A
Library
Six
granite ramps rise
to
glass walls that
rise into snow.
Come-and-go
constant
visitors, mostly
from the
circling-around
university. But not
all. Anything might happen
here. For instance, a child
runs up to her mother
and
whispers, I found a
river
to fill your
cup. A river found
maybe in some book,
maybe
flowing, barely
visible,
beneath a black marble
floor.
Hogarth: You classical
archeologists,
who have found
so much in Greece
or in
Asia Minor, forget
this city.
Lovers stroll, share
plush sofas, or lean against
each other in the stacks. One
says,
570 BCE, he
was born the same day she hurled
herself into the Aegean.
The same moment, I wonder?
Pairs of lovers walk
suspended pathways between
floors. Walk and think: best
way.
They speak about
thought. Mind does not think
intermittently. What it
is to be
intellect does
not lie in
its being thought
by us. When intellect thinks that
existent thing that is an
intellect in actuality,
it does
not think an existing
thing
outside itself, but only
thinks itself in unconscious
thought.
Below
that walkway, voices. Other
voices that drift up.
Each voice drifting
up from a mouth, invisible,
below. Two lovers embrace in
a stairwell. On the step beneath them,
a dropped book — Mouth
Pieces — has
landed on its spine and splayed
open.
Drifting up a stairwell, Mouth:
both its eyes, two ears, one hand,
one
leg, with foot. Today it wishes
to say
numbers, so it does,
thusly: numbers. Just the way it might
say lilacs, or way.
“Why, Mouth,
your eyes, ears,
appendages?” Head, face,
arm, hip need
them no longer.
Now they are of
me: whereof I
speak;
whatof I speak./////
Now Mouth is tired of answering.
This happens,
since it was really
born to
interrogate. Drifting,
again, in a
stairwell, two eyes
observe, on a
landing, two
lovers pressed
against a railing.
What [are
they]? What [do they do]? What
[physical space do
they
[inhabit], [and] where? All other
unimportant
questions
remain
unasked./////
They ask Mouth how
it was born.
Again, it
says. “All right, how
were you born? Again. What
do you mean?” Once more./////
Rising from what is best
known
to what is unknown
in the unconscious.
Those on higher floors look out
into February
early-evening, liquid
violet light, over
snow. Later,
they gaze at a night,
snow shushing
against glass, snow
that drifts down and
up,
that could be ash drifting up, then
down, up from and back into
ravening flames
invisible
below, ash lifting
free from books,
parchments, scrolls, a
world vanishing in
fire.
Out of the Library’s ashes, she
rose,
rises. Tenth Muse. Yet still
hurled, hurls herself from
that high rock.
Lucan: Nor did the fire fall
only upon the
vessels: the
houses
near the sea ignited
from the spreading heat, and
the winds fanned the conflagration,
till the flames, smitten by the eddying
gale, rushed over the
roofs.
Her death day,
his birth
day. She made, from sacred
singing, new poetics. He
heard metal
on metal
harmonies, took
music’s
heart, turned it into only
math. Legitimization
as distortion.
Here,
it is possible, though not
painful to be lost. Passing:
long stacks, receding to
shadows;
cases of open texts,
maps, daggers, goblets, astrolabes,
buttons, gloves; era after
era, under glass;
era
rhyming with
era. Then books left
on
hundreds of tables. One
entitled Times Rhyme:
They built
reverence for inevitability
into the
arches. But, oh, if only the elms
could have
been saved. The mind does not know itself, except
in so far
as it perceives the ideas
of the
modifications of the body. Consequently,
she refers
to reason’s rhyme and explains:
Immense, marvelous
golden
wheels roll over me, each day more of them.
They
turn me
into light so I can study the timbre
of radiance. Her
neighbors spent the whole afternoon
in her home but
never once uttered the word
condolence.
They maintained that every night the dead
entered
their house and were roundly scolded, told they had
to return
to their own moldy hostels. And they
forced her to
choose: the cave is either the
rock, or it is the hole./////
Standing with her left elbow
against the cigarette
machine, she surveyed the tables. She asked if we’d
ever heard of that sort of rhyming
before: what did she
say it was
called? It appeared to be summer. Eye
of the
daisy. Out there, rain blinded the
barren,
stuccoing it
only, but as soon as he emerged from
that
tunnel, they noticed the horror — mouth hole and
those
hundreds of his hands. Of course, her
father
was in one
of his moods again. Out of
the
ground, rising all day like a huge face./////
The circling-around
university and the
circling-around city can
be here, inside glass walls that rise
into snow.
White and yellow
windows — university’s,
city’s —
become smears in wet
snow
against glass. University,
city are
here. Enclosed.
Hogarth
advised giving up on that
old city. But, with water
dripping,
echoing: We
supposed old Alexandria
was destroyed, only
to
realize that when you
stroll on the sidewalks, it
is just below your feet.
One cistern, three stories
deep.
Egyptian, Corinthian,
Roman elements in the
arches
constructed from
above-ground
ruins. As much
cathedral
as water supply.
Underneath
the streets and
houses, the whole city
is hollow. One
canal from the
great river carried flood water
into
perhaps thousands
of
immense chambers.
1842, the Croton
Aqueduct finally
brought clean water to
the city. From the Receiving
Reservoir to the
Distributing Reservoir — Fifth
Avenue between 40th
and 42nd,
where
the Library now stands.
Mouth enters —
well, hops —
into the
academy.
Long, lonely — well, empty
—
corridors.
Silence in
those hallways. Two ears hear
another silence: of ones who
don’t wish to be found, to be
found out. The great hall is ornate,
unpeopled, terribly hushed.
Hand holds an
unshelved book that
won’t open. One after
another, books that
won’t open./////
Certain reservoir rocks used
for the foundation can still
be seen. Cornerstone, with relic
box, 11/10, 1902.
1897, John Shaw
Billings sketched floor plan
on a postcard. 16 years until
completion. Three floors.
$9,000,000. $20,000,000
for the plot.
Occasionally
Mouth
wants
nostrils, but knows
it
can’t have everything:
no chiming of resources.
Eyes, ears, hand, leg —
enough. Though
one
day hand picks up paper
money
from pavement.
Mouth studies
it closely, then
wonders, If I had another
hand, could one give
the other this money?
Mouth drops the bill, moves on.
Mouth wishes to
hug its
own poverty./////
Most
probably that library
housed the entire of
Greek literature. Demetrius
had
at his disposal a large
budget in order to collect,
if
possible, all the books
in
the world; to the best
of
his ability, he carried out
the king’s objective.
Carrère and Hastings designed
even the wastebaskets. Pink
Tennessee marble lions: Patience
and Fortitude. Opening day,
1911: very first
call slip, for Della Bacon’s
Shakespeare study; text, not
catalogued. First book delivered,
seven minutes after
request, Nikolai Grot’s
Nravstvennye idealy
nashego vremeni,
(Nietzsche and Tolstoy’s
moral ideas).
If he should suffer embarrassment, yet still believe,
and
intercede for Zoar, and ask to be sent to the
city of
safety, he will find a place where he cannot
rest on laurels, where it is too close and small for even
the best set of morals. Eye of
day, or else true salt of
earth. So what lies deep under
the threads? He went out of his
mind while he was quite a young man and composed
continually
in the asylum, using sheets
of music paper he had been using for a very
different purpose, saying with delight,
That’s all the works of man are worth. If a
person go on
analyzing names into words, and enquiring also
into the elements out of which the words are formed,
and keeps
on always repeating this process, he who has to
answer him will at last
give up the enquiry in despair.
But at
what point ought he to lose heart? Must
he not stop when
he comes to the names which are
the elements of all other
names and sentences; for these
cannot be supposed to be
made up of other names? The great bridge to the mainland:
she
walks it, aware that gulls are flying beneath her feet./////
Here, picking up books left
by others on tables: beginning
with
the exact pages left open.
Mouth: Bridge. And repeats.
One
after another spills out
into a line at end of
which
a tiny, sad Mouth stands and
looks back to realize that it
has crossed all the bridges
before coming to them./////
Here, any patron holds
an open hand
before a shelf’s empty
space, and, like Athena sliding
palpably
forth from impalpable
air, the searched-for book will
emerge.
To the Mouseion
Ptolemy’s heir appended the
Library, which held
an enormous collection
of scrolls, including all those
the
government seized
for
copying, from foreign ships.
In
the peripatos, they
(research
students, really)
strolled
and conversed.
Someone
comes toward Mouth, and stops
to stare.
I see the person
seeing
me but cannot see
me
seeing. And am I now
a mirror? — with a fine, finest
mesh
draped before it?
Do I now take this mesh
into
the mirror that I am?////
The one leaving and the one
staying. The one leaving
shifts, blurs, and returns,
shifted, blurred. Part of the one
having
left is left behind, or a small something is brought
back. The one having stayed must revise,
must, because both
must eat. Inhabiting has to be a truth; permission
has
to be allowed. Eyes meeting, pulling
clarity
from
another’s mind. It is in the nature of
reason
to
perceive things under a certain form of
eternity. Inadequate and confused ideas
follow
by the same necessity as adequate
or
clear and distinct ideas. The case of
language, you see,
is
different; for when by the help of grammar we assign
the
letters alpha or beta or any other
letters
to a certain name, then if we add, or
subtract, or misplace a letter, the
name which is
written is not only written wrongly,
but not written
at all; and in any of these
cases becomes other than a name./////
Unlike the academy,
the Lyceum wasn’t
private: often lectures were
free and open to anyone.
1919, one-story
lunchroom bungalow added to
southern courtyard, which became,
eventually,
the staff’s
social and recreational
center: plays, puppet shows,
readings,
receptions, revues, an
historical pageant
ending
with
dancing in the
main lobby.
Here, each night, some stay. Pull
together
sofas or
arrange
them into corrals. Spread
blankets they’ve brought. After those long,
wandering perambulations —
rest. Galaxies of flakes swirl
in
darkness. They’ve picked up books
left by
others on tables:
In
Alexandria, thoughts
of
Olympus flickering
and
few. Parabalani, the
archbishop’s
monk militiamen,
razed
what remained of
the
Library, ruined
pagan
temples, Jewish
neighborhoods, then looked to
Hypatia,
“the witch.” Dragged her
from
a chariot, stripped her, flayed
her
skin with fragments
of oyster shells, dismembered
her,
burned her. The new
religion’s
triumph.
Mind
to Mouth: I really need
a place more rarefied. But
for one arm, one leg, scaling
that peak is
brutal. They heave
up onto the summit, bloodied
and drained. Two ears hear
a torrent of
wind. Two eyes
begin to scan the
circular
vista. Mind loves it up
there —
day after day, cold, cold
clarity. Mouth: What is that
green expanse down there?
Mind:
Nothing at all. Don’t
even
think about it. But Mouth
does, and days later: I’m taking
us all down. And in that green
field, Mouth announces, This is
the Valley of Silliness./////
Mouth
readies itself to speak
and
tells hand to carve each
statement
into a fallen twig.
I believe with certainty
that I
have one hand … with
certainty…one leg …
two eyes … two
ears. And so much
more. What with
speaking and carving, time
passes. But finally hand bends,
twists,
weaves all those twigs into
the nest that
Mouth calls home./////
Prairies don’t apologize, but it turns
out that angry
banging on the piano keys actually
can help. Or
there’s listening to Puccini while cabbage
boils. This is
what some call
Pre-established Harmony, which removes
all
notion of miracle from purely natural actions,
and makes
things run their course in an
intelligible manner.
Meanwhile, the promise-crammed air
and crocodile
are still to come; blithe ass-grabbers wait
outside the
theater. Rim keeps brightening. Each day
the
world unfolds its miracles, its atrocities.
He
was
almost the ugliest man I’d ever seen — and yet
the force of his intellect was felt in every glance
of his eyes and in
every one of his abrupt
movements. Schubert’s lieder’s notes, voice and piano,
hanging
icicles in darkness: wonder overhead, echoed, then fled./////
How about real
donkeys? If we could find one dumb
enough
to starve between
two bales, we would have evidence
against free will,
at least as far as donkeys are concerned (or
at least that
particular donkey). Staid and staying,
the biting power,
the hour, the state of wait. An
analogous condition
might be compulsive
metaphor-making
and, perhaps, punishing
rhyme. With bitter remorse, he recalled playing
piano
as a
child and feeling his mother listening
behind the parlor door; he would scream
annoyance
and stop
practicing. Once there was a Garden
Movement. Once there were Decorative Hermits./////
June, 1920, staff open
a general store in the
basement: groceries, tobacco
products, clothes, sewing
supplies. 1929-30,
busiest in their history;
often up to 1,000
visitors in the Main
Reading Room, SRO.
Ptolemy
studied mostly war but
became one of the greatest
cultural patrons. The Moueseion:
lecture halls,
labs, guest rooms. Euclid
and
Archimedes solved
problems there; Aristarchus
of Samos
concluded that
the sun centered our solar system.
For the
mathematics to work, the universe would
actually consist of ten spatial dimensions:
the extra seven dimensions have rolled up out of sight.
Y: I left it eons ago,
when radiation started
to leak. X: I left just now,
but Ted is still back
inside.
Z is the entanglement of all
three. No drama
at the event
horizon. Information loss
paradox.
They pause at their entryway, unwilling to
permit the golden dying of afternoon
to relinquish
them.
George Ives would have his boys sing in one key
while he accompanied in
another; he built
instruments to produce
quarter-tones; he played
his cornet over a
pond so Charlie could gauge the effect
of space. And can we rightly speak of a beauty that is
always
passing away, and is first this and then that;
must not the same thing be born and retire
and
vanish while the word is in our mouths?
As George entered his house, he heard five-year old
Charles pounding out
dad’s drum parts, tone clusters, on their piano with this little
fists. They are particles of each
other, so they
can be transformed into each other by charge conjugation
and thus have opposite strangeness.
The computation
necessary to verify
that Alice and Bob
are entangled could take longer than
the age of the
universe, and the black hole would
evaporate in the
meantime, making it impossible
ever to go inside
and experience the
contradiction. Night, an old, starved crow, memory
and instant
death. There is nothing worse than a
brilliant
image of a fuzzy
concept. Your parents are the firm
but delicate
membrane holding back a sea that hangs,
domed far above your
head. Pegasus quivers in his
fixed place, jetting at some ridiculous speed,
to pull
beyond the sextant and
the charts. Ringlets to serpents, men to
stone,
the winged steed rises from the Gorgon’s blood. Anything
to anything;
anything from anything. There have been
greater days.
Forsythia-blooms crowd and crown our discontent. When the
general character is preserved, even if some
of the proper letters are wanting, still the thing is
signified: — well, if all the letters are given; not well,
when only a few of
them are given. I think that we
had better admit
this. Lest we be punished like travelers
in Aegina, who
wander about the street late at night:
and be likewise
told by Truth herself that we have arrived
too late. Myth is broken by the age that is sprawling
and daedalion, that
has outgrown its application.
Forgiveness soaked
up by a field once bright and green.
Each of
the six flavors of
quarks can have three different colors. The
quark
forces are
attractive only in colorless
combinations of three
quarks (baryons), quark-antiquark
pairs
(mesons), and possibly larger combinations
such as the pentaquark that could also meet the colorless
condition.
Whop, whop of racquet strings against
yellow balls: too dark to really
see. The gong
on
the hook and ladder. The most musical
town
in
Connecticut. O, how be heartsick, still?/////
Theophrastus succeeded
Aristotle, his fellow
Peripatetic, in directing
the Lyceum.
Having
presided for 35 years, he
died in 287, BCE, at,
some say, 107. Right
before death, he bemoaned
life’s
brevity — that one expires
just as one begins to
understand crucial problems.
Theophrastus
objected to
certain Aristotelian
notions
concerning the
existence
of a Prime
Mover, as well as
universal teleology.
Mandelstam: The
past has not
even been
born yet; it has
never
truly come to pass.
I want Ovid,
Pushkin, and
Catullus once more;
the
historical Ovid,
Pushkin
and Catullus are
not
enough for me.
A.D. 365, August
21, the sea abruptly
drained from Alexandria’s
harbor: ships and fish left in
sand.
Citizens walked into the
empty space, just before
a huge tsunami rolled over
the once-harbor, over houses
and other buildings. At least
50,000 dead. The beginning
of 200 years of
earthquakes and
rising sea levels.
Cassius Dio: Toward
the
philosophers who were called
Aristotelians,
Antoninus
showed
bitter hatred in every
way,
even going so far
as
to desire to burn their books, and
in
particular he abolished
their
common messes in
Alexandria
and all
the other privileges that they
had enjoyed; his grievance
against
them was that Aristotle
was
supposed to have been concerned
in the death of
Alexander.
Researching
in
wet suits the old harbor, mapping
quays, royal quarter,
perhaps the actual palace
of
Cleopatra. And the
Pharos, lighthouse that once
soared forty stories. Plutarch:
The Peripatetics no longer
possess
the original texts
of Aristotle
and
Theophrastus because they have
fallen into idle and base
hands. 1911, all staff
supplied with rubber-soled
shoes because the
marble floors were
deemed too hard. The O’Sullivan
Company
exhorted people to
patronize the library where
employees wore
the firm’s product.
Left
open on this
table,
a book:
Think
fast! This, Mouth never
does. Thus, hurled rock takes out an
eye. Mind sends pain along. Hand tries
to touch the gone orbital.
So. But gone is gone. Now, then,
this loss is a part of me. Don’t
weep, one eye. Just, more clearly, see./////
Hard it is for hand to shuffle,
deal, hold, and sort. Single eye must
squint to see. Mouth, though, enjoys
this game, for awhile, and
especially likes numbers, both
red and black, the only cards
Mouth receives. 3. Red. What
do they mean? 9?
Black? He
loses. Pay up. But Mouth has
nothing. Then I will take that
ear. And it is gone.
Mind
suspects a bad pattern./////
Mouth’s impoverished lease on
life:
eye, ear, hand, leg now all on just
one side. Dizzy-listing, Mouth finds
it can no longer drift, yet,
still
wishing to rise, searches
for leaned-already ladders.
Rung. Rung. Rung. Poor hand, leg —
nearly done for. Hoisted, finally,
to the roof, Mouth sees — no
going
back: down, impossibly
harder. Leg kicks ladder away./////
On the cathedral
roof, Mouth
takes stock.
Clouds: gold; blood-orange. Bells
trembled
by this steady
wind. Below, rough fabric of
city. In that corner,
black column
of smoke rises.
Heightens. Enlarges.
Approaches.
Eye twitches. Mouth wants
the ladder back./////
Tree city. Who decides?
—
even this cathedral,
made
of wood.
What? — that expanding
wall of
flame. Where? — too
close, to
my high refuge. What? — being
in a pickle. So Mouth rides
roof down to ground, now cindery.
That wall has moved past, beyond./////
Remaining eye smeared into
jelly,
remaining ear
nowhere
to be found, hand and
leg severed, Mouth can only
roll, hauling mind along./////
Conflagrations, that
high
rock,
chambers, parchments, ruins,
rivers, temples, neighborhoods,
patience, fortitude,
grammars, bridges, lieder,
dancing, rims, religion, gulls,
silence, silliness, clothes,
crocodiles, catalogues,
asylum, ships, summits, guest
rooms, strangeness, ten
dimensions, metal on
metal, bells, fish, harbors,
ladders,
drums, quays,
quarter-tones, towers: all can be
here. Here, picking up books left
by others on tables: best
books to read,
beginning with
the exact
pages left open.
Many leave here, a leaving that’s
hardly
death. Some stay, a staying that’s hardly
exile, that’s a welcoming of
night and snow.
Joel Chace has published work in print and electronic magazines such as, Tip of the Knife, Eratio, Otoliths, Word For/Word, and Golden Handcuffs Review. Most recent collections include Humors, from Paloma Press, Threnodies, from Moria Books, and fata morgana, from Unlikely Books.
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