Eric Hoffman


Amos 5: 8-24
in some seson whenne softe was the sunne

All mercies shrivel,
all boasts of nations erase,

the massive anthems become a broken choir
muted hymns cannot place.


1.

Scribes tend to mercantilism, the peasantry pursues starvation.
The unlettered aristocracy tend to militaristic fame,

to defend, they say, the civilian population
from foreign aristocrats in search of venal glory.

We cannot all be kings and queens
and run the nation like a slum, an inherited debt.

Vaults are made the graves of dead currencies;
all is beggarly outside the master’s kitchen.

The most insignificant arrear serves as the small mean
between the barest subsistence and personal luxury.

They devour themselves and succor on freedom,
the ultimate price of vigilance.

Plunder and murder, quietly legalized,
keeps the grease from cobwebbed guillotines.

The slick-booted patrolman roars,
declares the absolute right of righteous annihilation.


2.

Amos, tasked with the difficult mission
of condemnation in a smooth season, was ignored.

Many said intelligent things they knew to be true
and saw strange things in the distance –

why must one peer into darkness for truth
when the lies are so brilliantly illuminated?

All data is observation, all politick disillusion and distortion.
A cry went up where there would be heaven.

Righteous indignation is the luxury of the rabble masses.
What sunders us must also piece us together.


3.

We intend to distinguish ourselves from the merely topographic,
from that shining deity who makes marginal the stars of heaven.

We cannot speak properly of paradise, for we are not there.
We color blind force with reckoning.

The Word is the thinnest possible surface,
the truest point of a blade.

Prophecy is poetry, particular and demanding.
The true prophet speaks harshly when hope is still alive.

The prophet’s words are a burden instead of a flame.
When the prophets speak, they do not listen.

They eye the swift horses that loiter in the corral,
and in fleeing risk the death of little children.


4.

The gate bar of Damascus is broken.
The world is on fire with the heat of resignation.

Passion consumes it, the blind force of judgment,
the Earth drilled with Elizabethan ruff,

clouds of tornadoes in fists that clutch rags of confusion,
shining stupidities mistaken for God.

The torrents of primeval waters do not hear it.
Nor do the animals fixed in the hunt or dazed with sleep,

nor the frigid vast palaces of light in the remote alpine,
nor the ocean’s alien deep, nor the frozen millennia.


5.

Turmoil persists in the company of ghosts.
Stones swell and flowers speak. The earth thirsts.

A massive upheaval of sea cascades,
high as the topmast a thousand waves.

We, the drifting chaff,
are swept away in the monstrous torrent of dismissive spit.

Yet comes a cry from the Fish Gate, and from the Second Quarter,
thunder from the hills as the Mortar people wail.

From afar, observers watch from the Serene Sea,
centered upon its apex,

an assemblage of the Chiaroscurans
above the pyramid’s slopes.


6.

Determinate evil in ferric waters, alkaline, unveiled,
swirls of porous yolky eyes, opaque, and grim.

Birds of air and fish of sea rendered sacrificial.
Christened with ash, teeth gnash and wail.

The emplacements lie in ruins, the city streets in ruins,
the detritus cries of emptiness

while houses and shops teem with nothing.
The winds and seas have tossed us, our spear hands grow weary.

The once fertile fields are ribbed with barrenness,
the oceans choked with industry.

The seas burn to vapor, blossoms wither and fade.
The hills melt under the weight of heat,

the ground buckles and roils with quakes.
None can endure the wraith-like fire.

The ancient stones of the western hills
shatter like cannonballs thrust at metal hulls.

An oak submerged beneath the waters
remains an oak, its skin made opaque

by the murky depths, as though bones were crystal
and the dirt that covers them invisible—

their empty eyes gaze eternally into vacant skies.
The labyrinthine chasm yawns.


7.

The weakest seeks release
from the wreckage of good intent.

Children abandoned, their fingers, weak, cling tenaciously
to the minor triumph of inglorious spoiled rags.

Judgment reigns the broken dead.
The void of their eyes consumes everything.

Their emptiness amputates the living.
Their houses plundered, their wealth laid waste.

The last day hastens, breaks in the blood red dawn.
Complacency boils in the absence of an enemy’s guilt.

The warrior throws down his sword and wails
ruination, unending ruination, darkness, and gloom.

Defeat, the rotted bodies of our brothers,
our only peace a seized thresher.

The city is desolation, its citizenry disconsolate.
Noon is uprooted from the clocks.

The poisoned world is a relic of polity, a rain of blasts,
an home of rubble, desolation.

Blinded, they feel the sting of wind on shorn faces.
Muted, they scream with their eyes.

Wounded, they remove steel
from the hot cavity of flesh.


8.

Our lives are a disorderly archive.
Our flesh falls away like the walls of a conquered city.

Pain is cradled in the nerves,
the same loathsome darkness that enfolds us.

What blue ruin will the fallen walls display
when at last the desperate shadows retreat?

Distress that nothing conveys the mind’s contents,
neither the body nor its prayers they are obliged to hear,

obscured by the blast of trumpets
and the footfall of millions.

Blood will turn the dust to mud
and the flesh will stink of shit.


9.

Must they bring us to nothing in order to save us?
And we who cannot speak of paradise,

for we are not there, can it not speak or think of us?
A fraction of infinity is still infinity.

They laughed at lame Hephaistos
as he hobbled ‘round the great table, pouring nectar.

What will they make of us, as we crowd
the bitten fields, soiled, defiled, oppressed?

We who took no correction,
who refused to trust and humble ourselves before them?

We are those who carry the crosses and flags,
and in battle assume the shape of the liberty bell.

We remain unified in hope of conveyance of the geometric,
companioned to a few simple words

as guide and comfort in this vast wilderness,
occluded and lost.


10.

We dig our way into hell
and the life-giving waters consume the flesh,

the nourishing sun scorches the Earth.
The soils deplete. The harvest starves.

White dust collects on the heads of the wretched.
Their survival is the small hook

that pierces the fiercest shark
and brings him to submission

to the pain of the hook, worsened considerably
by the intensity of his thrashing.


11.

We are the skeleton’s soft marionettes.
We have journeyed from wilderness to wilderness.

We will taste the corrosives that replace water.
We will hear the roar of the lion without prey.

We will see the ensnared peregrine struggle for release
and the children like mice removed from its unforgiving talons.


12.

Are we the only family the universe has known?
Can that fathomless expanse clotted with immensities,

with unchartable distances that outlast the measure of time,
diminish itself enough to perceive our insignificance?

Is the broad desert concerned with a mote of dust?
The ocean with one single-celled prokaryote?

Is the ineffable simply another drab task of a clerk?
Our words are chalk to the limestone.

We collect our zones, our longitudinal forces,
the wooden gyres and steel pendulums, and assign their motions.

None shall know the cause of the fractures,
from earthquake, or war, or the slow cylinder of time

that has invisibly picked the wall apart piece by piece
and hidden the remnants where none can find them.


13.

There is the clean teeth that have bread to eat,
the child with the breast to nuzzle.

There is sun to nourish them.
There is earth rich with minerals.

There is rain on the crops and on the crops of your neighbor.
There is the mountain, and there is the wine to drink,

there is the feast that requires no sacrifice.
Everyone drinks, from none is the taste withheld.

Nothing is withheld but dread.
The blight is an unreal memory.

The gardens increase, the vineyards, and fruit trees.
The captive horses carry their riders willingly.

The weaponry’s trajectory becomes confused.
The plagues remain in a distant country.


14.

Morning is always dark upon the plains.
The wind, untethered from the world,

fashions the thunderhead, paints sound
throughout the valley, in the branches of the pines

and among the switches and hedgerows.
The abandoned city sits forlorn upon the horizon,

a silhouette of bankrupt concepts, a geometric pillar of ash,
its gleaming towers footnotes to the vaulted caverns

where old stones count the millennia
as though they were a single drop of rain.


15.

No one knows the things of God.
He breaks out like a fire among the ashes.

He demands repentance.
Master, and slave. Slave, and master.

He comes between us as reconciliation,
as though righteousness can be commanded,

or hunger tempered, or the child’s screams
met with anything other than agony.

He turns the shadow of death into morning?
We lay waste to the death of morning

by the eye’s insatiable hunger for the light.
He made the Pleiades and Orion, yet so did we.

The internal-combustion engine,
then animal pragmatism, then nothing.

Tipping points, by degrees, achieved
on a quark or gluon scale, unobserved.

A diamond that survived the ordeals,
a salamander that lives in the fire.


16.

The poet’s ashes are scattered near the pyramid
of Caius Cestius, somewhere near Rome,

who spoke of the remnant statue
whose contours are a testament to civilization,

who made the poor the packhorses of taxes.
The granaries are empty, the glebes have withered.

All is dry dust and depletion, a monochrome of brown
stippled with osiers, a plain pockmarked with yawning thirst.

Bees wander in a hungry daze, the tint of delirium
in the small lenses of their five eyes,

compositions of blue and gray, synthesis and dissolution,
desultory lights, local congeries of protoplasmic eggs.

Nailed to the wall, left to molder and wither,
like Bacon’s library at Oxford, an orderly forest,

bric-a-brac democracies shed.
The moralist must now be the devil.

Monks with skulls in their cells,
the beautiful bone in fixed jest,

a firebrand plucked from the fire,
a broken cromlech among the ruins.




Eric Hoffman is the author of several books of poetry, the most recent being This Thin Mean: New Selected Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and Presence of Life (Dos Madres, 2018). A revised and expanded edition of Oppen: A Narrative, his biography of George Oppen, was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2018.
 
 
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