for a moment

on the surface of a black pool.

Ripples find their darkness,

a constellation stranded there.

I have seen myself

between her sleeping body

and the side road in the lush green night.

I have seen myself fading

into the eternal discourse.

Between the young man my neighbor

and my rusted mirror,

a leaflet spreads the sun.

The years’ stones only make tours

around night’s favored gardens,

that despair someone coated black

will turn to the window, follow its own heart.

Duty

Treading with the utmost care,

finding my way

to an office building

on the side of things.

A republic of mice

scurries toward a global sorrow.

Lifetimes pass

and we wonder at the new leaves.

Carrying a blue torch

in the district at the end of love,

flame wounds me

and my language fills with smoke.

I don’t have much,

that hint of wine

touches the tongue,

opens the hearts waves.

Further From the Road

(Ex)colere, exercere, studere

Cast in a glimpse,

bronze angles,

cry for us –

what was tempered

from the dust;

we were not,

our eyes were not,

all that did not belong to us.

Gathered, they gathered

the wheat, the moonlight,

the word spoke,

primaevus,

the young, was a drab shawl

and marked the man, Abel’s brother

for what crime he didst commit.

And Hesse, in doubt,

called to an older friend,

and called not.

And was no sermon

and Pilate was not there,

the students

and Pound’s beard,

but a stubble.

And envy spoke not,

silent, Academicus,

and spoke of it all,

and was not of shame.

And I awoke, seeing the birds around me,

burdenless, and the mountain was not,

and was not survival,

and the beholder stared upon the perceived

like a child with his mouth open,

and the birds around me,

turned not their eyes.

And drank, they drank coffee

in the room, furnished with old oak,

and the book, covered with dust,

and on the shelf,

a bust of Ceasar,

soggy with whining.

September, ’09 - January, ’10

The Bridge

The hum of summer,

arched brow of the transparent bridge,

half-finished to heaven.

I learn again

what I know of knowledge,

leaning against the mystery.

I find it open,

this door to the desert

from the myths.

It’s not the water

smoking in the east,

the sun is not a thing like this,

an idea that drinks itself

from the borders.

Calm like a Moorish song,

I watch an old dance.

The flowers growing up,

the sky with clouds flowing

at a faster pace than I.

The bridge is my road –

two musics, of land and of sky

mount a horse that left me

on my way from the forest.

And I must play

on the strings of night

the sorrow of the land

to clear the air

of a laugh that wounds

a million stars.

The bridge is where a stranger

once stumbled upon himself

in the music of the stranger

and learned again

what he knew of knowledge

on which a mystery now leans.

July, ’10

For Jim Krull (I)

Smile so

the daft and pure

expanse of watering,

this – town is like a swell of music,

panting for warm phrase

exudes –

wanderers,

not strictly,

Catapult the empty sugar jar

into the sky

for to uncover

is to sing

and you, not daft,

not pure,

don’t let the other ring.

Raised head for what was true,

old things, not accrue.

September 9^th, ’10

The Shape of a Stone

Conserves the forest
in its green,
jar to the shape of a stone,
time willing it
into these lives
like a little stroll,
back out of the hold;

this rock, the shape
of it, the shape of
things to come,
straight up and down,
your brand of suit
like this tree,
viewed as he is,
viewed as you see it.

And the road gets longer,
“this way,”
becomes “goodbye,”
this nature of things
as nature in scope forms
too these forms that grow
up from it,
someone you didn’t
know.

                        October 23^rd, ’10



Gasping for Breath

The distance crowds around me
like filth. The form takes shape
like a light in my heart,
invisible, arching to the depths.

A green machinery
that moves in alliance
with its purpose
beats out its dull tones.

I am of the mind that it is somehow me,
but this sound is only
the beating of my heart,
gasping for its breath.

                        October 31^st, ’10

Long Distances

To talk to you
when you are not there,
a glance, so involuntary
I remembered,
I really don’t know how you are.

Scent of rain
a measureless inspiration,
not so, desolation,
mi amor in delicata –
these I lose willingly.

A face in finding it, sadly
perforates, this jungle still
I hold as long as it sees time,
a wondering, not so, resignation,
only departed home.

                        October, 15^th, ’10

Turtle and Outcast

Nature is a rock that can be entered
through an outcast’s crop of ragweed.
Already he has found the substance to be chilled.
And in the cup the smoke has turned
30 years, 40 years, 50 years back
to where the tree made its root,
and bird-song has reached across the universe
into the outcast’s ear and through his garden.

Let’s leave this place, it’s dull,
cries the outcast into the black hole.
And he and the turtle he had known all along
started off for that long forsaken home.

                        December 15^th, ’10

Fast

An impression of pleasing
curved mother’s glasses’ rim
to weight soon indelectable,
while impressions unfold
from a moving eye,

in a such great wait
never were there
more presence of opulation
fantastic beyond all centered out
from in, is passion’s light
weightless formless birth.

                        December 27^th, ’10

Abandoned Railroad

When puffs of smoke
moving handworn
music of a moment
is unlocked, and sound
placed upon an open chamber
finds its rattle –
in blessèd heed,
find the abandoned railroad
in the self-less figure
where began to separate
and look upon
no person but
a frame in which
cool water often waited,
there is strength
to be spoken.
by another,
whom that figure
in the autumn
            only color –

                        December 31^st, ’10

Dove

Road from my pen,
it's a road nonetheless,
night on the inside
catching birds.

Warm-lit rooms,
the sounds of cars,
I tell myself, "stop,
and go further from the road."

There's a garden.
And an Olive tree from Syria,
where a dove has learned to fly each day
from the wounds love left in the land.

Fly dove, from this stone building,

fly to my sleeping love like two moons in a water jar.
Carry your message toward two prayers without reason,
and the flames in your body to no destination
so an angel's psalm can continue in the oranges on the table.

Hold his embroidery to the light
when two churches spend their nights far above the cemetery
and fly to the red sun, dove, scattering leaves
about you like the ashes of three shepherds.

And descend on extended wings, dove of america,
dove of Wallace Stevens, poet who died peacefully.

November 24^th-December 1^st, ’10

Weekly bits and morsels

Friday, January 21, 2011

The Answer - Robert Creeley

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Haikai

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Bei Dao - Toxin

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Years of Indescretion (a John Ashbery poem)

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Some Kafka

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Dark Room (Eliot Cardinaux, poems, 2009-'10)

Poems,

2009 - ’10

In your night of the rosemary of yesterday

I dream of your waiting

With you the road is endless

The more I ask

What of your ears

In the Ruins of Myth

The life of a crowd

Here, at midday

Summer smoke

He wanders past the old brook

The Hospital

Duty

soggy with whining.

September, ’09 - January, ’10

The Bridge